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The general subject of Birth Control necessarily includes the special subject of Birth Control Methods, viz., of the methods of association between husband and wife under which offspring is conceived only at such times as desired, and consequently only in the number desired.
These methods may be grouped into three general classes, as follows:
I. Methods of Continence (total or temporary). In the practice of the methods under this class, there is an avoidance of sexual relations between husband and wife, either continuously or for certain periods during which the liability to conception is great.
II. Methods of Semi-Continence. In the practice of the methods under this class, there is a partial manifestation of the sexual relation accompanied by an absence of the manifestation of the procreative functions.
III. Methods of Contraception. In the practice of the methods under this class, the usual manifestations of the sexual relation are observed, accompanied by an avoidance of the union of the male and female elements of reproduction which result in conception.
The student of the subject of Birth Control, of course, familiarizes himself or herself with each of the several classes of methods above noted, for the purpose of understanding the characteristic distinctions between them, and the respective advantages and disadvantages of each class. In the following pages each class will be briefly considered, that the student may acquire a general understanding thereof, and may be enabled to reason intelligently concerning them. In this presentation therewill be sought a fair statement of each class, without any desire to influence the student for or against either of them.
Continence (which in this special sense means the avoidance of sexual relations between husband and wife), in the strict sense, is based upon the idea that the sexual relation should not be exercised except for the purpose and intent of procreation. In the restricted usage of the term, it refers to the abstinence from sexual intercourse during stated periods in which the liability to conception is greatest.
Rev. Sylvanus Stall, the author of several widely-read works on the subject of Sex, says of strict continence: “One theory is that the reproductive function is not to be exercised except for the purpose of procreation. * * * There are some married people, more numerous than some suppose, who have adopted the idea of uniform continence, and who call the reproductive nature into exercise for the purpose of procreation only, and who assert that the maintenance of continence secures not only the greater strength and better health, but greater happiness also. * * * While the results of our investigations do not enable us to assert that it is the true theory, we are yet prepared to say that it is worthy of thoughtful consideration. If it is possible for married people to maintain absolute continence for a period of six months or a year, it must be conceded that it would be possible to extend that time to a longer period. The maintenance of this theory would require such a degree of self-control as is far beyond the possession of the great mass of humanity. We fear, also, that there are but few, even if they entered upon a life union with such thought and intention, who would be willing to maintain their principles for any considerable period. * * * The other theory, and that which many men and women who are eminent for their learning and religious life hold to be the correct theory, is that while no one has a right to enter upon the marriage relation with the fixed purpose of evading the duty of parenthood, yet that procreation is not the only high and holy purpose which God has had in view in establishing the marriage relation, but that the act of sexual congress may be indulged in between husband and wife for the purpose of expressing their personal endearments, and for quickening those affections and tender feelings which are calculated to render home the place of blessing and good which God intended. * * * It is held by those who advocate this theory, that while it would be possible to restrict the exercise of the reproductive functions to the single purpose of procreation, yet in the great majority of instances the effort to live by that theory would generally result in marital unhappiness. * * * Due regard is not only to be paid to the perpetuity of the race, but to the well-being and perpetuity of the individual.”
The advocates of continence, except for the purpose of procreation, advance many arguments and evidence to justify their contention that this is the only course justified by Nature and Morality. We need not present this argument here, for it is outside the particular question now under consideration. However, in all fairness and justice, there should be presented here the general outline of their argument that there is no rational basis for the widely accepted idea that abstinence from sexual relations is in any way harmful or detrimental to the health and physical well-being of the human race.
The advocates of continence cite the cases of many continent men who have been noted for their vigor and activity; and claim that such cases also justify their claim that continence makes for the sound mind in the sound body of mankind. The following quotations from authorities will give the general spirit of this contention.
Dr. Kellogg says: “It has been claimed by many, even physicians, and though with but a slight show of reason, that absolute continence, after a full development of the organs of reproduction, could not be maintained without a great detriment to health. It is needless to enumerate all the different arguments employed to support this position, since they are, with a few exceptions, too frivolous to mention.” Dr. Mayer says: “This position is held by men of the world, and many physicians share it. This belief appears to us erroneous, without foundation, and easily refuted. No peculiar disease nor any abridgement of the duration of life can be ascribed to such continence. * * * Health does not absolutely require that there should ever be an emission of semen, from puberty to death, though the individual live a hundred years.” Dr. Kellogg also says: “This has been amply confirmed by experiments upon animals, as well as by the experience of some of the most distinguished men who have ever lived, among whom may be mentioned Sir Isaac Newton, Kant, Paschal, Fontenaille, and Michael Angelo. These men never married, and lived continent lives. Some of them lived to be a very great age, retaining to the last their wonderful abilities. In view of this fact, there is certainly no danger.”
Another writer has said: “The Greek athletes training for the great Olympic Games were compelled to observe strict continence, the experience being that by this course they were able to conserve their vigor and strength much better. The prize-fighters of today are compelled by their trainers to observe strict continence during the period of training. Many of the former champions who went to pieces suddenly, owe their downfall to a violation of this rule.” Another has said: “Chastity, even continence, is the prime necessity of the successful athlete.” Dr. Kellogg forcefully says: “Breeders of stock who wish to secure sound progeny will not allow the most robust stallion to associate with mares as many times during the whole season as some of these salacious human males perform a similar act within a month.”
Dr. Warbasse has said: “Testicular fluid in the seminal vesicles, under unexciting conditions, does not require to be discharged at intervals. I have not been able to find in the studies of the physiologists that its retention is abnormal or unhygienic. * * * I do not conceive of a man suffering from the ills of continence who has been cast away on a desert island, with no immediate prospect of relief, and whose mind and hands are occupied with raising grain, catching fish for subsistence, and constructing a boat for escape. All that has been said of men may be said of women.”
Dr. Talmey has said: “Continence, if long continued, has been claimed to be the cause of impotence. But there is no valid reason for this belief. To prove the harmfulness of continence an analogue is brought forward between the atrophy of a muscle in enforced idleness and the injury to the sex organs in enforced abstinence. But the proof is somewhat feeble. The essential organs of generation are not muscles, but glands, and who has ever heard of a tear gland atrophying for lack of crying. * * * There is no valid proof of the harmfulness of total abstinence in a healthy individual. A perfectly healthy man is never injured by abstinence. At least there is no sufficient proof that he ever was; but there are unmistakable proofs that total abstinence does not harm the individual.”
Dr. Stockham has said: “The testes may be considered analogous to the salivary and lachrymal glands, in which there is no fluid secreted except at the demand of their respective functions. The thought of food makes the mouth water for a short time only, while the presence of food causes abundant yield of saliva. It is customary for physicians to assume that the spermatic secretion is analogous to bile, which, when once formed, must be expelled. But substitute the word ‘tears’ for bile, and you put before the mind an idea entirely different. Tears, as falling drops, are not essential to life and health. A man may be in perfect health and yet not cry once in five or even fifty years. The lachrymal fluid is ever present, but in such small quantities that it is unnoticed. Where are tears while they remain unshed? They are ever ready, waiting to spring forth when there is an adequate cause, but they do not accumulate and distress the man because they are not shed daily, weekly, or monthly. The component elements of the tears are prepared in the system, they are on hand, passing through the circulation, ready to mix and flow whenever they are needed; but if they mix, accumulate and flow without adequate cause, there is a disease of the lachrymal glands. While there are no exact analogies in the body, yet the tears and the spermatic fluids are much more closely analogous in their normal manner of secretion and use than are the bile and the semen. Neither flow of tears nor of semen is essential to life or health. Both are largely under the control of the imagination, the emotions, and the will; and the flow of either is liable to be arrested in a moment of sudden mental action.”
Parkhurst says: “The prostatic fluid, according to Robin, is secreted at the moment of ejaculation. The remaining element of the spermatic secretion is produced, under normal circumstances, only as required, either for impregnation or for the maintenance of the affectional function. The theory that the sperm is naturally secreted only as it is required, brings it into harmony with other secretions. The tears, the saliva, and the perspiration, are always required in small quantities, and the secretion is continuous; but if required in great quantities, the secretion becomes great almost instantly. The mother’s milk is chiefly secreted just as it is required for the infant, and when not required the secretion entirely ceases; yet it recommences the moment the birth of another child makes it necessary. * * * A man accustomed to abstinence will not suffer from any accumulation of secretions, while a man whose absorbing glands have never had occasion to take up the secretions will be in trouble; just as a dairy cow which has not been milked will be in trouble, though if running wild she would never have any necessity for milking. * * * The objection that man needs physical relief from a continuous secretion is answered by the admitted fact that men not deficient in sexual vigor live for months, and probably for years, in strict abstinence, and with no physical inconvenience such as is often complained of by men who happen to be deprived of their accustomed indulgence for a week or two at a time.”
Dr. Nystrom, the eminent Swedish writer on the subject, however, utters the following warning to those who would make hasty generalizations on the subject: “In speaking of relative abstinence or regulation and command of the sexual instinct, I warn against absolutism in this regard, and especially against the generalizing of abstinence as possible for everybody. Although abstinence during an entire lifetime does not injure certain individuals, it cannot be endured by others for some length of time without undesirable consequences. I therefore oppose the principle of absolute continence as in the main false. It may possibly be applied to a few deeply religious or philosophical persons, but not to the majority of normal people, despite good resolutions and habits. * * * We must consider the different bodily constitutions and passions—why some people without difficulty, others with the greatest difficulty, can master their feelings regarding sexual relations. * * * May those who try to better humanity in sexual respects first give their attention to the subject when well prepared with a rich experience and deep study, for otherwise they cannot give advice which can be followed, and their work should fail as being contrary to human nature.”
Temporary Continence. Many married couples who are desirous of preventing too-frequent conception, or conception following too soon after the birth of the youngest child, practice the method of refraining from the marital sexual relations during certain periods in which conception is most likely to occur. This custom is said to be favored by those acting under the advice of their religious instructors, and who regard all methods of birth-control other than continence as sinful. Even the most orthodox objectors to birth-control as a general principle seem to regard this particular method as free from objection, providing that the married couple do not seek to entirely escape parenthood in this manner.
This plan is based upon the well-known, and well-established physiological principle that the time immediately before the menstrual period, and still more, immediately after the period is the most favorable to conception. Impregnation is most likely to occur just after the menstrual period; while from about two weeks after the beginning of the period, to a few days before the beginning of the next period, is the time of comparative sterility when impregnation and conception are the least likely to occur. Consequently, the authorities hold that the period of from ten to fifteen days after the end of the menstruation is one peculiarly free from the probability of impregnation and conception.
This plan of temporary continence, continuing during the period in which conception is most probable, and terminating when that period has passed each month, until the new period approaches, is followed by many married couples with the full approval of the conscience and their religious guides. In many cases the result fulfills the expectations, though as there is a considerable variation observed among different women there is no absolute certainty to the plan considered as a birth-control method—at the best it is but taking advantage of the law of probabilities, the chances being in favor of the result sought.
Semi-Continence (in the sense in which the term is employed herein) consists of the abstinence from the exercise of the procreative functions, while there is a partial manifestation of the sexual relation. Under various fanciful names, backed by as many curious theories, this birth-control method is practiced by very many married couples in this and other countries.
