IS PASSIONATE LOVE THE SUREST FOUNDATION FOR MARRIAGE?

“There is no subject,” says Bernard Shaw in the preface to Getting Married, “on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.” And though I disagree rather violently with Mr. Shaw’s views about marriage, he is right here. We do talk dangerous nonsense, which need not matter very much, if we did not think absurdly, and so inevitably have to pay the fruit in wrong action. This explains, I think, our curious levity, our unhappiness, and fierce refusal to face facts.

We have infested our ideals with the poison of pleasure and turned away from essential things. Marriage is not a religion to us—it is a sport.

I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we know better how to engage a servant, how to buy a house, how to set up in business—how, indeed, to do every unimportant thing in life, than we know how to choose a partner in marriage. We require a character with our cook or our butler, we engage an expert to test the drains of our house, we study and work to prepare ourselves for business, but in marriage we take no such sensible precautions; we even pride ourselves that we do not take them. We speak of falling in love, and we do fall.

The conventions of to-day are false; they are bound up with concealments or with an equally untruthful openness. It does not, however, follow from this that mere destruction will be enough, that everyone’s unguided ignorance will lead to success and freedom. The laisser faire system is as false in the realm of marriage as it is in industry and economics. While equally false, though this is rarely recognised, is the modern spiritual view of marriage that love can be found only in perfect harmony of character between the wife and the husband, and is independent of duty. It is true that love differs from lust in its deeper insight into the personality, deeper interest in character, as opposed to the inexpressive smooth outline and “untrained” physical beauty of the body. But the character and intellect may be studied and loved as self-centeredly, as much with a view to the enjoyment of mental excitement, as the body itself.

Of all of which what is the moral? This:

In marriage, as in other things, we fasten our chains about our own necks. We do not find what we desire because we do not know what we want.

The very word love is used in so general and indiscriminate a way to denote sometimes the most transitory impulse and sometimes the most intense feeling, that a mass of misunderstanding arises. The emotion which most often passes under the name of love is a maudlin, sickly sentiment or passion founded on hypocrisy, which means nothing at bottom but the desired enjoyment of a passion which is felt but not understood, and which professes to be everything but that which it is in reality.

With more courage to face truth, we should have a surer ideal; there would be much less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about marriage. Our romance is slightly vulgar. Vulgarity is a sign of weakness of spirit, that spirit which is “the life that carves out life” as Nietzsche says.

We associate romance with courtship and not with marriage. “Thank God our love-time is ended!” cried a north country bride on the day that marriage ended her long engagement.

Now, I do not know whether this delightful story is true, but it does illustrate the attitude of many ordinary couples, whose love adventure ends at the very hour it should begin.

Every marriage ought to be a succession of courtships.

A very slight knowledge of existing marriages is sufficient to convince even the most optimistic believer that true mating is hard. I do not believe that most marriages are unhappy, but I do know that only the very few are happy. With many perhaps, and even with those who are passionate lovers, the attraction of sex always seems to fall short of its end; it draws the two together in a momentary self-forgetfulness, but for the rest it seems rather to widen their separateness. They are secret to one another in everything; united only in the sexual embrace.

Can we, then, ever find perfect love? Is it not like exercise of the body? You can develop it to a certain point, but not beyond, without danger; and very slowly, with continued patient effort. Do we not need exercise of the soul? I do not know. Often I feel I know nothing. To some men and women it is all simple enough, a woman is just a woman and a man is a man. The trouble begins when any woman becomes the one desired woman and any man the one desired man.

There is gain and development in this selective tendency of Love—and yet, if I am right, there is terrible danger lurking in the application of this egoistic spiritual view.

We may not safely ask too much or too little from marriage or take too high or too low a view of it.

I am not very hopeful of improvement. At least, not for a long time, and never unless we learn to be more honest about ourselves and about love.

In fear, we have tried to keep the blinds down so that love may be decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its actions, like all the emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths of the ordinary experience of each one of us; it exercises its influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.

Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. The emotional-self refuses, at times, to be controlled by the reason-self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evils. For our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretenses and guards we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own conceit and egoism, or collectively as a so-called civilized people in the hope of controlling conduct.

That is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so foolish. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and want to do, and, therefore, are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost always fail to face.

To me, one thing, at least, is certain, the romantic view of marriage has failed us.

But we cannot change the ideal of to-day unless we have ready a new ideal to inspire our conduct. We cannot destroy a sanctuary unless we first build a sanctuary.

There is a strange idea among some young people to-day that sexual happiness can be gained by breaking away from all the traditional bonds, it is the visible sign of our confusion as a people, and the want of happiness in our lives. The new generation should not set at naught the experience of the ages.

The individual household where both parents share in the common interest of bringing up the children, is the foundation on which marriage has been built up, and on which it must stand. If the conditions of the home are seriously changed, and the bearing and caring for children is no longer considered an essential part of marriage, a change in marriage itself will follow. I do not think you can hold the one if you let the other go. For Westermark is right, and children should not be regarded as the result of marriage, but marriage as the result of children. And love between men and women implies duties and responsibilities that go out beyond themselves; without this, even love of the most passionate kind, loses its quality and tends to become an ephemeral or even a corrupt thing.

There is much stupidity in the view of many reformers of marriage who fail to see that, however hard it is to live faithfully to the obligation, and unchecked responsibilities of love, the old ideal of marriage does so appeal to our emotional nature, that men and women are seriously unhappy in trying to destroy it.

Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards of children and of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of jealousy and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden with your smile?” are still felt, even if not uttered by the lips, of the most emancipated husbands and wives. For our sex-judgments are not intellectual, nor are they merely moral; they are not just questions of understanding and forgiving, but they are also physical, of the nerves, of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.

Fortunately it is easier to talk of love’s freedom, than it is to act as if it ever could be free. And in spite of what advanced people say, some feeling of duty in sex will always exist as long as it hurts us at all to hurt others. The immorality that says, “Do what you desire irrespective of others,” is as yet beyond most of us.

Attempts to solve these problems quickly are bound to fail. Intellectual revolutionists are, I think too hopeful with regard to what may be done to produce a harmony of sexual needs. The optimism that once prevailed in regard to economics is being transformed to sexual matters. Once people supposed that if every one followed his own interests a harmony would automatically establish itself in the economy of society. Now they tend to say the same about sex.

Intellectual views of life and what is right and wrong always act to break people into groups, each struggling to explain everything according to one theory, built on a single principle. And as the result of caring so much for one thing, people seem quite unable to grasp any facts that do not refer to their own particular reform; they are not able even to consider it as part of a world in which there is anything else. All the evil in marriage? is due to too large families and populations pressing upon the food supply, we are told by one class of enthusiasts, while others point to men’s tyranny over women. Emancipation for women, with an equal moral standard, would have a magical effect: men are all bad say some. The father is a parasite, unnecessary except for his share in begetting the child; the mother is the one parent. All would be well if legal marriage were abolished and motherhood made free, is the view common among one class of reformers. Eugenical breeding and sterilisation of the unfit is the remedy brought forward by others. Many suggest economic changes and the endowment of motherhood.

But the matter is not so simple as these reformers seem to believe. And I doubt if any outward change is really capable of producing the prompt kind of penny-in-the-slot results that its supporters claim that it can. The complexity of marriage (in particular, the occurrence of sexual disharmonies so present and active for misery to-day) is ignored by all intellectual reformers. It is because they have no emotional hold on life as a whole that they find it easy to squeeze all life into their magic theories. For myself I can see no sure remedy—though in a later essay I shall try to suggest a palliative: but were I asked to state my deepest belief, I could say only “A few thousand years more of development, a growth towards consciousness and a fuller understanding of the meaning of life.”

MARRIAGE REFORM

Many people seem to be in fear that any change in the marriage laws will destroy marriage. “Hands off! No tinkering with marriage!” they cry in a panic of timidity and moral anger.

I marvel at this want of faith. Do they, indeed, believe that the institution of marriage rests on a trembling quicksand, so that its supporters are compelled to build a scaffolding of lies to sustain its foundations?

The laws of marriage are only the register of what marriage is: they do not control marriage. There are no laws, for instance, to regulate the perfect love-unions of birds, whose faithfulness and family life present a beautiful and high standard of conduct.

Let there be no mistake here. I have been told that I wish to destroy permanent marriage, that I do not consider the welfare of children and the best interests of the race. I deny these charges; they are untrue.

My ideal of marriage is one that many will call old-fashioned. It demands the consecration of the mother in service to her husband, to their children, and the home. That is why I advocate the recognition and regulation of other forms of union, not because I have a low ideal, but to prevent the degradation of marriage by forcing into it those who do not desire, and, therefore, are unsuited for, its binding duties.

The immense failure of marriage to-day arises from the confusion of our desires and our ceaseless search for individual happiness. We have no firm ideal, no fixed standard of conduct either for women or for men. And the existence of many standards of what ought to be done; the liberty permitted to the man, the liberty permitted to the woman; if the wife shall continue her work or profession or remain at home dependent on the husband’s earnings; whether the marriage shall be fruitful or sterile—these are but a few of the questions left undecided. And thus to leave men and women unguided, with their own ideas of what is good to do and what is evil, is the dry-rot very surely destroying the ideal of marriage.

Every couple starts anew and alone, and the way is too difficult for solitary experiments.

This modern delusion of looking at marriage as an individual affair is of course, the essence of the selfish, egocentric habit of life—it focuses desire on personal adventure and personal needs. With more courage to face the realities of love we should have a surer ideal. There would be less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about marriage.

This, then, is what I would teach: No longer must marriage be regarded solely as a personal relationship. Marriage is a religious duty.

“To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers, men.”