Among the earlier advocates of this general class of birth-control methods was Noyes, the founder of the one-time famous Oneida Community, who taught the doctrine of what he called “Male Continence.” The gist of his teaching was as follows: That the sexual relation (in its entirety) should be exercised solely for the purpose of reproduction, all else being contrary to nature. But, he held, notwithstanding this, there was possible and proper a certain degree of such physical relation which, while not opposing Nature’s laws of reproduction, yet was sufficient to afford a complete manifestation of the “affectional desire and function.” In other words, as a writer has expressed it, “that one might manifest a marked degree of sexual gratification and still remain continent, while feeling none of the irksome restraints of continence.”
Noyes claimed that his community followed this plan with satisfactory results, the ordinary sexual relations being manifested only when reproduction was specially desired and deliberately decided upon. Noyes claimed that in this way there was no secretion of the seminal fluid, and therefore no waste of the same, and no unnatural practices such attached to the common custom of “tricking Nature” by methods of preventing impregnation and conception. Parkhurst (who, as we shall see presently, followed Noyes) objected to the Noyes plan, claiming that “it necessarily stimulates into activity the generative functions of the sexual batteries, and this not only causes a wasteful use of sperm, but diverts the sexual batteries from their affectional function, diminishing amative attraction.”
In the year 1896, Dr. Alice B. Stockham, of Chicago, published a book called “Karezza” which has since attained an enormous sale, the leading principle of which seems to have been almost similar to that of Noyes, as above stated. The book was built around the idea previously announced by the same author in an earlier book, which she stated as follows: “By some a theory called ‘secular absorption’ is advanced. This involves intercourse without culmination.” In her book “Karezza” this author further stated: “Karezza so consummates marriage that through the power of will, and loving thoughts, the crisis is not reached, but a complete control by both husband and wife is maintained throughout the entire relation, a conscious conservation of the creative energy. * * * It is both a union on the affectional plane, and a preparation for the best possible conditions for procreation.”
About 1882, Henry M. Parkhurst published a booklet called “Diana,” which since that time has passed through several editions, and has had a large number of readers. The principle advocated is radically different from that of Noyes or Dr. Stockham, above mentioned, although some of the writings of Dr. Stockham seem to favor the Parkhurst idea as much as the one advanced by herself. Parkhurst, as we may see by reference to a quotation from him in connection with the Noyes’ idea, did not approve of the “male continence” as taught by the latter, although he seems to have considered it a step in the right direction.
The gist of the Parkhurst idea is expressed in the following quotations from his booklet, “Diana”: “In order to secure proper and durable relations between the sexes, it is necessary to live in harmony with the law of Alphism, that is abstinence except for procreation. But if that principle is adopted alone, no means being taken to provide for the due exercise of the sexual faculties, it will likely be abandoned or lead to a life of asceticism. In order to make Alphism practicable for ordinary men and women, another law has to be observed, that is, the law of sexual satisfaction from sexual contact; understanding by the term ‘contact’ not merely physical external contact, but using the term in its more general sense to include sexual companionship, or even correspondence, bringing the minds into mental contact. The observance of this law will lead to complete and enduring satisfaction in abstinence.
“It is an observed fact that contact incites to activity the affectional action, * * * extending over the whole frame, and by their activities satisfies them, without calling into action the special generative function of the generative organs. And it is also an observed fact that the repression of this affectional activity naturally creates a desire for the exercise of the other; so that a true remedy for sexual intemperance is the full satisfaction of the affectional mode of activity by frequent and free sexual contact. Sexual satisfaction may be obtained by personal presence, conversation, a clasp of the hands, kissing, caressing, embracing, personal contact with or without the intervention of dress.
“The exercise of the affectional function tends to satiety and exhaustion in the same way as all other physical or mental exercise; but if it is not carried to excess it is a permanent benefit. * * * The principle of Alphism will tend to diminish prostitution, not only by diminishing sexual intemperance, even if the principle is not at once accepted in practice to the full extent, thus diminishing the temptation of the present generation, and the hereditary temptation of future generations; but also by correcting the physiological error which has led astray so many, i. e., that total abstinence is not conducive to health, or to the highest physical pleasure, but that the ordinary physical relation is an essential feature in male existence.
“To avoid misapprehension, these two theories should be clearly defined and the distinction between them explained. The doctrine of Alphism is confined to one principle, i. e., the law of abstinence except for procreation. Those who believe in this doctrine may be divided into different classes. Some believe in it as a matter of duty, to be enforced by precept and self-denial; and some believe in it as a matter of right, requiring no self-denial. In the latter is included the doctrine of ‘Diana,’ which may be defined as the law of sexual satisfaction from sexual contact. In other words, Dianism is Alphism as the result of sexual equilibration.”
The general idea of Parkhurst, and those who have followed his teachings in some modified or adapted form, may be said to be based upon the following general proposition: That there is a dual function in the sexual relations, which may be stated as follows: (1) the function exercised from purely physiological causes, and which expresses the desire for the relation resulting in procreation; and (2) the function exercised from emotional causes, and which expresses what may be called the “affectional desire,” i. e., the desire for the embrace, caress, fondling, and general companionship with the loved one of the other sex.
The first one of these phases, i. e., the reproductive function, is manifested by the lower animals as well as by man, and is elemental and primitive in character. It is often manifested by man without the accompaniment of the affectional function, and at times seems to be almost entirely divorced from the idea of high human affection. The second one of these phases, i. e., the affectional function, usually accompanied the procreative function in the human sexual relation, at least in the highest forms of that relation. But also, it may be and often is manifested independently of the procreative function by men and women of refinement. In fact, it would seem to be the form of physical attraction accompanying the very highest phase of love, particularly in women.
It is this affectional function which is manifested by betrothed lovers in their beautiful period of mutual understanding, sympathy, and affection. It is that characteristic of the courting days which is so precious to the woman, but which is too often sadly missed by the wife after the honeymoon. It exists often before the fires of passion are kindled, and it persists often after the flame of passion has died away. It is the expression of the purest love of youth, and of the tenderest affection of age. It is this form of sexual relation, physical though it may be, that is the outgrowth of evolution in man. May it not be that in this way man has “improved upon the sexual habits of the animals”; and that when man violates the natural restrictions held sacred by animal life, and indulges in excessive sexual relations in and out of season, that he is really manifesting a degenerative tendency instead of taking an upward step on the evolutionary scale.
There have been many excellent authorities who have held that this affectional function, and its manifestation, is far better calculated to satisfy the sexual instincts of advanced men and women than is the ordinary physical sexual relation. They claim that in the higher form of this affectional relation is to be found the secret of the joy, bliss, and happiness of the betrothed lovers, which alas! too often disappear when the other form of the relation is manifested, particularly when manifested to excess in the manner customary to so many married men. They claim that in the recognition of this fact of human life and love is to be found the secret of married happiness between wedded advanced and cultured individuals. They assert that the experience of the race, rightly considered and understood, full proves this contention.
Edward Carpenter has the following to say on this point: “It is a matter of common experience that the unrestrained outlet of the purely physical desire leaves the nature drained of its higher love-forces. * * * There are grounds for believing in the transmutability of the various forms of the passion, and grounds for thinking that the sacrifice of a lower phase may sometimes be the only condition on which a higher and more durable phase can be attained; and that, therefore, restraint (which is absolutely necessary at times) has its compensation. Anyone who has once realized how glorious a thing love is in its essence, and how indestructible, will hardly need to call anything that leads to it a sacrifice; and he is indeed a master of life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body, and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion * * * Between lovers, then, a kind of hardy temperance is to be recommended—for all reasons, but especially because it lifts their satisfaction and delight in each other out of the regions of ephemeralities (which too often turn into dull indifference and satiety) into the region of more lasting things—one step nearer at any rate to the eternal kingdom.
“How intoxicating, indeed, how penetrating—like a most precious wine—is that love which is the sexual transformed by the magic of the will into the emotional and spiritual! And what a loss, on the merest ground of prudence and the economy of pleasure, is the unbridled waste along physical channels! So nothing is so much dreaded between lovers as just this—the vulgarization of love—and this is the rock upon which marriage so often splits. There is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it instantly snatches the same and destroys in a few moments the form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full glory who holds back a little, and he only truly possesses who is willing if need be not to possess. * * * It must be remembered, however, that in order for a perfect intimacy between two people their physical endearment must by the nature of the case be free to each other. The physical endearment may not be the object for which they come together; but, if it is denied, its denial will bar any real sense of repose and affiance, and make their mutual association restless, vague, tentative and unsatisfied. I think, from various considerations, that, generally, even without the actual physical sex-act, there is an interchange of vital and ethereal elements—so that it may be said that there is a kind of generation taking place within each of the persons concerned, through their mutual influence on each other, as well as that more specialized generation which consists in the propagation of the race.”
Count Tolstoi said on this subject: “The difference in organization between man and woman is not only physiological but extends also into other and moral characteristics, such as go to make manhood in man, and womanhood (or femininity) in woman. The attraction between the sexes is based not merely upon the yearning for physical union, but likewise upon that reciprocal attraction exerted by the contrasting qualities of the sexes each upon the other, manhood upon womanhood, and womanhood upon manhood. The one sex endeavors to complement itself with the other, and therefore the attraction between the sexes demands a union of spirit precisely identical with the physical union.
“The tendency toward physical and spiritual union forms two phases of manifestation of one and the same fountain-head of desire, and they bear such intimate relations to each other that the gratification of the one inclination inevitably weakens the other. So far as the yearning for spiritual union is satisfied, to that extent the yearning for physical union is diminished or entirely destroyed; and, vice versa, the gratification of the physical desire weakens or destroys the spiritual. And, consequently, the attraction between the sexes is not only physical affinity leading to procreation, but is also the attraction of opposites for one another, capable of assuming the form of the most spiritual union in thought only, or of the most animal union, causing the propagation of children, and all those varied degrees of relationship between the one and the other. The question of upon which footing the relation between the sexes is to be established and maintained, is settled by deciding what method of union is regarded at any given time, or for all time, as good, proper, and therefore desirable. * * *
“The nearer the union approaches the extreme physical boundary, the more it kindles the physical passions and desires, and the less satisfaction it gets; the nearer it approaches the opposite extreme spiritual boundary, the less new passions are excited and the greater is the satisfaction. The nearer it is to the first, the more destructive it is to animal energy; the nearer it approaches the second, the spiritual, the more serene, the more enjoyable and forceful is the general condition. * * * Taking into consideration the varying conditions of temperament, and above all what the contracting parties regard as good, proper, and desirable, marriage for some will approach the spiritual union, and for others the physical; but the nearer the union approaches the spiritual the more complete will be the satisfaction. The substance of what has been said is this: that the relation between the sexes have two functions, i. e., the reproductive, and the affectional; and that the sexual energy, if only it have no conscious desire to beget children, must be always directed in the way of affection and love. The manifestation which this energy assumes depends upon custom or reason; the gradual bringing of the reason into accord with the principles herein expounded, and a gradual reorganization of customs consonant with them, results in saving men from many of their passions, and giving them satisfaction for their higher sexual instincts and desires.”
Some capable writers on the subject have held that in the practice of the methods of semi-continence, such as have been referred to in the foregoing pages of this part of the book, there may lie the danger of excessive stimulation of the sexual centres, without the safety-valve of the physical and nervous relief which follows as a natural sequence in the ordinary sexual relations. The advocates of these methods, however, reply that such objections while valid in the case of persons who practice the same only because opportunity prevents the performance of the usual physical relation, still have no true application to those who adopt these methods in a conscientious and honest manner, and who maintain the proper mental attitude toward the whole question.
These advocates say that the mental effect upon the secretions of the body must be taken into account in all considerations of the question. They say that just as the gastric juice will begin to flow in response to the mental image or idea of food, and the mother’s milk in response to the cry of the child for food, so do the sexual secretions, direction of the circulation, and other physiological activities result from the mental pictures or idea of sexual congress. They hold that if the mind of the husband be filled with mental images of sexual congress, then there is set into operation the process of secretion of seminal fluids, and the consequent engorgement of the blood-vessels concerned therewith, which are denied the normal physiological relief, and accordingly produce bad effects upon the nervous system. But they likewise claim that if the mind of the husband entertains ideas merely of physical endearment and caress as “an end to itself,” then there is no mental incentive toward the secretion of the seminal fluids, and the constant engorgement of the blood-vessels, and no nerve force is generated—and therefore no nerve-shock is experienced by reason of frustrated manifestation and expression.
Parkhurst says regarding the point just mentioned: “In the relations between the sexes, the question of how the association of the husband and the wife shall stimulate the affectional or generative action or sexual batteries must depend greatly upon their habits of association. We have only to accustom ourselves to associating the relation with the affectional action, by repeated repetition when the affectional action is all that is felt or thought of, in order to cultivate such habits and associations as will make the association tend to repress passional desires, by the direction of the sexual forces into the channel of affectional attraction and functioning. * * * The form of the sexual manifestation will be largely influenced, by the mind, and largely by force with these principles, and the gradual formation of habits consistent therewith, will make more and more evident their beneficial operation.”
There is much interest now being taken by thinking people in some phases of the general subject of semi-continence, and many thoughtful and conscientious persons find in it at least the promise of a worthy and honest solution of the problem of Continence as applied to Birth Control. Such persons claim to find in this general class of Birth Control methods a happy medium between the rigid practice of absolute Continence in the marriage relations, on the one hand, and the more popular methods of Contraception, on the other hand.
We now come to the consideration of the subject of Contraception, pure and simple, the methods of which contemplate the manifestation of the usual physical sexual relations between husband and wife, accompanied by an avoidance of the union of the male and female elements of reproduction which result in conception.
It should once more be positively emphasized that by Contraception is NOT meant Abortion. Abortion means “the premature expulsion of the human embryo or foetus; miscarriage.” Contraception, on the other hand, means simply the prevention of the union of the male and female elements of reproduction, and consequently, the preventing of the process which evolves the foetus or embryo. Contraception is prevention; abortion is destruction. There is here a difference as wide as the poles. As Dr. William J. Robinson says, in a paragraph previously quoted in this book: “In inducing abortion, one destroys something already formed—a foetus, or an embryo, a fertilized ovum, a potential human being. In prevention, however, one merely prevents chemically or mechanically the spermatozoa from coming in contact with the ovum. There is no greater sin or crime in this than there is in simple abstinence, in refraining from sexual intercourse.”
Unfortunately for the cause of scientific Birth Control in America, the laws of the United States (and of most of the separate States) at present prevent the public dissemination by written or printed words, or by public teaching of information concerning the contraceptive methods known to all intelligent physicians and others who have made a scientific study of the subject. The conveyal of such information, in the manner stated, is made a criminal offence, subject to heavy fines and imprisonment. Though there is a strong movement underway on the part of many intelligent and earnest citizens of this country, having for its object the repeal of such prohibitive laws, and the passage of careful legislation designed to give the dissemination of such instruction a legal and certain status, under the restrictions imposed by common sense, intellectual honesty, and the best interests of the race—to place it upon the same footing as in certain advanced European countries—the fact remains that at the present time no person may give such information without subjecting himself to indictment and probable conviction as a law-breaker and enemy of society.Under the circumstances, of course, there has been, and will be, no attempts to furnish such forbidden information in this book. So long as these laws stand unrepealed on the statute books, they must be observed by all law abiding citizens.
Dr. Wm. J. Robinson, an authority on the subject, says: “We believe that under any conditions, and particularly under our present economic conditions, human beings should be able to control the number of their offspring. They should be able to decide how many children they want to have, and when they want to have them. And to accomplish this result we demand that the knowledge of controlling the number of offspring, in other and plainer words, the knowledge of preventing undesirable conception, should not be considered a criminal offence punishable by hard labor in Federal prisons, but that it should be considered knowledge useful and necessary to the welfare of the race and of the individual; and that its dissemination should be as permissible as is the dissemination of any hygienic, sanitary or eugenic knowledge.”
The only possible relief from the present condition is seen by careful thinkers to be in the education of the public as to the needs of the case, and the presentation of the scientific argument in favor of rational and proper Birth Control, to the end that public opinion, once seeing the truth in the case, may be sufficiently strong as to bring about a change in the present antiquated and bigoted laws. But, so long as the laws remain on the statute books, they must be observed and obeyed. Education, not Anarchy, is the true remedy.
The following general remarks on the subject of Contraception, by Havelock Ellis, the well-known English authority of the subject of Sex in Modern Society, may perhaps prove interesting to students of the general subject: Ellis says: “Many ways of preventing conception have been devised since the method which is still the commonest was first introduced, so far as our certainly imperfect knowledge extends, by a clever Jew, Onan (Genesis, Chap. XXXVIII) whose name has since been wrongly attached to another practice with which the Mosaic record in no way associates him. There are now many contraceptive methods, some dependent on precautions adopted by the man, others dependent upon the woman, others again which take the form of an operation permanently preventing conception, and, therefore, not to be adopted save by couples who already have as many children as they desire, or else who ought never to have children at all and thus wisely adopt a method of sterilization. It is unnecessary here, even if it were otherwise desirable, to discuss these various methods in detail. It is even useless to do so, for we must bear in mind that no method can be absolutely approved or absolutely condemned. Each may be suitable under certain conditions and for certain couples, and it is not easy to recommend any method indiscriminately. We need to know the intimate circumstances of individual cases. For the most part, experience is the final test.
“Forel compared the use of contraceptive devices to the use of eyeglasses, and it is obvious that, without expert advice, the results in either case may sometimes be mischievous or at all events ineffective. Personal advice and instruction are always desirable. In Holland nurses are medically trained in a practical knowledge of contraceptive methods, and are thus enabled to enlighten the women of the community. This is an admirable plan. Considering that the use of contraceptive measures is now almost universal, it is astonishing that there are yet so many ‘civilized’ countries in which this method of enlightenment is not everywhere adopted. Until it is adopted, and a necessary knowledge of the most fundamental facts of sexual life brought into every home, the physician must be regarded as the proper adviser. It is true that until recently he was generally in these matters a blind leader of the blind. Nowadays it is beginning to be recognized that the physician has no more serious and responsible duty than that of giving help in the difficult path of sexual life. Very frequently, indeed, even yet, he has not risen to a sense of his responsibilities in this matter. It is well to remember, however, that a physician who is unable or unwilling to give frank and sound advice in this most important department of life, is unlikely to be reliable in any other department. If he is not up to date here, he is probably not up to date anywhere.
“Whatever may be the method adopted, there are certain conditions which it must fulfill, even apart from its effectiveness as a contraceptive, in order to be satisfactory. Most of these conditions may be summed up in one: the most satisfactory method is that which least interferes with the normal process in the act of intercourse. Every sexual act is, or should be, a miniature courtship, however long marriage may have lasted. No outside mental tension or nervous apprehension must be allowed to intrude. Any contraceptive proceeding which hastily enters the atmosphere of love immediately before or immediately after the moment of union is unsatisfactory and may be injurious. It even risks the total loss of the contraceptive result, for at such moments the intended method may be ineffectively carried out, or neglected altogether. No method can be regarded as desirable which interferes with the sense of satisfaction and relief which should follow the supreme act of loving union. No method which produces a nervous jar in one of the parties, even though it may be satisfactory to the other, should be tolerated. Such considerations must for some couples rule out certain methods. We cannot, however, lay down absolute rules, because methods some couples may find satisfactory prove unsatisfactory in other cases. Experience, aided by expert advice, is the only final criterion.
“When a contraceptive method is adopted under satisfactory conditions, with a due regard to the requirements of the individual couple, there is little room to fear that any injurious results will be occasioned. It is quite true that many physicians speak emphatically concerning the injurious results to husband or to wife of contraceptive devices. Although there has been exaggeration, and prejudice has often been imported into this question, and although most of the injurious results could have been avoided had trained medical help been at hand to advise better methods, there can be no doubt that much that has been said under this head is true. Considering how widespread is the use of these methods, and how ignorantly they have often been carried out, it would be surprising indeed if it were not true. But even supposing that the nervously injurious effects which have been traced to contraceptive practices were a thousandfold greater than they have been reported to be—instead of, as we are justified in believing, considerably less than they are reported—shall we therefore condemn contraceptive methods? To do so would be to ignore all the vastly greater evils which have followed in the past from unchecked reproduction. It would be a condemnation which, if we exercised it consistently, would destroy the whole of civilization and place us back in savagery. For what device of man, ever since man had any history at all, has not proved sometimes injurious?
“Every one of even the most useful and beneficial of human inventions has either exercised subtle injuries or produced appalling catastrophes. This is not only true of man’s devices, it is true of Nature’s in general. Let us take, for instance, the elevation of man’s ancestors from the quadrupedal to the bipedal position. The experiment of making a series of four-footed animals walk on their hind-legs was very evolutionary and risky; it was far more beset by dangers than is the introduction of contraceptives; we are still suffering all sorts of serious evils in consequence of Nature’s action in placing our remote ancestors in the erect position. Yet we feel that it was worth while; even those physicians who most emphasize the evil results of the erect position do not advise that we should go on all-fours. It is just the same with a great human device, the introduction of clothes. They have led to all sorts of new susceptibilities to disease and even tendencies to direct injury of many kinds. Yet no one advocates the complete disuse of all clothing on the ground that corsets have sometimes proved harmful. It would be just as absurd to advocate the complete abandonment of contraceptives on the ground that some of them have been misused. If it were not, indeed, that we are familiar with the lengths to which ignorance and prejudice may go we should question the sanity of anyone who put forward so foolish a proposition. Every great step which Nature and man have taken in the path of progress has been beset by dangers which are gladly risked because of the advantages involved. We must never loose sight of the immense advantages which Man has gained in acquiring a conscious and deliberate control of reproduction.”
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The term “The Determination of Sex” is employed in two general senses in scientific circles.
The first usage is that of the biologist, and it includes within its scope merely the discovery and understanding of the causes which determine whether the embryo shall develop into a male or into a female. In the discussion of the subject from this standpoint there is but little, if any, attention given to the question of whether the sex of the unborn child may be determined by methods under the control of man. The biologist simply studies the causes which seem to lead to the production of an individual of one or the other sex, without regard to whether these causes, when discovered, may or may not be amendable to human control.