This was the ideal which gave the breath of life to marriage among the men and women in our earlier England, who were more fixed in character and less selfish than we are to-day.

It is this ideal we have lost.

TO-DAY’S IDEAS ON MARRIAGE
ARE WE SEEKING VAINLY AFTER HAPPINESS?

The love-story of to-day differs in one essential way from the love-story of yesterday. Yesterday’s love-story always had a youthful hero and heroine, and ended with the marriage bells. To-day’s, which is a far harder love-story to write, begins with marriage. Moreover, the bride and bridegroom are rarely young, nor are they ravishingly beautiful.

Earlier authors in short, shirked the real problem of marriage. They ended where they should have begun. For the main difficulties, in that always difficult adventure of the two learning to live as one, do not lie in youth, the period of quick adaptation, of easy falling in love. The trouble does not often begin in the courtship or honeymoon days; but it comes later in the struggle to harmonise and bend the character to the demands and lessons of marriage, and in the continued effort of maintaining love after knowledge of love has come. There is the difficulty. The preservation of love when all the passionate preliminaries are over.

Love is not walking round a rose garden in the sunshine; it is living together, working together. And the honeymoon is as trifling as the hors d’oeuvre in comparison with wedded life, and as unable to satisfy the deep needs of women and men. And the greatest difficulty rests in the fact that very few of us understand what our deeper needs are. Even to ourselves we are strangers. That is one reason why marriage is always difficult.

You see so often the partner one falls in love with does not make a good life companion. It’s all very well to moralise, but you can hardly ever be certain beforehand how these relations will turn out. There is physical attraction and passion, and there is affection—just being pals with each other. Who is to know which is the more necessary—the better for happiness of these two? You ought to have both, but few couples are so fortunate as that. We are almost all of us divided in our desires and our wills as also in our love.

The boys or girls to-day are, I think, more natural. There is much greater openness and less pretence. Even our novelists frankly say that every woman looks with special interest on a well formed man. There is no convention marking this as improper, “the baser side of love.” We Victorians were everlasting children in an everlasting nursery; we did not play with love, but we fiercely refused seriousness towards the fundamental emotions. Perhaps that is why we lost the old firm tradition of marriage and its duties, and why we have succeeded in putting nothing in its place.

The disease of our wills and the sickness of our souls has rust-eaten into marriage. We are doing nothing because we are too frightened to be serious. We have sought to drown our unhappiness and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure; to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty; to forget responsibility, and, in so doing, inevitably we have turned aside from essential things.

We have missed happiness in trying to grab at it.

Cannot you see what is wrong? We are so terribly tired of this search for something that we never find. We are like little lost children, we run, this way and that, we cry and make much noise, in fear, seeking for our mothers. Yes, our adventures are the tricks of the child who fantasies so as to pretend that everything is right when in reality everything is wrong.

Love is a dream to those who think but a terrible reality to those who feel.

The frequent and tragic failure of so many marriages arises from a confusion of our values and our undisciplined wills. In one way we expect too much from love, while in another we expect too little. What we have lost is any fixed standard of duty. I have said this before: I must say it again.

Marriage has ceased to be a discipline, it has become an adventure.

It is, little as we may believe it, the search for deeper and more perfect love that so often endangers love. Seeking, always for the one satisfying mate, we must find a partner corresponding in every respect to our ideal. The man in Mr. Hardy’s novel, “The Well-Beloved,” spent forty years in trying to do this, and his ultimate failure is typical of the experience of most of us.

Fools and blind, we neither understand nor seek the cause of our failure.

We need a new consciousness of our social spirit and racial responsibilities in marriage: the idea of handing down, at least as much as we have received. We are the guardians of the Life Force. Let us honour ideals of self-dedication; of fixed obligations of the one sex to the other, of duties to our children long before they are born, and let us spread the New Romance of Love’s Responsibility to Life; then there will be in society in general and not in a mere fraction of it, happiness in marriage and passionate parenthood.

WHY MEN ARE UNFAITHFUL

There is a question I would ask all wives, whose husbands having left them, are to-day seeking relief in the divorce courts. What was it that first sent your man away from you? What was it that first turned him from the safe happiness of marriage to seek the restless unhappiness of unregulated love?

It will not do to dismiss this question with the old unreasoning condemnation of men; nor will it serve to talk of their polygamous nature and uncontrolled passions. Let us look at the matter a little more closely, and with greater regard to truth.

In marriage the woman dominates more often than usually is known. For one thing she has the children on her side. I think marriage is more of a duel than usually is acknowledged. One partner wins, kills the other, kills all that makes joy and life—makes the one who conquers a captain; the other—the conquered one, a servant, slave—what you will. It is so always, more or less. And in this marital duel there is no quarter; and, nine times out of every ten, it is the woman who holds the cards; she who wins. If she is clever, she knows this—knows the game is in her hands. But the dice she has to throw is her sex, and she has only been allowed one throw! And when she has thrown wastefully—Yes, it is here that disaster enters into marriage and makes tragedy of the game of life.

But there is another side—and a side that is of immense importance to women.

Undeniably the greatest function of any man in the life of the average woman is to be the father of her child. All other things he means to her are secondary to this. For this reason, after the birth of her first child, she frequently ceases, though she does not know it, to love her husband as a man, and for himself.

The feeling of a child against a woman’s bosom is more to her than the kiss of a lover or the devotion of a husband. What is it that she feels? It is a liberating power; a sensation of unaccustomed unity—like a strong tide that carries her over everything, makes her unconscious of the worry of the days. It is life itself. It irradiates all the world about her, all that belongs to her—her very soul. She has become one with life—a creator, as a god.

That is why so often the man—the husband and the father, finds himself left outside this charmed circle of life.

And even when the marriage is childless (as happens most frequently in the marriages that come to the divorce courts), this same passionate, grasping maternity acts—indeed, acts sometimes with added fierceness and even more disastrously. She mothers her man, but she does not love him. She gives him the protection that she should have given to her children but she holds back the inspiration and the spur that he most needs from her.

The woman’s life so often is filled with attending her children or her husband, whom she loves (I must press this home again), where she has no children, not as a mate, but as a child. She ceases to consider him as a man—to belong to him as completely as he belongs to her.

She holds back more and more of herself—the vital part that he wants, while, at the same time, she demands more and more from him. The man feels that he is losing, giving up his individuality with all that he cares for most, and, after a period of loneliness and unhappiness, broken, probably, with some bluster and conflict, he gives in and begins not to care.

The result in the end is almost certain. The lower types of husband from time to time, will break away and find compensation in wild love. Some will seek distraction in work, or will develop a temper and nerves. Other men of more refinement will suffer much more, till they too break away at last; they will turn from the reality of life to dreams, unless they too seek and find love and sympathy with some woman, who, without the binding security of marriage, is more careful to understand them and to love them for themselves.

Most wives have yet to learn the deeper responsibilities of love; and this not at all in regard to their duties to their husbands, which most often are too perfectly fulfilled, but in the more intimate and far more exacting task of giving them spiritual freedom as well as sympathy and understanding.

I believe that this failure on the part of so many wives, in holding back just what the man most craves and seeks for, is the real cause, to which all other causes are subsidiary, of that failure in the continuance of the husband’s love, which brings so many marriages, which started in happiness, to the disaster of the divorce courts.

In my opinion, the greatest cause of error is in women’s limited experience which makes their judgments hard. While another cause arises from the tendency, and already I have emphasised more than once (a tendency due to a deep inner cause of sex difference) to throw the whole blame for sexual sins upon men. Some women carry sex antagonism like a flag, which they flourish in every wind. These are, of course, a small minority, but the majority of women fail to take a wide, sane view both on this question of the unfaithfulness of husbands and that of the whole physical relationship of marriage.

And the remedy? Yes, that is the difficult matter. We cannot alter these inharmonies of love by any cut-and-dried reforms. The expression of sex is a question largely of understanding. Its regeneration must begin with a movement, in particular, on the part of women, towards a truer acknowledgment of their own natures and an acceptance of men’s needs.

I dare to think of such a regeneration of Love, but it must come through education in consciousness and a fuller understanding of life. And by education must be understood all that influences the unconscious as well as the conscious self, so that our full life may be lived in harmony, and not with one half of ourself in enmity with the other half.

WHY WIVES ARE UNFAITHFUL

It may, and I expect will, be said that I am looking at this question of faithfulness in marriage from the man’s side only. This is not because I do not see and sympathise with the woman’s position. I am thinking really just as much of one partner as of the other. What I wish to do is to focus attention. For this reason, I am insisting upon the fact, of the wife’s coldness as being most often the first cause which drives the husband from his affection and his duty. I do this because it is just the real cause that is almost always neglected, unrealised, in particular, by women themselves.

Women have been taught to believe, and do really feel, that by sexual unfaithfulness a husband does them the cruellest possible wrong that a man can do to a woman.

It is rare to find a woman who is not sexually jealous. To possess and to hold, even when she has ceased to desire the possession, is a quality that is exceedingly common in wives. And our iniquitous divorce laws, with their obsession with sexual offences, help to maintain this view of marriage.

But is the man ever wholly to blame? It is so easy to talk self-righteously of the unfaithfulness of men—of their polygamous nature and their attraction to wild love.

I never heard such nonsense. Men are the most faithful creatures alive. After all, almost in every case, the man has given away only what his wife has shown him she does not want for herself. As long as she desires him, indeed, often, as long as she will put up with him, her man will stick to her—yes, stick with the closeness of the proverbial burr.

Most English wives always are acquiescent, rather than passionate in the sexual embrace. Even when in love, they are shy and often unresponsive. Hiding what they feel, rarely showing their husbands that they want them with any real desire. Then, after a few years of marriage, his embraces are either evaded or repulsed, if not, they are suffered as a duty.