An authority, speaking of this standpoint concerning the question referred to, says: “We may discover the causes of storms or earthquakes, and when our knowledge of them is sufficiently advanced we may be able to predict them as successfully as astronomers predict eclipses, but there is little hope that we shall ever be able to control them. So it may be with sex; a complete understanding of the causes which determine it may not necessarily give us the power of producing one or the other sex at will, or even of predicting the sex in any given case. Whether we shall ever be able to influence the causes of sex-determination cannot as yet be foretold; at present, biologists are engaged in the less practical, but immensely interesting, problem, of discovering what those causes are.”
The second usage of the term, includes and embraces the idea of the voluntary determination or control of the sex of the future child, by means of certain methods or certain systems of treatment, etc. Of recent years, science has been devoting considerable attention to the question of whether or not man may not be able to produce any particular sex at will, by means of certain systems or methods of procedure. Many theories have been evolved, and many plans and methods have been advocated, often with the expenditure of much energy and enthusiasm on the part of the promulgators and their adherents.
In this lesson there will be briefly presented to you the general consensus of modern thought on the subject, with a general outline of the favorite methods and systems advocated by the several schools of thought concerned in the investigation.
Professor Doncaster, the well-known authority on the subject, says: “But little progress has been made in the direction of predicting the sex of any child, and, if possible, even less in artificially influencing the determination of its sex. When the general principles arrived at are borne in mind, it must be confessed that the prospects of our ever attaining this power of control or even of prediction are not very hopeful, but the possibility of it cannot be yet regarded as entirely excluded. The general conclusions arrived at are that sex is determined by a physiological condition of the embryonic cells, that this condition is induced, at least in the absence of disturbing causes, by the presence of a particular sex-chromosome. [A “chromosome” is a portion of the chromatin, or substance characteristic of the nucleus of the cell, this nucleus seemingly controlling the life-processes of the cell.] But there is evidence, which for the present at least cannot be neglected, that certain extraneous conditions acting on the egg or early embryo may perhaps be able to counteract the effect of sex chromosome.
“Quite generally, then, there are two conceivable methods by which the sex might be artificially influenced in any particular case; firstly, if means could be found of ensuring that any particular fertilized ovum received the required chromosomes; and, secondly, by the discovery of methods which always effect the ovum or embryo in such a way as to produce the desired sex. Many suggestions for applying both methods have been made, some of which have attained considerable notoriety, but hitherto none of them has stood the test of practical experience. In the case of the higher animals, especially of the mammals, in which the embryo develops in the maternal uterus until long after the sex is irrevocably decided, it is obviously difficult to apply methods which might influence the sex after fertilization, even if it were certainly known that such methods were ever really effective.
“Apart from the few experiments like those of Hertwig on rearing tadpoles at different temperatures, there have been a very few cases in which there is even a suggestion that the sex of the fertilized egg can be modified by environment, and the belief that this is possible has been entirely abandoned by many of the leading investigators of the subject. It is probable, therefore, that if it will ever be possible to predict or determine artificially the sex of a particular child, the means will have to be sought in some method of influencing the output of germ-cells in such a way that one kind is produced rather than the other. It is in this way that Heape and others interpret the results of their investigations; they find that certain conditions affect the sex-ratio of cells, and they explain the result by assuming that under some circumstances male-determining ova are produced in excess, and under other circumstances, female-determining.”
Professor Rumley Dawson holds to the opinion that the male-determining and female-determining ova are discharged alternately from the ovaries. In woman one ovum is usually discharged each month, and it is maintained that on one month the ovum is male-determining, and in the next, female-determining. It is obvious that exceptions must occur, for boy and girl twins are quite common, but if the cases which support the hypothesis are taken by themselves, and the exceptions explained away, it is possible to make out a strong case in favor of this theory. Some authorities hold that the right ovary produces male-determining ova, and the left ovary female-determining, and that the two ovaries discharge an ovum alternately, but an impartial examination of the evidence for this belief shows that it rests on very slender foundations. Experiments on the lower animals have shown that after the complete removal of one ovary the female may produce young of both sexes. Women, also, have produced children of a particular sex after the corresponding ovary has been removed, and it is hardly possible to believe that the removal in all these cases was incomplete. On the whole it must be concluded that the theory is insufficiently supported by the evidence.
Another widely promulgated and vigorously supported theory is that which holds that the sex of the future child may be determined by specific nutrition of the mother before conception, and in some cases after conception. Schenk’s theory, advanced about 1900, attracted much attention at the time. He based his method on the observation that a number of women whose children were all girls all excreted sugar in their urine, such as happens in the case of persons affected with diabetes. From this he suspected that the physiological condition which leads to the excretion of sugar was inimical to the development of male-determining ova, and that males could be produced by its prevention. He therefore recommended that those who desire a male child should undergo treatment similar to that prescribed for diabetes for two or three months before conception, and held that a boy would be produced by these methods. Although this method has had considerable vogue, it cannot be held to have been established on a scientific basis.
Doncaster says “The general conclusion with regard to man must therefore be that if sex is determined solely by the spermatozoon there is no hope either of influencing or predicting it in special cases. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that the ovum has some share in the effect, and if this is so, before any practical results are reached it will be necessary to discover which of two conceivable causes of sex-determination is the true one. It is possible that there are two kinds of ova, as well as two kinds of spermatozoa, and that there is a selective fertilization of such a kind that one kind of spermatozoon only fertilizes one kind of ovum, the second kind of spermatozoon the second kind of ovum. If this should prove to be the case, it is possible that means might be found of influencing or predicting that kind of ovum which is discharged under any set of conditions. Secondly, it is possible that the ova are potentially all alike, but that their physiological condition may under some circumstances be so altered that the sex is determined independently of the spermatozoon. * * * It is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that the sex of the offspring may be influenced, at least under certain circumstances, by the mother. The search for means of influencing the sex of the offspring through the mother is not of necessity doomed to failure. No results of a really positive kind have been obtained hitherto, and some of the facts point so clearly to sex-determination by the male germ-cell alone in man and other animals that many investigators have concluded that the quest is hopeless; but until an adequate explanation has been given of certain phenomena discovered in the investigation of the subject, it seems more reasonable to maintain an open mind, and to regard the control of sex in man as an achievement not entirely impossible of realization.”
Another writer on the subject has said: “Every individual among the higher animals, whether male or female, begins as an impregnated ovum in the mother’s body. Any such ovum contains elements of constitution from both of its parents. In the earliest existence of this impregnated ovum, there is a season of sexual indifference, or indecision, in which the embryo is both male and female, having the characteristic rudiments of each sex, only indifferently manifested. In this stage, the embryo is susceptible of being influenced by external conditions to develop more strongly in the one or the other direction and thus become distinctly and permanently male or female. It is evident that this is the season in the development of the individual in which influencing conditions and causes must operate in deciding its sex, although it is possible in some of the lower animals to alter the tendency of sex in the embryo from one sex to the other, even after it has been quite definitely determined. It is well established, in fact, that differences do not come from a difference in the ova themselves; that is, there is not one kind of ova from the female which becomes female, while other ova become male, for it is possible to alter the tendency toward the one sex or the other after the ovum has been fertilized and the embryo has begun its career of development. This possible change in sex tendency in the embryo also proves that sex is not decided by a difference in the spermatozoa; that is some of the sperm cells from the father are not male, while others are female, in their constitution.
“It is incorrect to suppose, as has been held by some theorists, that one testicle give rise to male spermatozoa and the other to female spermatozoa, for both male and female offspring have been produced from the same male parent after one testicle or the other has been removed. The same is true in cases in which either ovary has been removed from the mother; that is, male and female offspring are produced from mothers in whom either ovary has been removed. In like manner, the sex of offspring is shown not to be materially affected by the comparative vigor of the parents; thus, a stronger father than mother does not necessarily produce one sex to the exclusion of the other. These negative decisions are important because they simplify the solution of the problem of sex-determination, by excluding, more or less fully, various causes which have been supposed to operate quite forcibly in deciding the sex of offspring. Some of the more positive agencies that enter into the determination of sex are found (1) in the influence of nutrition upon the embryo during its indifferent stage of sexual development, and (2) in the constitution and general condition of the mother before and during the early stages of pregnancy. These two factors appear to enter more fully than any others in the decision of the sex in offspring, and deserve the greatest consideration. The influence of food in supplying the embryo with nourishment for its development is, perhaps, the most potent of these determining causes.”
Investigators along the line of theory indicated in the above last quotation, i. e., the theory of sex determination by means of nourishment of the mother and embryo, have presented a volume of reports which demand respectful consideration. The general report may be said to be the discovery that abundant nourishment during the period of sexual neutrality tends to produce females; while lack of abundant nutrition during such period tends to produce males.
These experiments, of course, have been chiefly performed upon the lower animals. The frog has been a favorite subject of such experiments—the tadpole stage being the one selected, because in that stage there exists a lack of sex, the stage being one of sex neutrality. Professor Yung’s celebrated experiments will illustrate this class of experiments. Here were chosen 300 tadpoles, which when left to themselves manifested a ratio of 57 prospective females to 43 prospective males. These were divided into three classes of 100 tadpoles each. Each class was then fed upon one of several kinds of nutritious diet in order to ascertain the change in sex-tendency due to such food. The first set, with an original ratio of femaleness of 54 to 46, were fed abundantly on beef, and the ratio of femaleness was changed to 78 to 22. The second class, with a ratio of femaleness of 61 to 39, were fed on fish (specially nourishing to frogs), and the ratio changed to 81 to 19. The third class, with a ratio of 56 to 44, were fed upon a still more nutritious diet (i. e., that of frogs’ flesh), and the ratio was raised to 92 to 8. In short, the experiments showed that the increase of nourishment in diet changed every two out of three male-tendency tadpoles into females. The experiment was held to prove that a rich diet, affording nourishment, during the period of sexual neutrality in the embryo, tended to develop femaleness.
The advocates of this theory also point to the instance of the bees. With the bees, the larva of ordinary worker-bees are fed ordinary food, and do not develop sex; while the larva which is intended to produce the queen-bee is fed specially nutritious “royal food,” and consequently develops larger size and full female sex powers. If the queen is killed, or dies, the hive of bees proceeds to produce a new queen by means of feeding a selected larva with the “royal food” and thus developing full femaleness in it. It is said by some authorities that in cases in which some other of the larva accidently receive, through mistake, crumbs of the “royal food,” they, too, grow to an extraordinary size, and develop fertility. This fact is held by the advocates of the nutrition theory to go toward establishing the fact that abundant nourishment of the embryo, during the neutral stage, tends to produce femaleness in it. They also claim that caterpillars which are very poorly nourished before entering into the chrysalis stage usually develop into male butterflies, while those highly nourished in the said stage tend to become females. Experiments on sheep have shown that when the ewes are particularly well nourished the offspring will show a large proportion of females.
A writer, favoring the theory in question, says: “In general, it is reasonable to infer that the higher sexual organization which constitutes the female is to be attained in the greatest number of cases by embryos which have superior vital conditions during the formative period. Among human beings, some facts of general observation become significant in the light of the foregoing inferences. After epidemics, after wars, after seasons of privation and distress, the tendency is toward a majority of male births. On the other hand, abundant crops, low prices, peace, contentment and prosperity tend to increase the number of females born. Mothers in prosperous families usually have more girls; mothers in families of distress have more boys. Large, well-fed, fully developed, healthy women, who are of contented and passive disposition, generally become mothers of families abounding in girls; while mothers who are small or spare of flesh, who are poorly fed, restless, unhappy, overworked, exhausted by frequent childbearing, or who are reduced by other causes which waste their vital energies, usually give birth to a greater number of boys. As a general proposition, the facts and inferences tend to establish the truth of the doctrine with women, that, the more favorable the vital conditions of the mother during the period in which the sex of her offspring is being determined, the greater the ratio of females she will bear; the less favorable her vital conditions at such times, the greater will be her tendency to bear males. That many apparent exceptions occur does not disprove the general tendency here maintained. Moreover, it is impossible to know in all cases what were the conditions of the mother’s organism at the time in which her child was in its delicate balance between predominant femaleness and maleness; else many cases which seemingly disprove the proposition would be found to be forcible illustrations of its truth. Still further, it is probable that other causes besides those here mentioned act with greater or less effect in determining the sex of offspring.”
Based upon this general theory of the relation of nutrition to sex-determination, many methods and systems have been devised by as many authorities, and have been followed and promulgated by as many schools. Without going into the almost endless detail which would be necessitated by a synopsis of these various methods and systems, it may be said that they all consist of plans having for their object the decrease of nutrition of the woman in cases in which male children are desired, and the increase of nutrition in cases in which female children are sought for. This increase or decrease in nutrition is enforced for a reasonable period before the time selected for the conception of the child, and also for a reasonable period after the time of conception. The decrease in nutrition does not consist of “starvation,” but rather of a “training diet” similar to that followed by athletics, and from which dietary all rich foods, sweets, etc., are absent. In fact, the average dietary advocated by the “Eat and Grow Thin” writers would seem to be almost identical with that of the “male offspring” theorists.
Many persons who have followed the methods and systems based on the nutrition theory above mentioned claim to have been more or less successful in the production of the particular sex desired, but many exceptions to the rule are noted, and some writers on the subject are disposed to regard the reported successes as mere coincidences, and claim that the failures are seldom reported while the successes are widely heralded. The present writer presents the claims of this school to the attention of his readers, but without personally positively endorsing the idea. He is of the opinion that the data obtainable is not as yet sufficient to justify the strong claims made for the theory in some quarters; but, at the same time, he does not hesitate to say that there are many points of interest brought out in the presentation of the theory, and that many thoughtful persons seem to accept the same as reasonably well established and logical.
Another theory which has been heard of frequently of late years is that in which it is held that the ova are expelled in alternating sex, each month. Thus, if a male ovum is expelled in January, the February ovum will be a female one, according to this theory. Under this theory if the date of conception of a child be ascertained, and the sex of the child noted at its birth, it is a simple matter to count forward from the menstrual period following which the child was conceived, and thus determine whether the ovum of any succeeding period is male or female. It should be noted, however, that the periods are regulated by the lunar months, and not the calendar months. The fact that twins of different sexes are sometimes born would seem to disturb this theory—but not more than any other theory of sex-determination voluntarily produced, for that matter. The several schools explain this apparent discrepancy by the familiar saying that “exceptions prove the rule.”
Another theory of sex-determination is that which holds that when conception occurs within a few days after the last day of menstruation, the child will be a girl; and that when conception occurs at a later period, the child will be a boy. Methods and systems based upon this theory are also reported as being reasonably successful in producing satisfactory results. But, inasmuch as there appears to be a great difference in individual women in this respect (even according to the claims of this school of sex-determination), it would seem that it would be difficult to proceed with certainty in the matter in most cases. One of the writers advocating this method, says: “Conception within five days after the end of the menstrual period is almost certain to produce a girl child; within five days to ten days, it may be either a boy or a girl; from ten to fifteen days, it is almost sure to be a boy; from eighteen to twenty-five days is the period of probable sterility, in which conception is extremely unlikely to occur.”
In conclusion, it may be said that Nature undoubtedly has certain rules of sex-determination which govern in these cases; and that it is possible if not indeed probable that these rules may some day be discovered by man, and turned to account; but that it is very doubtful whether the secret has as yet been solved by the investigators. The writer may be pardoned for suggesting that, in his opinion, if the discovery is ever made it will likely be found to be very simple—so simple that we have probably overlooked it because it was in too plain sight to attract our attention. Nature’s methods are usually very simple, when once discovered. She hides her processes from man by making them simple, it would seem.
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AGAMIC. Unmarried; unmarriageable, sometimes non-sexed.
AGENIC. Lacking in reproductive power; sterile.
AMPHIMIXIS. That form of reproduction which involves the mingling of substance from two individuals so as to effect a mixture of hereditary characteristics. It includes the phenomena of conjugation and fertilization among both unicellular and multicellular organisms.
ANABOLISM. See METABOLISM.
ANAMNESIC. Pertaining to or aiding recollection.
ANEMIC. Deficient in blood; bloodless.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM. The attributing of human characteristics to natural, supernatural, or divine beings.
ANTHROPOMETRY. Science of measurement of the human body.
ARTIFACT. Any artificial product.
APHASIA. Impairment or lose of the ability to understand or use speech.
ASSOCIATIONISM. The psychological theory which regards the laws of association as the fundamental laws of mental action and development.
ATAVISTIC. Pertaining to reversion through the influence of heredity to remote ancestral characteristics.
ATAXIC. Pertaining to inability to coördinate voluntary movements; irregular.
CALAMO-PAPYRUS. Reed papyrus or pen-paper.
CATABOLISM. See METABOLISM.
CATHARSIS. Purgation or cleansing. Aristotle’s esthetic theory that little renders immune for much.
CEREBRATION. Brain action, conscious or unconscious.
CHOREA. St. Vitus’s dance; a nervous disease marked by irregular and involuntary movements of the limbs and face.
CHRESTOMATHY. A collection of extracts and choice pieces.
CHRISTENTHUM. The Christian belief; the spirit of Christianity.
COMMANDO EXERCISES. Gymnastic exercises whose order is dependent upon the spoken command of the director.
CORTEX. The gray matter of the brain, mostly on its surface.
CORTICAL. Pertaining to the cortex.
CRANIOMETRY. The measurement of skulls.
CRYPTOGAMOUS. Having an obscure mode of fertilization; or, of plants that do not blossom.
CULTUS. A system of religious belief and worship.
DEUTSCHENTHUM. The spirit of the German people.
DIATHESIS. A constitutional predisposition.
EPHEBIC. Pertaining to the Greek system of instruction given to young men to fit them for citizenship; adolescent.
EPIGONI. Successors; followers who only follow.
EPISTEMOLOGY. The theory of knowledge; that branch of logic which undertakes to explain how knowledge is possible and to define its limitations, meaning, and worth.
EUPEPTIC. Having good digestion.
EUPHORIA. The sense of well-being; of fullness of life.
EVIRATION. Emasculation; loss of manly characteristics.
FERAL. Wild by nature; untamed; undomesticated.
FORMICARY. An artificial ants’ nest.
GEMÜTH. Disposition; the entire affective soul and its habitual state.
HEBETUDE. Dullness; stupidity.
HEDONISTIC. Relating to hedonism, that form of Greek philosophy which taught that pleasure is the chief end of existence.
HETAERA. A Greek courtesan. This class was often highly trained in music and social art, and represented the highest grade of culture among Greek women.
HETEROGENY. (1) The spontaneous generation of animals and vegetables, low in the scale of organization, from inorganic elements. (2) That kind of generation in which the parent, whether plant or animal, produces offspring differing in structure or habit from itself, but in which after one or more generations the original form reappears.
HETERONOMOUS. Having a different name.
HOROLOGY. The science of measuring time and of constructing instruments for that purpose.
HYGEIA. The Greek goddess of health; health.
HYPERMETHODIC. Methodic to excess; overmethodic.
HYPERTROPHY. Excessive growth.
INDISCERPTIBLE. Incapable of being destroyed by separation of parts.
INHIBITION. Interference with the normal result of a nervous excitement by an opposing force.
IRRADIATION. The diffusion of nervous stimuli out of the path of normal discharge which, as a result of the excitation of a peripheral end organ may excite other central organs than those directly connected with it.
KINESOLOGICAL. Pertaining to the science of tests and measurements of bodily strength.
KINESOMETER. An instrument for measuring muscular strength.
MEDULLATION. The investment of nerve fibers with a protective covering or medullary sheath, consisting of white, fat-like matter.
MERISTIC. Pertaining to the levels or spinal and cerebral segments of the body.
METABOLISM. The act or process by which, on the one hand, dead food is built up into living matter—anabolism, and by which, on the other, the living matter is broken down into simpler products within a cell or organism—catabolism.
METAMORPHOSIS. Change of form or structure; transformation.
METEMPSYCHOSIS. The doctrine of the transmigration of the soul from one body to another.
MONOPHRASTIC. Pertaining to or consisting of a single phrase.
MONOTECHNIC. Pertaining to a single art or craft.
MORPHOLOGY. The science of form and structure of plants and animals without regard to function.
MYOLOGY. The scientific knowledge of the muscular system.
MYTHOPOEIC. Producing or having a tendency to produce myths.
NOETIC. Of, pertaining to, or conceived by, mind.
NUANCE. Slight shade; difference; distinction; degree.
ORTHOGENIC. Pertaining to right beginning and development.
ORTHOPEDIC. Relating to the art of curing deformities.
OSSUARY. A depository of dry bones.
PALEOPSYCHIC. Pertaining to the antiquity of the soul.
PANTHEISTIC. Relating to that doctrine which holds that the entire phenomenal universe, including man and nature, is the ever-changing manifestation of God, who rises to self-consciousness and personality only in man.
PATRISTICS. That department of study occupied with the doctrines and writings of the fathers of the Christian Church.
PHOBIA. Excessive or morbid fear of anything.
PHYLETICALLY. In accordance with the phylum or race; racially.
PHYLETIC. Pertaining to a race or clan.
PHYLOGENY. The history of the evolution of a species or group; tribal history; ancestral development as opposed to ontogeny or the development of the individual.
PHYLUM. A term introduced by Haeckel to designate the great branches of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Each phylum may include several classes.
PICKELHAUBE. The spiked helmet of the German army.
PLANKTON. Sea animals and plants collectively; distinguished from coast or bottom forms and floating in a great mass.
POLYGAMIC (LOVE). Pertaining to the habit of having more than one mate of the opposite sex.
POLYPHRASTIC. Having many phrases; pertaining to rambling, incoherent speech.
POST-SIMIAN. Pertaining to an age later than that in which simian or monkey-like forms prevailed.
PRENUBILE. Pertaining to the age before sexual maturity or marriageability is reached.
PRIE DIEU. A praying desk.
PROPEDEUTIC. Preliminary; introductory.
PROPHYLACTIC. Any medicine or measure efficacious in preventing disease.
PSEUDOPHOBIAC. Pertaining to a morbid condition in which the subject is continually in fear of having said something not strictly true.
PSYCHOGENESIS. The origin and development of soul.
PSYCHONOMIC. Pertaining to the laws of mind.