Everyone who does not blink facts, knows that the vast majority of marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. Very often this starts from the beginning of marriage. The wife is disappointed: she finds the husband different from the lover of her dreams.

In the story of Beauty and the Beast we have material out of which part of the great sex difficulty can be explained. In the fairy story, the husband, who before marriage looks like a beast, after marriage, becomes a prince. In real life the story is inverted. There is a deluding force in the mere skin and limbs of those of the opposite sex at the time when maturity is reached which may give princely attributes to those who would be seen as beasts at other times. The prince seen as a beast after marriage is a tragedy into which the romantic, ignorant girl must beware of drifting. The man who most boldly plays up to the romantic part expected of him, reciprocating to the perhaps unconscious encouragement of the girl—is not the man who will be most agreeable to live with. I believe there is real danger in the sentimental view of love that is common to most girls. They do not know the poverty of feeling that loudly expressed sentiment may hide. The defect of many unfaithful lovers is not sensuality, but sentimentality. The lower types of lovers are strangely, almost incredibly sentimental.

It cannot, I think, be denied that sexual anaesthesia is present in many women and there would seem to be evidence that even where it is not present before experience of love, it arises after marriage. Any number of wives are unable to give themselves up to the sexual act in such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the gladness and health that it should give. This is a very grave matter. The evil would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule they do marry. It is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold, are sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women, probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to the man’s desire. Men are persistently blind in these matters. They want response to their own love in their wives, but most of them are very much afraid of any woman who possesses the strong passion to enable her to give such response.

In short, as we found in the previous essay on unfaithful husbands, woman gains her fulfilment from the man when he gives her his child. But when she turns from him, she leaves him unsatisfied. The drama and the novel are burdened with this problem, which, indeed, intrudes itself on every hand.

We have, by our wrong ideals, for long been inducing an entirely perverted view, which regards physical desire as something of which women should be ashamed, and the sex act as a thing in itself degrading and even disgusting—the nasty side of love and of marriage, something to be submitted to, indeed, in order to bear children or for the sake of the loved man whose passions must be allowed, but not a thing for health and desire—for the delight and perfection of the woman herself.

This false view, I affirm again, is the blight that has been, and still is, the destroyer of sexual happiness and health. And this fear and denial of love; this separation between the passion allowed to the man and not allowed to the woman, is the serious side of this problem of marriage. For the hideous disguises and constant lying, too often made necessary to both the partners, owing to the wife’s entire failure to realise the physical necessities of love, makes domestic life an organised hypocrisy.

We fight and fight to be free. Yet ever the concealed antagonism lays fresh hold, upon both the husband and the wife. It crops up in many and curious ways, imposing its poison and destroying life—the deep, deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied love.

The need for love will not often allow itself to be inhibited without claiming payment. And if desire so frequently manifests itself in abnormal forms of the coarsest and commonest dissipation, this is almost always to be explained by some hindrance opposed to its normal expression. When women face facts and realise this truth, many things in the conduct of husbands will be clear that hitherto have been hidden from them.

There is, however, another aspect of this question which now must be considered. For to leave the matter here would be the greatest injustice. A further question must first be asked. Why is this coldness in women so prevalent? Why does the desire of even the loving wife so often cease towards her husband? It is a difficult question to answer. One reason has been given already. We have noted women’s false attitude to love; an attitude which, in so many cases, makes her ashamed of expressing openly the passions she feels. Yet there is, I think another and much deeper part of the truth that is fairly clear. Love is a more difficult thing for women than it is for men. Each man is able to enforce his sexual desire upon his wife at a time when she feels no desire, whereas she cannot gain her desire unless he gain his. We may, perhaps, trace back to this cause, many of the feelings of disharmony and waning of desire which injures the woman’s power to love.

I must follow this a little further. In marriage the husband, usually exercises his marital privileges when he wishes. He does not think sufficiently of, or understand sufficiently as he should, the wishes of his wife. For what she says must never be accepted as representing really what she wishes. It is very hard for any man to understand how almost impossible it is for a woman, if she is good, to be frank about sexual desire. Both our laws, and opinion and custom have strengthened the view—not usually openly acknowledged but usually felt—that the husband has the right to approach his wife when he desires. Her right is not equally considered, too often it is taken for granted that she has no desires or real sex-needs to be considered. The result is inescapable. The man’s passion finds relief while she remains unsatisfied. She is in just the same position as someone who is forced to eat a meal without appetite.

And inevitably this leaves her unresponsive, makes her irritable, capricious, and quite incomprehensible to her husband.

Of course, this disharmony, is not always conscious even to the woman herself, who usually fails quite to understand what is the matter or to connect her restless unhappiness with the stirrings of her unsatisfied love. The dyspeptic does not know that he wants food: he turns away from it. In the same way the woman turns away from love. She gives in to the inhibiting influences and accepts the abysmal misconception into which one sex has fallen in regard to the other.

This difference in the power for sexual sacrifice between the two sexes is, I have frequently thought, one of the gravest causes of misery in marriage. It will take very long to over come it. Only as we advance in refinement and knowledge of love can this antagonism in the sex act lessen, as the woman gains in frankness and the man comes to know how to arouse and keep aflame her desire.

For woman is passionate. There is no greater lie than the so often reiterated assumption that she “is naturally and organically frigid.”4 We must remember that this view of woman’s coldness in love is of comparatively modern growth. Yet it is a lie that will take a real revolution in our moral ideas to uproot. It is, in large measure, at least, the result of our pretences—the horrible, grasping, destroying, back-wash of shams. It is the result of the way in which women have lived, with blinds drawn down on most of the unruly disturbance and elemental forces in love.

The wife whose love is turned away from her husband finds substitute satisfaction in her home and her children, if she has them, or, failing these, in dress and amusement and other outside interests; or in a lover, who gives her new hope of finding satisfaction in love. And the poor bewildered husband is quite unaware of the cause of this coldness. He cannot understand his wife’s unfaithfulness. He does not know that his unthinking acceptance of her subordination to his desire, however gladly given, is what has, and indeed must, exhaust the passion in her.

For I do not deny, as already I have stated, that sexual coldness is exceedingly common on the part of the wife to-day. What I do deny is that this is a natural condition; rather is it a symptom of the mistakes of our civilisation that have cheated women and men alike of health and happiness in love.

I affirm again, that this idea of coldness in love being natural to women is entirely false. Complete absence of satisfaction in love cannot be borne, especially when living in the close intimacy of married life, by any woman, through a period of years, without producing serious results on the body and the mind. It is in the blighting effects of this pseudo-celibacy that we must seek the cause of the sterility of so many married women’s lives.

Do I put this other side of the problem of marital-celibacy—the woman’s side—in a strong light. Yes I do, but I put it faithfully as I have come to know it from the facts I see daily around me.

It is hard to say how often, and how many wives have put from them the temptation to seek happiness in love at any price; no less hard is it to compute to what extent the transformation of this suppressed sexual passion is expended in passion in other channels. We see it in a hundred cases to-day. In every instance where passion is called for woman tends by her nature to be carried further than man.

There is, of course, no exact measuring in these matters, but who among us can dare to say that the harm done by the deprivation of love is greater in the lives of men than of women? I doubt not it is the other way. We hear so much of the sex-needs of husbands that we have become a little wearied. We accept so much for them as being right and natural, but who shall calculate the number of equally right and natural impulses that women have resisted?—resisted until the very instinct to love tends in time to become dulled and blighted.

I am willing to grant, indeed, that few women experience that obsessing longing of the man to grasp the woman of his desire, nor do they, as a rule, I think suffer the same terrible physical depression that causes incapacity for control. I am not certain here: women are less open about these matters than men are, and one hesitates to judge other women by oneself. We are dealing with a question very difficult to solve. We may find some explanation in the fact that many passionate women have had to learn how the energy of the sexual impulse may be diverted into other activities. It is a lesson that possibly men will have to learn. Yet I do not know, the price women have had to pay has been heavy and the results gained very poor. And does not this denial of love entail a waste of life?—that is what really matters. It is very hard to know the truth.

Here, then, is the question I would put to men who are suffering to-day from the unfaithfulness of women. I would ask them. Have they taken sufficient trouble to understand, both on the physical and psychical side, the sexual nature of woman, which is much more complex than their own? The art of love is not understood by men. If they paid more attention to this subject marriage would be freed from the strongest and most frequently operating cause that brings it to disaster. But this will never be done until we have ruled out from our moral conscience the idea of “the body as the prison of the soul.”

I have often asked myself if this misconception is not the real cause of all sex trouble?

SHOULD DOCTORS TELL?

Of the many differing opinions concerning the question whether doctors should reveal medical secrets, none that I know have been more interesting, in particular to women, than that of a local practitioner (whose name I have forgotten) who spoke at a Conference of doctors met to consider this question. In opposing with admirable frankness a resolution for the continuance of the practice of professional secrecy, he asked the straight question, whether “a bounder” should be allowed to live and his wife and child to die?

For here we touch at once the grave difficulty of the position. The discussion, as is evident, was concerned more particularly with the position in regard to venereal diseases.

The whole question has, indeed, been brought before public attention in connection with the recommendation of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases that a communication made by a medical practitioner with regard to these diseases and to guard the innocent from infection should be regarded as a privileged communication, and the law of libel be so modified as to give this safeguard.

Now, on the face of it, this would seem a simple matter. And the question I want to ask is, why the professional medical voice of this country has pronounced so emphatically against it? I know, of course, the reason that is given, that the divulging of a patient’s secret, without his or her consent, and even if for a good reason, must weaken confidence—not only the patient’s confidence in the particular doctor who “told,” but the confidence of the public in the whole medical profession.

I do not think this reason bears any close investigation. Confidence is destroyed quite as surely, though probably not so quickly, by suppression of truth as by revealing it.

No, I believe we have to look deeper for the reason to explain this attitude of medical hiding.

These diseases are set apart from all other sicknesses of our bodies. For this reason, in considering them, moral considerations become confused with practical values. And I do not see quite how this is to be avoided. There is however, the gravest danger from such an attitude which rests upon hidden personal prejudices, and is not dependent on the facts of the case. Such an attitude leads inevitably to concealment of truth, which is specially disastrous here, because it is absolutely essential that these diseases, if they are to be cured, should be met in the open and grappled with methodically and thoroughly.

For greater clearness, I may state the matter thus: There are three attitudes that may be adopted towards sexual disease. First, that of the pure moralist, who says only “This is a sin to be punished.” On the opposite side is the purely utilitarian, who says, “This is only a disease to be cured.” But both attitudes may be alike wrong or, more correctly, the truth lies midway between the two. The disease, as a disease, needs to be cured. This is the first step with which nothing should interfere. But far different and much more complex is the treatment required to alter the actions that lead to the disease.

As a first step, public opinion ought to condemn too late marriage, instead of recommending it on economic grounds. The mania for making economics the deciding factor in conduct should surely cease: the falsity of this view has been exposed by many great writers, but much stronger is the condemnation that must be given here by all who can understand the evils that it has wrought in our sexual lives. Late marriages must be one of the causes contributing to men’s use of prostitutes before marriage.

We have to find a way out, to silence our shrieks of blame, and to give up many of our old pretences. You can never get things right until you honestly face them.

Women are the worst sinners. And I say, without hesitation, that it is men’s fear of women, especially the husband’s fear of his wife, that is the greatest hindrance to openness in this connection. It is women’s attitude which holds us back in progress towards health.

Let me give an illustration. I attended recently a meeting where a paper was read on the morals of men, in connection with the alarming increase of venereal diseases since the war. The reader of the paper, being a woman doctor as well as a feminist, took the wise view that the most urgent question was not the reform of the men, but staying the spread of the diseases. In the discussion that followed it was plainly evident that few of the audience—all women—agreed with her. These were women workers, who had read about, and to some limited extent, at any rate, thought and studied, these questions. Yet the general view was that men ought to be punished. One speaker, who stated that she was married, said that no true woman could or ought to forgive a husband who had become infected with a contagious disease.

Now, it is this view, here so crudely expressed, that has done so much harm in the past. It explains also the continuance of the medical secrecy that has acted so strongly against the stamping out of this scourge of civilisation. Such an attitude of blame and unforgiveness on the part of women has to be changed before the truth can be told safely.

Women are mainly responsible for the secrecy of these diseases. And what is the result? Because these infectious diseases are secret they are largely uncured.

It is, of course, easy to understand the attitude taken up by women. Blame of men is not easily avoided; yet is there not confusion in women’s minds?

The sin that a husband commits against his wife, a man against the girl he is to marry—yes, and a son against the trust of his mother—is in being unfaithful. Having caught the disease is a misfortune. The effect must not be blamed by itself.

Let me illustrate this point of view by considering a different case. Your child gets scarlet fever by an act of direct disobedience—the sin of his age. He stays from school, without leave of absence, and goes to play at a house he has been forbidden to enter. Would you, because of his disobedience, refuse to pity and nurse him? Rather, would you not forget his sin and desire only to help and heal him?

Do you see what I mean now? It is not that I would condone immoral conduct in the husband or the lover that I plead for pity and understanding on the part of women who love them.

Few men are intentionally evil. They do not even always act foolishly in this question of infectious diseases because they are wantonly careless. Often they are fully alive to the danger that may result to their wives, or the girl they wish to make their wife, from their own infection.

I repeat, they are not necessarily bad men, and they love their wives and children; but they are cowards. All men are cowards when it comes to facing the blame and misunderstanding of the woman they love.

If they cannot rely on the woman’s pity and help, few men will dare to tell the truth; nor will they be willing to let the doctor tell the facts for them. And if the truth cannot be told, it is very unlikely that the infection will not be spread to others. This may lead to the birth of diseased children, and who may say that in this case the crime is the man’s alone?

Why can’t we face the situation now, when we are trying to tidy up our social life? Concealments that may have been necessary in the old time of ignorance are surely impossible now.

Is the evil to remain hidden, uncorrected, from one generation to another? Hidden evil multiplies itself, and the sum is national deterioration.

The mistake has been the muddleheaded thinking that has obscured the plain and comparatively simple question of cure with the entirely opposed problem of moral appraisement and punishment: a confusion and losing of the way that has led us all inevitably into a forest-tangle of difficulty, of lies and silences, and unanswerable questions.

And this heritage of wrong thinking is still compassing our feet, binding them and throwing us down, as soon as we try to move a step onwards: and until that entanglement is broken through, by bringing the whole complicated position into the light of understanding and honest thinking, the evil will go on, unchecked by our futile tearings here and there at withered branches. The supporting stem of concealments and dishonesty will flourish, and the devastating evil will continue to spread.

THE MODERN WIFE AND THE OLD-FASHIONED HUSBAND

The old-fashioned husband is always older than his wife. If he is not old in years, he is old in character. His desires and instincts are aged. She is young because she is alive.

He wants to give her advice, but she will not listen. He desires to guide her, or he must think that he does so. He protects her. Thinks of her as young and precious and tender. He does not speak of certain things before her. He caresses her, he pays her bills, gives her presents, and treats her in the way, in which she has learnt not to treat her children.

For the old-fashioned husband is conservative and hopelessly romantic.

The fact is he ever seeks in his wife the image of his mother, the first woman whom he worshipped, and whose virtues remain as an unforgettable pattern, ever to be repeated. He sees her darning socks (horrible and useful occupation), making beds, dusting the china, arranging flowers, brushing her husband’s overcoat and smoothing his hat, fussing needlessly over everything. These pictures are always interfering with the image of his wife—the new woman of to-day, with her restless and noisy movements, her slang and violence, her knowledge, capable management and clearness of vision-that-look-you-straight-in-the-eyes air that belongs now to wives.

Why have women altered so greatly? Why have women gone on and left their husbands behind?

It is common to refer everything back to the war. Certainly the war did this—it sent both women and men into difficult schools but the men’s school was harder and quite different from that of the women.

If the war had a devastating effect, the peace has likewise had for women its revolutionary consequences. We all know what the war did. It took women out of their homes. The feminists rejoiced to see women in munition factories, on the platforms of trams, squeezed into government offices, hoeing and driving the plough. Then the peace threw them back; closed the open doors, cut off the day of financial prosperity, re-introduced them to their children, if they had any, and to their husbands.

And now what happened? What effect had this on the desires of women and men?

Why, the husbands yearned for the old order of home and wife and children. For the men had fought, they had experienced the uttermost bitterness of life. Their petrified imagination had had no new ideals. They wanted nothing changed. For them a terrible interlude was over, a nightmare passed, that must be forgotten. But the non-combatant women had not experienced war; they had only looked on. For many of them a glamour of patriotic achievement in various kinds of work, which they much preferred to the old domestic duties, added to the lure of high wages, had thrown a cloak of romance over the war-period. They had nothing to forget. The last thing they wanted was to go back, all their desire was set on going forward.

Here then, is the reason why to-day there are so many modern wives with old-fashioned husbands.

These war-trained women are very efficient; they impose their will on everyone; they are attractive and very honest, but sometimes rather aggressive with their assurance and massed information. They go to and fro from their homes, when they like and how they like. The husband knows almost nothing of his wife’s friends. He supposes it is all right. But he understands that he cannot stop her, cannot control her interests. She makes his house her home, is his friend and dear companion, but she does not stay in his charge. Often he feels like a stranger, helpless, not knowing what to do.

Wives are now almost more independent than husbands used to be. “I want to do it, therefore, I must do it,” is their acknowledged cry. They are on such good terms with life and with themselves that they cannot imagine another view—the old view of the woman sacrificing herself. There are quite a lot of things they won’t do; they are very simple and straightforward about them.

Nowadays it is not fashionable for even young unmarried girls to remain in the guarded shelter of the home. Old-fashioned fathers and brothers, are sometimes alarmed at the freedom of friendship allowed—the light-hearted pairing off. Life is a game, a dance, like the figure in the lancers where you “visit” and waltz away, but then come back to do the same thing with another partner. Yet these girls are not without hearts; but they realise that they must know men before they can choose the one man to whom they may give themselves. They have almost nothing in common with the boneless emotional heroines of the past. They are very practical and know that love will not pay the baker’s bills, and after realising all this, they have schooled themselves not to fall in love carelessly.

They look all life squarely in the face, understand their duties, what they will do and will not do, in a way that may be hard, but is admirably sane and admirably honest.

Here is an incident. An exceedingly modern girl was engaged by some ill-chance to an old-fashioned man. She came once to talk with him of her future and his. She was not fond of children and therefore, thought she ought not to have any. Gently he placed his hand over hers, “That will be as God wills, my darling.” She sprang from him, “It won’t, Ronald, that’s not true, it will be as I arrange.”

It used to be so different. The old-fashioned girl could never have spoken with such frankness. Wife or maid she was always younger than the man she loved. She studied him, listened to him, quoted him. She lived only in and through him. At least that is what he thought. He did not know that she did not really listen, was tired of his stories, not interested in his business or his friends. All her seeming submission and acceptance were used to hold him.