PSYCHOSIS. Mental constitution or condition; any change in consciousness, especially if abnormal.
PUBERTY. The age of sexual maturity.
PUBESCENT. Relating to the dawning of puberty.
PYGMOID. Of pygmy size and form.
RABULIST. A chronic wrangler; one who argues about everything.
SCHEMA. A synopsis; a summary. In the Kantian sense, a general type.
SCHEMATISM. An outline of any systematic arrangement; an outline.
SUPERFOETATION. A second conception some time after a prior one, by which two foetuses of different age exist together in the same female. Often used figuratively.
TEMIBILITY. (From Italian temibile, to be feared.) The principle of adjustment of penalty to crime in just that degree necessary to prevent a repetition of the criminal act.
TIC. A nervous affection of the muscles; a twitching.
TRANSCENDENTAL. In the Kantian system having an a priori character, transcending experience, presupposed in and necessary to experience.
TRAUMATA. Wounds.
TRAUMATISM. A wound; any morbid condition produced by wounds or other external violence.
VERBIGERATION. The continual utterance of certain words or phrases at short intervals, without reference to their meaning, as seen in insane Gedankenflucht or rapid flight of thought.
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History of the movement—Its philosophy—The value of hand training in the development of the brain and its significance in the making of man—A grammar of our many industries hard—The best we do can reach but few—Very great defects in our manual training methods which do not base on science and make nothing salable—The Leipzig system—Sloyd is hypermethodic—These crude peasant industries can never satisfy educational needs—The gospel of work, William Morris and the arts and crafts movement—Its spirit desirable—The magic effects of a brief period of intense work—The natural development of the drawing instinct in the child.
Manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its best representation here in our new and often magnificent manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public schools. This work meets the growing demand of the country for a more practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the accommodations. The philosophy, if such it may be called, that underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike Pestalozzi’s “keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten,” [No knowledge without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking and doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend to taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to the better appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful preparation for a number of vocations.
These claims are all well founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic agencies of any country or state. As man excels the higher anthropoids perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instrument in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. It is no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for but an insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and twenty-four.
When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations of the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially manual and offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular tissues of the body lie, those which respond most to training and are now most in danger of degeneration at this age; the back and trunk also are little trained. Consideration of proportion and bilateral asymmetry are practically ignored. Almost in proportion as these schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with motives of economy and administrative efficiency on account of overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the principle that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given shape.
There are now between three and four hundred occupations in the census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called basal types. This requires an effort not without analogy to Aristotle’s attempt to extract from the topics of the marketplace the underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the name, not even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel’s gifts and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and find their justification rather in their logical sequence and coherence than in being true norms of work. If these latter be attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious.
The wards of the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more intricate and mazy. As H.T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master in any art-craft must have a fourfold equipment: 1. Ability to grasp an idea and embody it. 2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3. Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in technical processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the last.
The actual result is thus a course rich in details representing wood and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the course treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly tending to make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for smiths, mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not liberal because they hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of every industry. Almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical drawing and its implicates.
These schools instinctively fear and repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic methods and matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the sake of the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination is a fatal mistake. To focus on process only, with no reference to the object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content to form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal; but tools are always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their invention.
Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly, hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the material universe, all is sacrificed to supernormalized method.
As in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is feeble. There is no control of the work of these schools by the higher technical institutions such as the college exercises over the high school, so that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought best by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow forms, manual training will prove to be historically, as it is educationally, extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of departure from which future progress will loom up.
Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he has connected them even with the kindergarten below. In general the whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles, metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines, etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each operation and each tool—the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel, draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe—will be studied with reference to its orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right, left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to individuality.
Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful, deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an institution of its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; but its manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make, and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off.
This change of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique features of which persist like a national school of art, despite transplantation and transformation.[1]
Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises, tools, drawing, and models. Each must be progressive, so that every new step in each series involves a new and next developmental step in all the others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and degree of development of each power appealed to in the child. Yet there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological or the psychological reason of a single step in any of these series, and the coördination of the series even with each other, to say nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child’s development.
This, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed constitute on the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in variety, etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer’s eyes. But the “45 tools, 72 exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints,” all learned by teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four years, are overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many series at once. Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of powers, is hard enough, since the fall lost us Eden; and woodwork, could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, incompatible with enjoying its fruit. Although a philosopher may see the whole universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce educational wholes from fragments of it.
The real merits of sloyd have caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims far beyond their modest bounds; and although its field covers the great transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its literature and practise for the slightest recognition of the new motives and methods that puberty suggests. Especially in its partially acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is all adult and almost scholastic; and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run by a poor power-wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so the mighty rent that sets toward motor education would give it some degree of success were it worse and less economic of pedagogic momentum than it is. It holds singularly aloof from other methods of efferent training and resists co-ördination with them, and its provisions for other than hand development are slight.
It will be one of the last to accept its true but modest place as contributing certain few but precious elements in the greater synthesis that impends. Indian industries, basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is making lost arts by forcing the white man’s industries upon red men at reservation schools and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization that Swedish peasant work has received to develop even greater educational values; and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the old New England farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few educators.
This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with Carlyle’s gospel of work and Ruskin’s medievalism, developed by William Morris and his disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by the ridicule of the comic opera “Patience,” and lately revived in some of its features by Cobden-Sanderson, and of late to some extent in various centers in this country. Its ideal was to restore the day of the seven ancient guilds and of Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when conscience and beauty inspired work, and the hand did what machines only imitate and vulgarize. In the past, which this school of motor culture harks back to, work, for which our degenerate age lacks even respect, was indeed praise. Refined men and women have remembered these early days, when their race was in its prime, as a lost paradise which they would regain by designing and even weaving tapestries and muslins; experimenting in vats with dyes to rival Tyrian purple; printing and binding by hand books that surpass the best of the Aldine, and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging locks, irons, and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and leather; seeking old effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture and decoration, as well as architecture, stained glass, and to some extent in dress and manners; and all this toil and moil was ad majorem gloriam hominis [To the greater glory of man] in a new socialistic state, where the artist, and even the artisan, should take his rightful place above the man who merely knows.
The day of the mere professor, who deals in knowledge, is gone; and the day of the doer, who creates, has come. The brain and the hand, too long divorced and each weak and mean without the other; use and beauty, each alone vulgar; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this union will lift man to a higher level. The workman in his apron and paper hat, inspired by the new socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott, revering Wagner’s revival of the old Deutschenthum that was to conquer Christenthum, or Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle—this was its ideal; even as the Jews rekindled their loyalty to the ancient traditions of their race and made their Bible under Ezra; as we begin to revere the day of the farmer-citizen, who made our institutions, or as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life for the red man.
Although this movement was by older men and women and had in it something of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no more, it shows us the glory which invests racial adolescence when it is recalled in maturity, the time when the soul can best appreciate the value of its creations and its possibilities, and really lives again in its glamour and finds in it its greatest inspiration. Hence it has its lessons for us here. A touch, but not too much of it, should be felt in all manual education, which is just as capable of idealism as literary education. This gives soul, interest, content, beauty, taste. If not a polyphrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapük of reasons and abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be worked. Thus the best forces from the past should be turned on to shape and reinforce the best tendencies of the present.
The writings of the above gospelers of work not only could and should, but will be used to inspire manual-training high schools, sloyd and even some of the less scholastic industrial courses; but each is incomplete without the other. These books and those that breathe their spirit should be the mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and forge work; who design and draw patterns, carve or mold; or of those who study how to shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to obtain diplomas or certificates of fitness to teach all such things.
The muse of art and even of music will have some voice in the great synthesis which is to gather up the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of secondary motor training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of adolescents in the order and proportion that nature and growth stages indicate, drawing, with this end supreme, upon all the resources that history and reform offer to our selection. All this can never make work become play. Indeed it will and should make work harder and more unlike play and of another genus, because the former is thus given its own proper soul and leads its own distinct, but richer, and more abounding life.
I must not close this section without brief mention of two important studies that have supplied each a new and important determination concerning laws of work peculiar to adolescence.
The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per minute of all whom they will employ. As a sending rate this is not very difficult and is often attained after two months’ practise. This standard for a receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry at schools where it is taught shows that about seventy-five per cent of those who begin the study fail to reach this speed and so are not employed. Bryan and Harter[2] explained the rate of improvement in both sending and receiving, with results represented for one typical subject in the curve on the following page.
From the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the dead-line a few months before the receiving rate, which may fall short. Curves 1 and 2 represent the same student. I have added line 3 to illustrate the three-fourths who fail. Receiving is far less pleasant than sending, and years of daily practise at ordinary rates will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he remains on the low plateau with no progress beyond a certain point. If forced by stress of work, danger of being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged and intense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate and permanently attains a faster pace. This is true at each step, and every advance seems to cost even more intensive effort than the former one. At length, for those who go on, the rate of receiving, which is a more complex process, exceeds that of sending; and the curves of the above figure would cross if prolonged. The expert receives so much faster than he sends that abbreviated codes are used, and he may take eighty to eighty-five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form.
[Illustration: Letters per Minute x Weeks of Practice.]
The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps physiological limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. This seems a special case of a general though not yet explained law. In learning a foreign language, speaking is first and easiest, and hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence. Perhaps this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower order habits are approaching their maximum but are not yet automatic enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order habits. The second ascent from drudgery to freedom, which comes through automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. One stroke of attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such effective speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together of units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack. In many, if not all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a long discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if here, too, as we have reason to think in the growth of both the body as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make leaps and attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is transformed, converted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a lower stratum; and a new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain level and functions, is evolved. The practical implication here of the necessity of hard concentrative effort as a condition of advancement is re-enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford on the effect of early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, “It is the supreme effort that develops.” This, I may add, suggests what is developed elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary attention is motivated by the same nisus of development even in its most adult form, and that the products of science, invention, discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was originally determined in the form of consciousness, are made by rhythmic alternation of attack, as it moves from point to point creating diversions and recurrence.
The other study, although quite independent, is part a special application and illustration of the same principle.
At the age of four or five, when they can do little more than scribble, children’s chief interest in pictures is as finished products; but in the second period, which Lange calls that of artistic illusion, the child sees in his own work not merely what it represents, but an image of fancy back of it. This, then, is the golden period for the development of power to create artistically. The child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in the act, and he cares little for the finished picture. He draws out of his own head, and not from copy before his eye. Anything and everything is attempted in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed the teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be abashed at his production. Indians, conflagrations, games, brownies, trains, pageants, battles—everything is graphically portrayed; but only the little artist himself sees the full meaning of his lines. Criticism or drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since it gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the child has little interest.
Thus awakens him from his dream to a realization that he can not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in drawing. Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability to draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen. The curve is the plateau which Barnes has described. The child has measured his own productions upon the object they reproduced and found them wanting, is discouraged and dislikes drawing. From twelve on, Barnes found drawing more and more distasteful; and this, too, Lukens found to be the opinion of our art teachers. The pupils may draw very properly and improve in technique, but the interest is gone. This is the condition in which most men remain all their lives. Their power to appreciate steadily increases. Only a few gifted adolescents about this age begin a to develop a new zest in production, rivaling that of the period from five to ten, when their satisfaction is again chiefly in creation. These are the artists whose active powers dominate.