The opinions of the old-fashioned woman were quotations from authority; her motto was obedience, but her practice was sweet rebellion. Very rarely was she honest. Her eyes were so blinkered that she saw nothing that she did not wish to see.

No, I am not sorry for old-fashioned men. They remain so childishly blind. Let them grow up, or at least, conceal their paleolithic ideas.

The new types of modern women face the future with laughter and the present with quickly responsive feeling. They give still to the world the essential gift of the eternal feminine, though they are cutting away the worn-out unreasonable exaggerations of perverted femininity—the coldness of the vicious woman, the unkindness of the grabbing woman, the ignorance and submission of the old-fashioned good woman. They are able to see everything and to help in everything, without being deceitful, without being dulled.

THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUNG WIFE

Everyone is busily trying to explain why there are so many unhappy marriages at the present time, but few people seem to realise that one of the most prolific causes has been the comparatively recent tendency of women to marry out of their class. We all know that all social distinctions were in abeyance during the war, and even afterwards. Normal class separations, conventional standards, old careful habits of conduct have been largely broken through at a time of great uncertainty and many changes.

Some of us hoped that this new co-operation which seemed to be springing up between men and women of different social classes would lead to permanent changes. We forgot that excitement is the most potent intoxicant, and that after excitement there is usually a falling back into dullness and apathy. But certainly for a time there was quite a new loosening of the guiding-rein of reason, that has allowed the horses of impulse and instinct freer than ever before to pull the car of ourselves and our fates in this direction and in that, just as they chose.

The many misfit marriages bear witness to the excited condition of women.

And it ought not to be difficult to realise, with the least gift of imagination, the conflict and the unhappiness, almost necessarily resulting, from such unions, entered into during that period of topsy-turvy conditions, between the man who had “risen” and the more complicated type of modern girl—the girl of brains and nerves, passionate, intellectually emancipated and delighting in her new-gained freedom; yet, at the same time, fastidious, ruled by traditions and inherited habits, which crop up unexpectedly, with a conservatism that is neither acknowledged nor reckoned with.

The men who in commerce or in war had a meteoric success have, in many cases, fallen back; they are but clerks, shop-assistants, artisans. They themselves, and everything belonging to them seem different. While they were accepted as gentlemen, because of what they had done or the money they had made, they married “above them” as the phrase is. And now when the money is spent and what they did no longer remembered, they cannot find work that will enable them to maintain the outward show of being a gentleman. The intoxication of excitement is over, and their wives complain, not only of their position, but of them.

The temporary gentleman and his young wife, in many cases, are finding that it needs a lot of grit and a lot of duty to keep in love. For the rose-coloured glasses of courtship have been replaced by the blue goggles of matrimony. They are already unhappy, though they expected happiness. You see, their love has been tested by the love-destroying test of poverty. And these difficult days have cast their homes into disorder.

We have all felt the world’s wave of trade depression: the world’s difficulties have dealt a blow, causing a leak to spring in many a frail boat of domestic happiness, so that its inexperienced navigators no longer can exercise control over the journey.

Now it is customary to blame the wife. Always it is the woman’s fault. She is, or ought to be, the home-maker. While no one seems to consider how much depends on the character, or conditions, of the home she is asked to make.

The boarding-school-educated and college girl has never been trained to perform or to endure the difficult, necessary duties of the poor man’s home. In their girlhood’s homes and luxurious schools, everything was done for them. That was in the old, almost-forgotten days of cheap domestic service.

In no other direction, perhaps, has there been so great and so far reaching changes as in the homes of the so-called upper classes. In a sense, to-day we have no homes, only places in which we sleep, and sometimes eat. For the domestic work of preparing the food and keeping the home as a place to live in and not to escape from has, in great measure, ended; duties which once it was every woman’s pride to do well, have been allowed to slip, as far as possible, into the hands of hired experts. In the old days cooking and housekeeping, and even house-cleaning, were known to all women. Every wife was expected to enter into competition with other wives in the important matters of making bread and cakes, and in making jams and jellies and puddings.

But the home, with its old full activities, has passed out of the hands of the mistress. So to-day a girl often finds herself forced to learn the very elements of the routine day of the wage-earner’s wife. And the duties that have to be learnt are many of them disagreeable as well as immensely tiring and monotonous to unaccustomed hands.

I do not, however, believe that the knife-and-fork aspect of these marriages is the fundamental aspect. It is love itself that is at fault. The strain and the jar of daily living under these difficult restless conditions have been too great, especially for the women.

The passing from one way of living, from one station of society to another, is always a hard and unpleasant process. We do not always know it or admit it, even if we do know, but the small, almost unnoticed differences in habits and manners are harder to tolerate than many a more fundamental cleavage.

I want to labour this point. The most frequent causes of trouble in those marriages where there is poverty and a restricted life, are born, I am certain, out of the daily fret of uncomfortable and cheap living together, out of small ugly minor habits of omissions, and stupidities.

Romantics may deny this, but what most wears and frays the love of wives are just trifles so small that very rarely is their adverse action directly noticed. But they give an escape for the concealed hostility, and set up an almost indecent and fearfully intolerant irritation. Dirty finger nails, the murdering of words, or making a noise when you eat soup, may be much harder to bear than real unkindness and anger. The failure to rise and give up a chair or to open a closed door may seem greater neglect to a wife than the absence of money to buy presents. The roughness of the “rough diamond” becomes unbearable. Things that once did not seem to matter, now matter tremendously.

Of course this is illogical, but then love is illogical.

And month by month as it passes makes the marriage more broken. The disappointment goes deeper though the irritation may, perhaps, be less frankly expressed. This is the time of the real danger. It is the wife’s own love that is failing her, much more than anything her husband may do or not do.

The difficulty of finding suitable work, the differences in friends and in the accustomed spheres of life, could be overcome were it not for the unconscious want of will to overcome them. The man may feel that he would do better farming in Canada than here. It is a very certain indication that the woman has ceased to love him wholeheartedly if she objects to accompany him on the ground that all her friends are in England.

Love does not hesitate: it delights to give up and to sacrifice.

You will see what this means: It is rather the hidden feelings that make conscious social difference, that act and are far stronger than the difference itself.

The unacknowledged failure in Love, not anything that happens outwardly, is the real trouble that gnaws at the root of content in their marriages, and rots and breaks the bond.

Yet there is a bright side to these marriages even when they fail. The socially adventurous, the breakers of conventions, must expect trouble; but they may console themselves by reflecting that they are pioneers in opposing dead traditions. Only the tall trees sway in the breeze, the dwarf plants are ingloriously safe.

On the subject of marriage I have written again and again, not alone in these essays, but in many of my other books. I would, however, wish to say now, and with all the power I have, that in England, marriage is made too easy. If some of the restrictions which are placed against the breaking of the marriage bond were transferred to the time when the bond is made it would be well.

We prevent too late. Always we run to shut the stable door after the horse is stolen.

Many amazing marriages are made, in particular, by the very young who to-day refuse, more fiercely than even before, any guidance from the old; reckless marriages, entered into by those who have known each other for a few days only before marrying for life.

An ever-increasing freedom and independence for the young has certainly had rather a startling moral result. It has been shewn that for all ordinary young men and women intimate association with each other in college, in business, in workshops, and factories, and in play, turns them with extreme readiness to love making. Now I am very far indeed from wishing to apportion blame, but I do hold that new conditions demand—not only changes in our thoughts and judgment, but revision of the laws formulated to restrict conduct.

A minister of religion stated publicly, not very long ago, “I have had to marry many couples who admitted to me they knew little about each other. I could do nothing. I was not allowed to refuse marriage.”

The many marriages made in haste and under the pressure of sudden emotional urgencies, are a sign of the nervous condition of the times. The customary criticisms of reason are not heard, or not until the emotional storm has subsided. This is, of course, a condition not infrequent in love, but in these rushing and exciting days of dancing-partners and jazz courtships, it is greatly exaggerated, such marriages may not unfortunately bear the scrutiny of minds restored to reason. Living together is found to be a different and far harder thing than dancing together. And this has led to the unprecedented demand for divorce which should cause no surprise or lamentation, but should urge us forward to face the situation, like spurs in the flesh of a tired horse. For the disgrace is, not that these marriages should end, but that they should ever have begun.

We English are too afraid of preventative interference: we wait until something is very wrong indeed and then we punish.

It would be salutary for us to consider the more careful regulations of other lands. In France, for instance, and in Belgium no encouragement is given for hurried marriages such as we permit. Official enquiries and the consent of parents and guardians are considered necessary. From the start the greatest care is exercised. FianÇailles (engagements) are regarded as serious family events, more binding and more sacred than anything to which we are accustomed. Both the engagement and the marriage are affairs of the utmost importance to the two families concerned as well as to the young people themselves. There are discussions and careful arrangements, and months of testing of suitability for life-partnership, during which the future husband and wife get to know one another before being tied by marriage. Perhaps, this is why the crime of bigamy is very rare in France, and there is no such thing known as cases for breach of promise of marriage.

I know, of course, the many and great evils that are attendant on the French system, but to me it seems that these could easily be avoided as they arise entirely out of property considerations and the wife’s dowry—considerations which so inevitably act disastrously on moral conduct.

It would, I am certain, lessen the chance of endless unhappiness in marriage and prevent many divorces if some more fixed inquiries, with—in the case of any one (shall I say, under twenty-five?) the consent of one parent of either party, if living, if not, that of a guardian, were obligatory before the marriage could be entered into. Or if the young will not accept this parental authority, marriage could be made conditional, except under very special reasons, on the betrothal months having lasted for a fixed and sufficiently long period: at least inquiry should be made as to the amount of knowledge the partners have gained of each other. I would recommend these reforms to all who are concerned for the future of marriage.