Lukens[3] finds in his studies of drawing, that in what he calls his fourth period of artistic development, there are those “who during adolescence experience a rebirth of creative power.” Zest in creation then often becomes a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure or profit to be derived from the finished product, so that in this the propitious conditions of the first golden age of childhood are repeated and the deepest satisfaction is again found in the work itself. At about fourteen or fifteen, which is the transition period, nascent faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. Lukens[4] draws the interesting curve shown on the following page.
[Illustration: Motor, creative or productive power. Sensory or receptive interest in the finished product.]
The reciprocity between the power to produce and that to appreciate, roughly represented in the above curve, likely is true also in the domain of music, and may be, perhaps, a general law of development. Certain it is that the adolescent power to apperceive and appreciate never so far outstrips his power to produce or reproduce as about midway in the teens. Now impressions sink deepest. The greatest artists are usually those who paint later, when the expressive powers are developed, what they have felt most deeply and known best at this age, and not those who in the late twenties, or still later, have gone to new environments and sought to depict them. All young people draw best those objects they love most, and their proficiency should be some test of the contents of their minds.
They must put their own consciousness into a picture. At the dawn of this stage of appreciation the esthetic tastes should be stimulated by exposure to, and instructed in feeling for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and instruction in technique, detail, criticism, and learned discrimination of schools of painting should be given intermittently. Art should not now be for art’s sake, but for the sake of feeling and character, life, and conduct; it should be adjunct to morals, history, and literature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be the guide. Insistence on production should be eased, and the receptive imagination, now so hungry, should be fed and reinforced by story and all other accessories. By such a curriculum, potential creativeness, if it exists, will surely be evoked in its own good time. It will, at first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, but will essay the highest that the imagination can bode forth. It may be crude and lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps grand; and if it is original in consciousness, it will be in effect. Most creative painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in literature or turning points in history, representations of the loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. None who deserve the name of artist copy anything now, and least of all with objective fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields, the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so easily blighted.
Just as the child of six or seven should be encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of his daily life, so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepressed courage. For the great majority, on the other hand, who only appreciate and will never create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stored with the best images and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. Now, although the hand may refuse, the fancy paints the world in brightest hues and fairest forms; and such an opportunity for infecting the soul with vaccine of ideality, hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will never come again. I believe that in few departments are current educational theories and practises so hard on youth of superior gifts, just at the age when all become geniuses for a season, very brief for most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the best. We do not know how to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at its lowest ebb.
Finally, our divorce between industrial and manual training is abnormal, and higher technical education is the chief sufferer. Professor Thurston, of Cornell, who has lately returned from a tour of inspection abroad, reported that to equal Germany we now need: “1. Twenty technical universities, having in their schools of engineering 50 instructors and 500 students each. 2. Two thousand technical high schools or manual-training schools, each having not less than 200 students and 10 instructors.” If we have elementary trade-schools, this would mean technical high schools enough to accommodate 700,000 students, served by 20,000 teachers. With the strong economic arguments in this direction we are not here concerned; but that there are tendencies to unfit youth for life by educational method and matter shown in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out in a later chapter.
[Footnote 1: This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms of High School Physics and Manual Training and Mechanic Arts in High Schools. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 193-204.]
[Footnote 2: Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic Language. Psychological Review, January, 1897, vol. 4, pp. 27-53, and July, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 344-375.]
[Footnote 3: A Study of Children’s Drawings in the Early Years.
Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 79-101. See also
Drawing in the Early Years, Proceedings of the National Educational
Association, 1899, pp. 946-953. Das Kind als Künstler, von C. Götze.
Hamburg, 1898. The Genetic vs. the Logical Order in Drawing, by F.
Burk. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 296-323.]
[Footnote 4: Die Entwickelungsstufen beim Zeichnen. Die Kinderfehler,
September, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 166-179.]
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The gradual emancipation of ladies that has been happening for the final century has nonetheless a protracted technique to proceed earlier than they’re wholly delivered from their conventional burdens and so stand away from the oppressions of males. But already, it should be plain, they’ve made monumental progress—maybe greater than they made within the ten thousand years previous. The rise of the commercial system, which has borne so harshly upon the race normally, has introduced them sure unmistakable advantages. Their financial dependence, although nonetheless adequate to make marriage extremely enticing to them, is nonetheless thus far damaged down that giant lessons of ladies are actually virtually free brokers, and fairly impartial of the favour of males. Most of those girls, responding to concepts which can be nonetheless highly effective, are but intrigued, after all, by marriage, and like it to the autonomy that’s coming in, however the truth stays that they now have a free alternative within the matter, and that dire necessity now not controls them. After all, they needn’t marry if they do not need to; it’s doable to get their bread by their very own labour within the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers had been in a much more troublesome place. Failing marriage, they not solely suffered a merciless ignominy, however in lots of instances confronted the menace of precise hunger. There was merely no respectable place within the economic system of these occasions for the free girl. She both needed to enter a nunnery or settle for a disdainful patronage that was as galling as charity.
Nothing might be plainer than the impact that the rising financial safety of ladies is having upon their entire behavior of life and thoughts. The diminishing marriage fee and the much more quickly diminishing delivery charges present which manner the wind is blowing. It is frequent for male statisticians, with attribute imbecility, to ascribe the autumn within the marriage fee to a rising disinclination on the male aspect. This rising disinclination is definitely on the feminine aspect. Even although no appreciable physique of ladies has but reached the particular doctrine that marriage is much less fascinating than freedom, it should be plain that giant numbers of them now method the enterprise with far better fastidiousness than their grandmothers and even their moms exhibited. They are tougher to please, and therefore happy much less usually. The girl of a century in the past may think about nothing extra beneficial to her than marriage; even marriage with a fifth fee man was higher than no marriage in any respect. This notion is progressively feeling the opposition of a opposite notion. Women normally should desire marriage to work, however there may be an rising minority which begins to understand that work could supply the better contentment, notably if it’s mellowed by a certain quantity of philandering.
There already seems on the planet, certainly, a category of ladies, who, whereas nonetheless not genuinely averse to marriage, are but free from any idea that it’s needed, and even invariably fascinating. Among these girls are an excellent many considerably vociferous propagandists, virtually male of their violent earnestness; they vary from the man-eating suffragettes to such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such skilled shockers of the bourgeoisie because the American prophetess of birth-control, Margaret Sanger. But amongst them are many extra who wake the world with no such noisy eloquence, however content material themselves with finishing up their concepts in a quiet and respectable method. The variety of such girls is way bigger than is usually imagined, and that quantity tends to extend steadily. They are girls who, with their financial independence assured, both by inheritance or by their very own efforts, mainly within the arts and professions, do precisely as they please, and make no pother about it. Naturally sufficient, their superiority to conference and the frequent frenzy makes them extraordinarily enticing to the higher form of males, and so it isn’t unusual for certainly one of them to seek out herself voluntarily sought in marriage, with none preliminary scheming by herself—certainly an expertise that only a few odd girls ever get pleasure from, save maybe in desires or delirium.
The previous order changeth and giveth place to the brand new. Among the ladies’s golf equipment and within the girls’s faculties, I’ve little doubt, there may be nonetheless a lot debate of the previous and foolish query: Are platonic relations doable between the sexes? In different phrases, is friendship doable with out intercourse? Many a girl of the brand new order dismisses the issue with one other query: Why with out intercourse? With the decay of the traditional idea of ladies as property there should come inevitably a reconsideration of the entire intercourse query, and out of that reconsideration there should come a revision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightest frivolity within the feminine. The notion that honour in girls is completely a bodily matter, {that a} single aberrance could convert a girl of the best deserves into a girl of none in any respect, that the only real invaluable factor a girl can convey to marriage is virginity—this notion is so preposterous that no clever particular person, male or feminine, truly cherishes it. It survives as one of many hole conventions of Christianity; nay, of the levantine barbarism that preceded Christianity. As girls throw off the opposite conventions which now bind them they are going to throw off this one, too, and so their advantage, grounded upon fastidiousness and self-respect as an alternative of upon mere concern and conformity, will grow to be afar extra laudable factor than it ever may be below the current system. And for its absence, in the event that they see match to get rid of it, they are going to no extra apologize than a person apologizes immediately.
Even prostitution, in the long term, could grow to be a roughly respectable occupation, because it was within the nice days of the Greeks. That high quality will certainly connect to it if ever it grows fairly pointless; no matter is pointless is at all times respectable, for instance, faith, modern clothes, and a information of Latin grammar. The prostitute is disesteemed immediately, not as a result of her commerce entails something intrinsically degrading and even unpleasant, however as a result of she is presently assumed to have been pushed into it by dire necessity, towards her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is normally unsound is not any objection to it; practically all of the pondering of the world, notably within the area of morals, is predicated upon unsound assumption, e.g., that God observes the autumn of a sparrow and is shocked by the autumn of a Sunday-school superintendent. The fact is that prostitution is without doubt one of the most tasty of the occupations virtually open to the form of girls who have interaction in it, and that the prostitute generally likes her work, and wouldn’t trade locations with a shop-girl or a waitress for something on the planet. The notion on the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the fingers {of professional} reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the latter as a way to domesticate their good will, simply as convicts in jail, questioned by tee-totalers, at all times ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of something resembling regular intelligence is below the slightest duress; she is completely free to desert her commerce and go into a store or manufacturing facility or into home service each time the impulse strikes her; all of the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a dwelling by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So lengthy as the common prostitute is ready to make an excellent dwelling, she is sort of content material together with her lot, and disposed to distinction it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you might ensure that her success is under her expectations. A ravenous lawyer at all times sees injustice, within the courts. A nasty doctor is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman is pressured out of his treatment by a vestry-room revolution he virtually invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and typically he even begins to doubt among the typographical errors in Holy Writ.
The excessive worth set upon virginity by males, whose esteem of it’s primarily based upon a mix of vainness and voluptuousness, causes many ladies to protect it in their very own individuals with a jealousy far past their non-public inclinations and pursuits. It is their idea that the lack of it could materially impair their probabilities of marriage. This idea isn’t supported by the information. The fact is that the girl who sacrifices her chastity, all the pieces else being equal, stands a significantly better probability of creating a creditable marriage than the girl who stays chaste. This is very true of ladies of the decrease financial lessons. At as soon as they arrive into contact, hitherto socially troublesome and typically virtually unimaginable, with males of upper lessons, and start to tackle, with the curious facility of their intercourse, the refinements and tastes and factors of view of these lessons. The mistress thus gathers allure, and what has begun as a sordid sale of amiability not uncommonly ends with formal marriage. The variety of such marriages is enormously better than seems superficially, for each events clearly make each effort to hide the information. Within the circle of my essentially restricted private acquaintance I do know of scores of males, a few of them of wealth and place, who’ve made such marriages, and who don’t appear to remorse it. It is an previous commentary, certainly, {that a} girl who has beforehand disposed of her advantage makes an excellent spouse. The frequent idea is that it’s because she is grateful to her husband for rescuing her from social outlawry; the reality is that she makes an excellent spouse as a result of she is a shrewd girl, and has specialised professionally in masculine weak spot, and is thus extra-competent on the conventional enterprise of her intercourse. Such a girl usually reveals a really magnificent sagacity. It could be very troublesome to deceive her logically, and it’s unimaginable to disarm her emotionally. Her revolt towards the pruderies and sentimentalities of the world was proof, to start with, of her mental enterprise and braveness, and her success as a insurgent is proof of her extraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness and acumen.