Nor need the change be difficult or would it entail any great alterations in the machinery of the law. We appoint a King’s Proctor to inquire into domestic details to prevent unsuitable marriages being broken, why not change his duties to prevent unsuitable marriages being made?

I would urge also that Commandments of Marriage are formulated to be read to every couple at their betrothal and again before the wedding ceremony takes place, as is done to some limited extent in France and Belgium and in one or two other countries. This is another duty which might be undertaken by the department of the King’s Proctor.

Here, then, is a practical way in which we might wisely copy other civilisations whose customs are more carefully planned to safeguard marriage and help the young in right living.

I must press home this question of the dangers of too easy marriage, though I risk wearying my readers by repetition. The facilities we give the young for marrying in haste, is, I affirm again, the cause mainly responsible in the greater number of marriages that come to the disaster of the Divorce Courts. This I have proved already. It is responsible also for many cases of bigamy, a crime which has increased alarmingly in the last years. Our law of breaches of marriage promises, with its frequent misuse and extortion of hushmoney, is another cause dependent on our stupid neglect to regulate marriage. It leads to many unsuitable marriages being made, which very often have their fatal sequel of separation or divorce.

Nor does the disaster end here. Our present careless laws are certainly acting to bring marriage itself to discredit. We hurry young people within its bonds, freeing them from all obligations to their families or to society in this matter of choosing their life’s partner, and then later, if disaster overtakes them, with callous irony we say, “you have made your bed, you must lie on it.”

If we desire really to preserve marriage, let us treat marriage with seriousness. As I have said in another of these essays—Marriage is not considered a vocation: it has become a game. I would urge practical and prompt action. We are, I think, bound to realise that if we are to succeed in freeing our society from the evils which all of us are deploring, our attention must shift from attempts to punish after wrong has been done, to removing the causes that lead certainly to wrong being done.

In other words we have to formulate more practical and helpful laws. Even more important is to change public thought, cleansing men and women from their desire to punish and replacing instead the desire to help and to understand. Nothing else, in my opinion, can avert even greater disasters of license in the future than those we are facing.

PASSIONATE FRIENDSHIPS

I had wished to write these essays without too frequent mention of the war. I find, however, that such avoidance is almost impossible. For the war has, in the most effective way, made prominent all the problems of sexual conduct with which I am dealing, has done this so effectively that some way out must be found. New and even startling changes have come and are coming, and have to be faced. Certainly our judgments can never be the same. Many who never before thought about these things have been made to think. All of us have seen more plainly the ineffectiveness of much that always before we had accepted. No longer can we cover our eyes with the comfortable mid-Victorian bandages. There has ended for every one of us our blind-man’s-buff game with life.

We are caught: and it is well. The unwritten commandment of sexual conduct, that anything may be done as long as the doing of it may be hidden, can never, I think, again be accepted, unless, indeed, by the very good, whose entire lack of humour makes them able to accept anything.

Whether we like it or not most of us have got now to muck-rake into the dark bye-paths of conduct.

Now, it is easy to say that this urgent concern with sexual questions arises from decadence. I do not believe it. To me it has always seemed that this growing demand for inquiry affords the surest hope for the future. Much is being thrown on to the scrap-heap of life. This is done only when there is need for it. We, who have come to see and in some measure to understand, have got to be concerned with sex and its problems, until some of its wrongs are righted.

Here I must digress to make a necessary explanation. The special problem of sexual conduct which now I wish to consider—the very difficult problem of passionate friendships between men and women who, for one reason or another, are unable or do not wish to marry, is a question to which my interest has for very long been directed. I was first asked to write about it in 1913 (how remote that time now seems) in answer to two articles that had appeared in the English Review, in July and August of that year, Women and Morals and Men and Morals, supposed to have been written, the one by “A Mother,” and the other by “A Father;” but which, as later transpired, were thought out and transcribed in the office, by the Editor and sub-Editor of that then courageous journal.

But to whatever journalistic trickery they owed their origin, the interest of those articles remained unchanged. I need not wait to describe them; their importance rested in the courage and truth with which they faced the difficult problem, at that time almost always hidden or sentimentalised over, of the sex-needs of men and women apart from marriage.

I was asked to answer—I had, as it were, to sum up, sift out, weigh and judge, what was said in both articles. I did not then know anything of their bastard authorship, and I accepted. My answer appeared in the September number of the Review. At the time it gained some attention. In America the three articles were republished together. The little book, called “Women and Morals” had an exceedingly attractive cover and an excellent preface: I believe it sold widely. More amusing and also, I think, more witness to the power of my work, was a very different kind of notoriety which, in one quarter at least, it achieved in this country. It aroused anger. The number of the English Review in which it appeared was, I believe, burnt publicly in an Advanced Club for women by order of the ladies who then formed the committee. For their intense virtue considered my views too horrible to remain uncleansed by fire. (Excuse my laughing, but the fact is I always do laugh when I picture this incident—those splendidly blinkered women holding solemnly in extended fire-tongs that burning review!)

My work was immoral!

Immoral! What is it that people mean? I do not know. I am for morality and always shall be. That is, indeed, why I offend. I am always wanting to turn out dirty places and to spring-clean life. And I have to show things as I find them, not as I would like them to be. It is so easy if you drug your soul and place blinkers over your intelligence. But you cannot be moral if you are over-occupied with being nice.

It is the young, not the old, who are thinking and writing to-day. Let me give you an example that exactly fits this question we are considering.

By a somewhat suggestive coincidence there appeared an article on “Youth and Marriage” in the English Review for May, 1923—the last number issued under the editorship of Mr. Austin Harrison—which very strikingly repeats, but more openly and with cruder emphasis, almost everything that was said in the three articles published in 1913. It treats the same difficult and still unsettled question of sexual relationships outside of marriage. The article gives the answer of youth to the old, who are criticising and condemning the friendships and new freedom of sex intimacy between young women and young men: they are told frankly that they fail to realise the changed conditions of present-day life. The name of the writer of this interesting article, Vera M. Garrell, is unknown to me, but I take this opportunity of thanking her. Her article has given me the greatest pleasure. All the facts are considered in a refreshingly candid, if not always entirely adequate way. (1) The increased enormous disparity between the numbers of the sexes, which the writer comments upon as “an outstanding tragedy of the war;” leading as it must do, to “an unhealthy competition to attract men,” under the urge of which girls are drawn “to use coarser measures and act on bolder lines,” if they are to escape “the dark dread that haunts the average girl of being ‘left on the shelf.’” (2) The economic factors, which cause marriage to become increasingly difficult, and thus act in lowering the marriage ideal by making a permanent union so remote that it comes to be regarded as “practically impossible.” “The young people of to-day are very much realists. They intensely dislike poverty.” A great deal is said about this “economic blockade against marriage,” and the writer maintains that “much of the laxity in sexual morals is the direct outcome of this position.” (3) Yet, even deeper in their action are the inner reasons. War has left the youth of to-day “with a kind of sexual neurosis.” For years it kept life “entirely physical;” “morality was at a discount,” the inescapable result has been that “youth has been lured into sexual compromise.” The old code of morality has failed: it does not meet the new demands.

I have been impressed and sharply hurt at the bitterness and fatalism underneath what is written. Let me quote one or two sentences. “The charge against youth is correct. He is in revolt against conventional morality. Young men and young women are sex conscious, not on the old lines of retiring from intimacy, but rather in the opposite direction of intimacy.” And again, “Every sex companionship is born of mutual recognition of social grievances. Where it is possible for men and women to come together and form friendships they do so, without any regard for the commital convention that marriage must be the object.” (The italics in the passages are mine.)

It is insisted upon that every normal person has a right to self-expression in the sex-function, while further frank acknowledgement is made that when sex-friendship “is unregulated it ends in vice.” “We shall not marry so why not enjoy ourselves,” is the prevailing philosophy of those who have ceased to regard the sexual act as immoral. (Again the italics are mine).

Now, all this has set me thinking that it is worth while to restate certain propositions in connection with these friendships of passion, which I made first in the article I wrote in 1913. I do this for two reasons. First I would like to assure the young, who to-day are more than ever impatient of, and condemnatory of, the old, that the old are not always ignorant and that some of them, too, have tried honestly to face this difficult problem of sexual conduct. The second reason is deeper. A sickness of soul cries out from so much that the young say to-day. I want to end this. And the only way in which I know to do this in connection with these unregulated friendships is to have them regulated.

It is ridiculous to say as so many of the young do to-day that sexual relationships between two people affect no one but themselves, unless a child is born. It is not true. The partners in even the strongest and purest union have no right to say to society, “This is our business and none of yours.” The consequences may be so grave and wide-reaching for society that the sex-deed can never be confined to the pair concerned.

And I would go further even than this. For the sexual partnership that is kept secret, almost of necessity, will work anti-socially. Just in the same way as in any other secret partnership, opportunity will be given to those who desire to escape from the responsibilities of the partnership. This inevitably leads to the commital of sin, by those who are weak and unfixed in character. While other men and women of higher conscience, who wish to, and would act honourably, often find the way so difficult that they fail in their endeavours—lose themselves in the dark and tangled ways of concealment. Many unions that now are shameful, would not have been shameful, if the partners had not been drawn into deceitful concealments, that cannot fail to act in a way disastrous to love.

This problem of Passionate Friendships, like all problems of sexual conduct, demands something more than emotional treatment; it requires the most careful consideration of many different sets of facts, that often rise up in what seem to be direct opposition.

I must follow this a little further. The sex-needs are almost always dealt with as though they stood apart and lay out of line with any other need or faculty of our bodies. This is, in part, due to secrecy which has kept sex as something mysterious. We have most of us been trained from our childhood into indecent secretiveness. There is as well deeper trouble, and it will be a long time before we can change it. Sex is so powerful in most of us, and occupies really so large a part of our attention, that we are afraid of ourselves, and this re-acts in fear of any open acknowledgement of our sex-needs.

It is necessary before we can even begin to judge this question of passionate friendships, to face very frankly this tremendous force of the sex-impulses, for the most part veiled in discussion. Next to hunger this is the most imperative of our needs, and, indeed, to-day sex enters more into conscious thought than hunger. For the hunger needs of most of us are satisfied, while the sex-needs are thwarted and restrained in all kinds of ways, and thus insist themselves the more insistently in our thoughts. Here is some slight explanation why so many of our judgments about sex are so arbitrary and so unforgiving. In penalising the sexual misconduct of others we are really passing judgment, though we do not know it, on our ourselves in blaming them we gain a curious kind of vicarious salvation, which brings the peace of self-forgiveness. In devising punishments for others, we are fixing a compensatory sacrifice for our deeply buried wishes, which never having found relief, either in direct expression or by sublimation, remain to torment us with ceaseless conflicts in our unconscious life.

I must not follow this further. Anyone with knowledge of the new psychology will understand what I mean.

Now, what I want to emphasise is that, to some limited extent at any rate, this system of self-concealments and lies is being broken, or if that view is too hopeful, at least the point of view has shifted. Indeed it is the acceptance of the imperative force of sex hunger, and the frank recognition of the present position—a fearless acknowledgment of the natural right of every adult woman as well as man to sex experience, that renders so noteworthy the change in outlook between this generation and the last. The youth of to-day have been fearless enough to cry aloud desires that the men and women of my generation, either denied or whispered about. Within its limits (and I am bound to say that, in my opinion, these limits are badly fixed and very narrow), this is the most truthful generation that yet has existed. I am glad to have lived to know it.

It is true that the many difficult problems of sexual conduct, of which we hear so much and so continuously, in almost every case are approached from one side only—the personal-pleasure side. That is why there is so much waste and foolishness. It explains too, why there is no consistent and united movement; no attempt at trying to find for everyone some possible decent way out—an escape from the terrible conditions which we are all agreed exist under the difficulties and strain of our under-controlled and over-civilised life.

A new conception of morality is, indeed, called for, but we have to be clearer as to what it is to be and where it is taking us. You will see at once what I mean. Until new safeguards are established, the old restriction cannot safely be loosened. It is too dangerous. The brief passionate partnership must entail disaster, in particular for the woman. She must still pay the heavier price of love. For what do these partnerships really mean? There can be no glossing with talk about freedom here. It is the old solution, the giving by the woman without security, what is given by the woman who is married under security and permanence.

I do not believe this can be accepted as an established and permitted thing as soon as we come to consider the lasting results.

It is an essential part of sexual morality, as I conceive it, that in any relation between the two sexes—I care not whether the association be legal or illegal, recognised or unrecognised—the position of the woman, as the potential mother must be made secure. This is a social, not a private matter. As such it has always been accepted by a wise State: it is the disgrace of our lax civilisation that too often to-day it is forgotten or ignored.

We come then to this—How can provision be made for honourable partnerships with security for the woman outside of marriage? For I am altogether persuaded that this provision must be made in order to harmonise our sexual life, and meet the desires of a large and increasing number of young people, whose exceptional needs our existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.

We must all of us know from our experience of life that many women as well as men are by their temperaments unsuited for monagonious marriage—the living permanently with one partner for life. Often, I would even say as a rule, these individuals are strongly sexual. They will not, because with the character they have, they cannot, live for any long period celibate. They will marry to gain permanent sexual relief or, if they are men, they will buy temporary relief from prostitutes, unless they are able to seek satisfaction in an irregular union.

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

It is commonly taken for granted that love and passion in men is quite different from love and passion in women. I am sure this is not true. It is very necessary to break down the idea that for the impulses of sex, with their immense complications and differences, there is one general rule. Nor is it possible, I am sure, to make any for arbitrary judgments. To me the man or woman who is able to live in faithful love with one partner is not necessarily better than the man or woman who is not so able. I may prefer the one type, and dislike the other, but that again is a matter of personal judgment. We cannot safely class those who differ from ourselves as wrong, and set them down as fit only for suppression and education. We have to put aside the old shrieks of blame that are possible only to the ignorant.

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

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

I believe if there were some open recognition of these partnerships outside of marriage, not necessarily permanent, with proper provision for the woman and her children, should there be any, a provision not dependent on the generosity of the man and made after the love which sanctioned the union had waned, but decided upon by the man and woman in the form of a contract before the relationships were entered upon, there would be many women ready to undertake such unions gladly; there would even be some women as well as men, who, I believe, would prefer them to permanent marriage, which binds them to one partner for life and as a rule entails mutual living together and the giving up by the woman of her work or profession. In this way many marriages would be prevented which inevitably come to disaster. It is also possible that such friendship-contracts might, under present disastrous conditions, be made by those who are unsuitably mated and yet are unable or do not wish to entirely sever the bond between them, with some other partner they could love. Such contracts would open up possibilities of honourable partnership to many who must suffer from enforced sexual abstinence or be driven into hateful concealed intimacies.

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

Under present conditions and the prejudice of social opinion, the penalties that have to be paid in particular by women, for any sexual relationship outside of marriage are too heavy. This is manifest as I have, to some extent, pointed out already. Indeed when we consider the difficulties faced in these unions, that so many do take the risks is another proof, if one were needed of the elemental strength of the sex-impulse. But mark this: it is only those whose social conscience is for some reason unawakened who can enter into these irregular relationships except under special and very exceptional circumstances, until some steps have been taken to regulate them. They may be willing to take the risk for themselves, but they know, or perhaps I had better say ought to know, that the payment may fall also on the child of their love. You may say—there need be no children. This is true. It makes the conditions of such love much easier. It is not, however, a solution and can never, I think, be accepted as such by women. The woman who loves a man wants to be the mother of a child by him. I shall be told that there are women of whom this is not true. I know this. But that does not make it less true that the great majority of women can find the completion of their love only in the child.

It would, of course, be easy to raise any number of objections against these contract-partnerships, some of which might well prove true. It may be said, for instance, that the economic difficulties that now prevent marriage would not be lessened, but increased, by these extra-conjugal relationships. This is a question on which so much ought to be said that I feel compelled to say almost nothing, as I cannot now treat it adequately. I can only say that I have in my mind some scheme of insurance, which might easily be contributed to by both partners of the contract, but which would go to the woman for her own provision, and that of any children of the union in case of separation. If this once became established as a custom (a kind of marriage settlement, but without the marriage) necessary between all entering into such partnerships, the practice would gain the support of public opinion. It is done frequently now, but secretly. What I want is that it should be done openly, as a right and not a favour. It would then be possible to take another step in the form of State endowment for parenthood; this might be an extension of endowment for legal motherhood and mother’s pensions, and by doing this would follow another and, perhaps, even greater gain. The recognition of these contract-partnerships would prevent the ostracism which even to-day falls on the discarded mistress. There are many women who dread this much more than poverty. The whole question of any sexual relationships outside of marriage in the past has been left in the gutter, so to speak. Everything has been blotted in darkness and made disgraceful by concealment. This would be changed.

May not something be done now, when in so many directions we are being forced to consider these questions, to establish sanction to meet new needs? Partnerships other than marriage have had a place as a recognised and guarded institution in many older and more primitive societies, and it may be that the conditions brought upon us may act in forcing upon us a similar acceptance.

We have got to recognise that our form of monogamous marriage cannot meet the sex-needs of all people. To assert that it can do this is to close our eyes to the known facts. Something has got to be done. The extending of the opportunities of honourable love must be faced before we can hope for more moral conditions of life. It is the results that have almost always followed these irregular unions that have branded them as anti-social acts. But the desertion of women with the inevitable resulting evils, which has arisen so frequently from the conditions of secrecy under which they now exist, would be put an end to. One reason why extra-conjugal relationships are discredited is because it is often almost impossible to avoid disaster. Make these partnerships honourable and there will be much greater chances of honourable conduct. I spoke just now of the sacrifice of women. But in love there is no such thing as sacrifice for a woman; there is the joy of giving. The sacrifice arises out of the conditions of concealment and blame under which the duties and joys of love so often have had to be fulfilled.

I do not see how we can forbid or treat with contempt any partnership that is openly entered into and in which the duties undertaken are faithfully fulfilled. It is our attitude of blame that has, in the past, so often made this honourable fulfilment of obligations impossible.

I have sought to put these matters as plainly as may be in the conviction that nothing can be gained by concealment. Anyone who writes on the subject of sexual conduct is very open to misconceptions. It is not realised that the effort of the reformer is not to lessen at all the bonds in any sexual partnership, rather the desire is to strengthen them. But the forms of the partnership will have to be more varied; unless, indeed, we prefer to accept unregulated and secret vice. We shall, I do most sincerely believe, have more morality in too much wideness than in too little.

I can anticipate a further objection that will certainly be raised. Why, I shall be asked, if sexual relationships are to be acknowledged and protected outside of marriage, preserve marriage at all? I have answered this question already. Monogamous marriage will be maintained because the great majority of women and men want it to be maintained. I affirm again my own belief in the monogamic union: the ideal marriage is that of the man and woman who have dedicated themselves to each other for the life of both, faithfully together to fulfil the duties of family life. This is the true monogony: this is the marriage which I regard as sanctified. But, I, regarding it as a holy state, would preserve it for those suited for the binding duties of the individual home so intimately connected with it.

The contract-partnerships I have suggested will do nothing to change the sanctity of any true marriages. There will always remain a penalty to those who seek variety in love, in that unrest which is the other side of variety. And the answer I would give to those who fear an increase of immorality from any provision for sexual partnerships outside of permanent marriage is, that no deliberate change in our sexual conduct can conceivably make moral conditions worse than they are at present. As a matter of fact every form of irregular union exists to-day, but shamefully and hidden. The only logical moral objection that I can think of being advanced against an honourable recognition of these partnerships is that, by doing away with all necessity for concealments their number is likely to be larger than if the old penalties are maintained. This is undoubtedly true: it is also true that it is the only possible way in which they can cease to be shamefull. Prohibitions and laws, however stringent, can do nothing. The past has proved their failure; they will fail still worse in the future.

Nor is the change really so great or so startling as at first it may appear to be. Our marriage in its present form is primarily an arrangement for the protection of the woman and the family. What I want is that some measure, at least, of the protection now given to the legal wife, shall be afforded to all women who fulfil the same duties. I am not seeking to make immorality easier; as I have before insisted, that is very far from my purpose. These changes for which I am pleading will make immorality much harder, for it will not be so easy as now it is to escape from the responsibilities of love.

No one can suppose, of course, that this change can be other than gradual. There will be no stage at which a large section of society will give up the accepted custom and stand perplexed as to how they shall readjust their sexual conduct. Any movement towards openness and honesty must be gradual. The process of change will be in the future, what has always happened in the past, the slow abandonment of worn-out conventions, and a trial of new paths, first by the few, to be followed by an ever-increasing number. When the need for a change arises then does a change come.

I assert again there need be no fear.

It is one of the deepest and healthiest instincts of men and women that they have always fought for liberty to love, and have rebelled whenever the restrictions and conditions of society have borne too hardly upon them. There is first a period of dull acquiescence, followed certainly by a reaction towards pleasure and sin—the grabbing to take what has been withheld by any means and in any form; but afterwards comes rebellion—the true movement towards purity; the deep desire of a return to health, necessitating always the breaking through from all hindering barriers, so that the intolerable burden of sin may be cast; a glad imperative effort to gain liberty, to live rightly and joyously.

It is the young who to-day have a new consciousness of the right of freedom. They will never again accept the ancient restrictions. And it is well. We, who are older, whose steps are faltering and whose eyes grow dim with waiting for the vision we have seen, look to them to gain liberty, to re-establish the sanctity of love, which we have tried to do and failed.

But the young must shake off every symptom of the prevalent and contagious anaemia of fatalism that limits everything to the personal issues, before they can formulate and carry through any really constructive work of reform. They must learn to distinguish more clearly between cause and effect, the means and the end. At present they place the horse after the cart and mistake the power for the product. We are all apt to suppose conduct and feelings are the outcome of conditions and laws. They are not: they are the origin of them. When we have all got the desire for right and honourable conduct and honest conduct and honest feelings both about marriage and every form of sexual partnership, we shall get living and helpful laws.

What is the use of tinkering with what is moribund? A great teacher has said, “Let the dead bury their dead; come and preach the good and the new thing.”

CONCLUSION
REGENERATION

I have dared to think of a regeneration of our sexual lives through education and a fuller understanding of the meaning of love. But by education must be understood all that influences the desires and imagination, so that in every direction we shall be turned to seek health and clean living.

Our supine acceptance of so many things that are wrong ought to arouse us to shame. What are we going to do?

Are we content to go on in the muddles that so long we have accepted without much consideration? Are we satisfied to allow all the evil to continue because we are too lazy and too dishonest to face them in truth and demand a clearance? We are all responsible; you, my readers, and I. If we demand saner and more practical conditions we shall get them.

But do we care—I mean care sufficiently to seek and to find the way of escape? Ah, that is the question!

Fear has been the hot-bed wherein have been forced rank plants of shame, dishonesty and trickery, of uncleanness, of concealments, of persecution and punishments—plants of persistent but unhealthy growth, that insistently and riotously spring up to hinder the workers, who strive ever to clear the soil of the fair Garden of Love, from the rank and choking growths.

What wonder, indeed, that we have lost our way so that still we are wandering in the jungle, unable to steer a straight course through the rough and tortuous paths left to us as a legacy from the past. It is this confusion that is hindering us to-day. And our real task is to cut through the jungle, and force clear paths, so that again we may have good roads in an open country on which we may walk gladly and fearlessly.

Yet, it were unwise to be too hopeful. We cannot be architects of life. Each generation will make new mistakes, even do they escape the follies that are old. We can see a very short way along the path of life, and often we are confused. The wisest amongst us are only bricklayers, and the best can but lay two or three bricks in a lifetime. Our work is to do that if we can. We can guess very feebly at the whole design. Many mistakes must be made by us, as they have been by those before us, and often it may be the duty of a new generation to pull down the work that in sorrow we have toiled to build up.

FOOTNOTES:

INDEX

• A
• Adoption of Children 61;
  • law needed 61 et seq.;
  • fears and dangers in 62 et seq.
    
• B
• Birth control 37 et seq., 163.
• Boys, seduction of 113 et seq., 119 et seq.
  
• C
• Cats, 15; their qualities compared with those of women 16 et seq.
• Child, effect of birth control on 39;
  • feeling of inferiority in 49;
  • inferiority and crime in 49;
  • must rebel 51 et seq. 82, 94, 103;
  • adoption of, law of needed 61;
  • faults and crimes of 73 et seq. 99;
  • in prison 73 et seq.;
  • at modern school 79 et seq.;
  • at play 81;
  • sex education of 87 et seq., 107 et seq.;
  • early manifestation of sex in 88 et seq.;
  • savagery of 97;
  • marriage founded on 136 et seq.
• Concealment, evils of 178 et seq.
• Curiosity, 101, 109 et seq.
  
• D
• Dangerous Age, the 29 et seq.
• Doctors and Patients’ secrets 157 et seq.
• Dogs, 59, 60.
• E
• Economics, mania for, 158 et seq.
• Education, sex 87 et seq.
• F
• Father, daughter’s feeling for 54;
  • the intruder 55 et seq., 95;
  • after birth of child 56;
  • conflict with son 56;
  • authority of, necessary 57;
  • effect on child 91 et seq. 93;
  • danger of being too fond of child 104.
• Faults of children 43 et seq., 73 et seq. 99.
• Freedom for children 80 et seq.
• G
• Gentleman, the temporary 165 et seq.
• Girls, and seduction of boys 113, 118;
  • playing with love 127 et seq.
  • See also Child.
• Garrell, Vera M. (on “Youth and Marriage”) 175.
• H
• Husband, the old-fashioned 161 et seq.
• J
• Jealousy, 44, 55, 68, 93, 95, 103, 109, 136.
• L
• Law, reform in relation to parentage 35 et seq.;
  • reform in relation to adoption 61 et seq.;
  • of adoption in other countries 67 et seq.;
  • in relation to mothers’ pensions 71;
  • in relation to seduction 113 et seq.;
  • in relation to age of consent 117 et seq.;
  • White Slave Traffic 118 et. seq.;
  • marriage law in other countries 170.
• Lyttelton, Dr. (on sex instruction) 107.
• M
• Marriage, joy in 33; 133 et seq.
  • result of children 136 et seq.;
  • causes of failure in 139;
  • altered views on 141 et seq.;
  • unfaithfulness of men in 145 et seq.;
  • of women 149 et seq.;
  • too easy 169 et seq.;
  • problem of unions outside 174 et seq.
  • See also Birth Control.
• Michaelis, Karin 29 et. seq.
• Mother, and child who steals 43 et seq.;
  • danger of being too fond of child 52 et. seq. 104;
  • supreme with child 55, 72, 92;
  • perfect and (childless) 59;
  • difficulty of adoptions for 61 et seq.;
  • love, effect on child 91;
  • and sex instruction 108 et seq.;
  • after birth of child 145 et seq.;
  • image of, sought in wife 161.
• N
• Neil, Judge 71 et seq.
• O
• Old-fashioned husband 161 et seq.
• P
• Pensions for mothers 71 et seq.
• Play 81;
  • love in 127 et seq.
• Pleasure, search for 31, 133.
• Punishment of children 73 et seq., 84 et seq.
• Parent, See Father and Mother.
• R
• Racial types, best seen in women 20.
• Rebellion of children, necessary 51 et seq.; 82; 94.
• Remorse, as temptation 46;
  • not necessarily good 98.
• S
• Schools, poor law 72;
  • for delinquent 77;
  • modern and their errors 79 et seq.
• Sex, education 87 et seq.;
  • early manifestation of 88;
  • right age for 107 et seq.
• Solitary confinement condemned 77.
• Son, who steals 43 et seq.
  • See also Child.
• Spain 19 et seq.;
  • dancing in 21;
  • workers (women) in 23 et seq.
• W
• Wife, the modern 161 et seq.
• Wife, the young 163 et seq.
• Women, their qualities compared with those of cats 16 et seq.;
  • in Spain 19 et seq.;
  • racial types best seen in 20;
  • as workers in Spain 23 et seq.;
  • approaching age, in terror of 30;
  • search for pleasure in 31;
  • false purity in 32;
  • repression in 33;
  • legal position of 35;
  • childless 59;
  • difficulties in adopting children by et seq. 61;
  • seduction of men by 113 et seq., 118, 123;
  • myth of superior purity 113 et seq.;
  • child more than husband to 145 et seq.;
  • attitude to sexual disease of 158 et seq.
• Women, See also Birth Control, Marriages, Mother, Wife, the modern, Gentleman, the temporary.

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