Even probably the most lowly prostitute is healthier off, in all worldly methods, than the virtuous girl of her personal station in life. She has much less work to do, it’s much less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far better number of males, and they’re of lessons distinctly past her personal. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her final destiny tragic. A dozen or extra years in the past I noticed a considerably amusing proof of this final. At that point sure sentimental busybodies of the American metropolis during which I lived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and a few of them got here to me prematurely, as a sensible journalist, for recommendation as to the way to proceed. I discovered that each one of them shared the frequent superstition that the skilled lifetime of the common prostitute is simply 5 years lengthy, and that she invariably ends within the gutter. They had been enormously amazed after they unearthed the reality. This fact was to the impact that the common prostitute of that city ended her profession, not within the morgue however on the altar of God, and that those that remained single usually continued in follow for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, after which retired on competences. It was established, certainly, that absolutely eighty per cent married, and that they virtually at all times obtained husbands who would have been far past their attain had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there have been a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officers, and a minimum of two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen {and professional} males. Among the 1000’s whose careers had been studied there was truly one who ended because the spouse of the city’s richest banker—that’s, one who bagged the perfect catch in the entire group. This girl had begun as a home servant, and deserted that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her previous age she was a grande dame of nice dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon girls of the traditional occupation is grounded upon an error as to their very own angle towards it. An educated girl, listening to {that a} frail sister in a public stew is anticipated to be amiable to all kinds of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the precise prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these males, nonetheless gross and repulsive they could seem to her, are measurably superior to males of the prostitute’s personal class—say her father and brothers—and that communion with them, removed from being disgusting, is usually relatively romantic. I effectively keep in mind observing, throughout my collaboration with the vice-crusaders aforesaid, the delight of a girl of pleasure who had attracted the discover of a police lieutenant; she was intensely happy by the concept of getting a consumer of such haughty manners, such sensible costume, and what appeared to her to be so dignified a occupation. It is at all times forgotten that this weak spot isn’t confined to prostitutes, however run by the entire feminine intercourse. The girl who couldn’t think about a bootleg affair with a rich cleaning soap producer and even with a lawyer finds it fairly simple to think about herself succumbing to an envoy or a duke. There are only a few exceptions to this rule. In probably the most reserved of recent societies the ladies who characterize their highest flower are notoriously complaisant to royalty. And royal girls, to finish the circuit, not sometimes yield to actors and musicians, i.e., to males radiating a glamour not encountered even in princes.
The transvaluation of values that’s now in progress will go on slowly and for a really lengthy whereas. That it’s going to ever be fairly full is, after all, unimaginable. There are inherent variations will proceed to point out themselves till the top of time. As girl progressively turns into satisfied, not solely of the potential for financial independence, but in addition of its worth, she’s going to in all probability lose her current overmastering need for marriage, and tackle herself to assembly males in free financial competitors. That is to say, she’s going to tackle herself to buying that sensible competence, that prime expertise for puerile and mainly mechanical expertness, which now units man forward of her within the labour market of the world. To do that she must sacrifice a few of her current intelligence; it’s unimaginable to think about a genuinely clever human being turning into a reliable trial lawyer, or buttonhole employee, or newspaper sub-editor, or piano tuner, or home painter. Women, to get upon all fours with males in such silly occupations, must commit non secular suicide, which might be a lot additional than they are going to ever truly go. Thus a shade of their current superiority to males will at all times stay, and with it a shade of their relative inefficiency, and so marriage will stay enticing to them, or in any respect occasions to most of them, and its overthrow might be prevented. To abolish it completely, as sure fevered reformers suggest, can be as troublesome as to abolish the precession of the equinoxes.
At the current time girls vacillate considerably absurdly between two schemes of life, the previous and the brand new. On the one hand, their financial independence continues to be stuffed with circumstances, and however they’re in revolt towards the immemorial conventions. The result’s a normal unrest, with many signs of extravagant and unintelligent revolt. One of these signs is the looks of mental striving in girls—not a striving, alas, towards the real pearls and rubies of the thoughts, however one merely towards the acquirement of the rubber stamps that males make use of of their so-called pondering. Thus we’ve girls who launch themselves into get together politics, and fill their heads with an enormous mass of ineffective information about political methods, customs, theories and personalities. Thus, too, we’ve the girl social reformer, trailing alongside ridiculously behind a tatterdemalion posse of male utopians, every with one thing to promote. And thus we’ve the girl who goes in for superior knowledge of the kind on draught in girls’s golf equipment—in short, the form of knowledge which consists completely of a physique of beliefs and propositions which can be ignorant, unimportant and unfaithful. Such banal striving is most prodigally on show within the United States, the place superficiality quantities to a nationwide illness. Its reputation is because of the comparatively better leisure of the American individuals, who work lower than another individuals on the planet, and, above all, to the comparatively better leisure of American girls. Thousands of them have been emancipated from any compulsion to productive labour with out having acquired any compensatory mental or creative curiosity or social obligation. The result’s that they swarm within the girls’s golf equipment, and waste their time, listening to dangerous poetry, worse music, and nonetheless worse lectures on Maeterlinck, Balkan politics and the unconscious. It is amongst such girls that one observes the periodic rages for Bergsonism, the Montessori methodology, the twilight sleep and different such follies, so pathetically attribute of American tradition.
One of the evil results of this tendency I’ve hitherto descanted upon, to wit, the rising disposition of American girls to treat all routine labour, notably within the residence, as infra dignitatem and therefore insupportable. Out of that notion come up many lamentable phenomena. On the one hand, we’ve the spectacle of a large number of wholesome and well-fed girls engaged in public actions that, 9 occasions out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and however we behold such a decay within the home arts that, on the first onslaught of the late conflict, the nationwide authorities needed to import a overseas professional to show the housewives of the nation the veriest components of thrift. No such instruction was wanted by the housewives of the Continent. They had been merely informed how a lot meals they may have, and their pure competence did the remainder. There is rarely any avoidable waste there, both in peace or in conflict. A French housewife has little use for a rubbish can, save as a depository for uplifting literature. She does her finest with the means at her disposal, not solely in conflict time however always.
As I’ve stated over and over on this inquiry, a girl’s disinclination to accumulate the intricate expertness that lies on the backside of fine housekeeping is due primarily to her lively intelligence; it’s troublesome for her to pay attention her thoughts upon such silly and meticulous enterprises. But whether or not troublesome or simple, it’s clearly vital for the common girl to make some effort in that course, for if she fails to take action there may be chaos. That chaos is duly seen within the United States. Here girls reveal certainly one of their subterranean qualities: their deficiency in conscientiousness. They are fairly with out that dog-like constancy to obligation which is without doubt one of the shining marks of males. They by no means summon up a excessive pleasure in doing what’s inherently unpleasant; they at all times go to the galleys below protest, and with vows of sabotage; their basic philosophy is nearly that of the syndicalists. The sentimentality of males connives at this, and is thus largely accountable for it. Before the common puella, apprenticed within the kitchen, can choose up a fourth of the culinary subtleties which can be commonplace even to the cooks on eating vehicles, she has caught a person and want concern herself about them no extra, for he has to eat, within the final evaluation, no matter she units earlier than him, and his lack of intelligence makes it simple for her to close off his tutorial criticisms by bald appeals to his feelings. By a straightforward course of he lastly attaches a optimistic worth to her indolence. It is a proof, he concludes, of her fineness of soul. In the presence of her lofty incompetence he’s abashed.
But as girls, gaining financial autonomy, meet males in progressively bitterer competitors, the rising masculine mistrust and concern of them might be mirrored even within the enchanted area of marriage, and the husband, having yielded up most of his previous rights, will start to disclose a brand new jealousy of those who stay, and notably of the fitting to a good quid professional quo for his personal docile trade. In transient, as girls shake off their historic disabilities they will even shake off a few of their historic immunities, and their doings will come to be regarded with a soberer and extra exigent scrutiny than now prevails. The extension of the suffrage, I consider, will encourage this awakening; in wresting it from the reluctant male the ladies of the western world have planted dragons’ tooth, the which can presently leap up and gnaw them. Now that girls have the political energy to acquire their simply rights, they are going to start to lose their previous energy to acquire particular privileges by sentimental appeals. Men, going through them squarely, will think about them anew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and caressed, however as free opponents in a harsh world. When that reconsideration will get below manner there might be a normal overhauling of the relations between the sexes, and among the truthful ones, I believe, will start to marvel why they did not let effectively sufficient alone.
The current sequence of wars, it appears seemingly, will proceed for twenty or thirty years, and maybe longer. That the primary conflict was inconclusive was proven brilliantly by the preposterous nature of the peace lastly reached—a peace so synthetic and dishonest that the signing of it was virtually equal to a brand new declaration of conflict. At least three new contests within the grand method are plainly perception—one between Germany and France to rectify the unnatural tyranny of a weak and incompetent nation over a powerful and enterprising nation, one between Japan and the United States for the mastery of the Pacific, and one between England and the United States for the management of the ocean. To these should be added numerous minor struggles, and maybe one or two of just about main character: the trouble of Russia to regain her previous unity and energy, the trouble of the Turks to place down the slave rise up (of Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, and so on.)which now menaces them, the trouble of the Latin-Americans to throw off the galling Yankee yoke, and the joint effort of Russia and Germany (maybe with England and Italy aiding) to do away with such worldwide nuisances because the insane Polish republic, the petty states of the Baltic, and maybe additionally many of the Balkan states. I cross over the chance of a brand new mutiny in India, of the rising of China towards the Japanese, and of a normal battle for a brand new alignment of boundaries in South America. All of those wars, nice and small, are possible; most of them are humanly sure. They might be fought ferociously, and with assistance from harmful engines of the utmost effectivity. They will result in an unparalleled butchery of males, and a big proportion of those males might be below forty years of age.
As a consequence there might be a scarcity of husbands in Christendom, and as a second consequence the survivors might be appreciably tougher to snare than the lads of immediately. Every man of agreeable exterior and straightforward means might be pursued, not merely by just a few dozen or rating of ladies, as now, however by entire battalions and brigades of them, and he might be pushed in sheer self-defence into very sharp bargaining. Perhaps in the long run the state must intervene within the enterprise, to forestall the potential husband going to waste within the turmoil of alternative.
Just what kind this interference is prone to take has not but appeared clearly. In France there may be already a wholesale legitimization of kids born out of wedlock and in Eastern Europe there was a clamour for the legalization of polygamy, however these gadgets don’t meet the principle downside, which is the encouragement of monogamy to the utmost. A plan that means itself is the amelioration of the place of the monogamous husband, now rendered more and more uncomfortable by the legal guidelines of most Christian states. I don’t assume that the extra clever form of girls, confronted by a deadly scarcity of males, would object severely to that amelioration. They should see plainly that the current system, whether it is carried a lot additional, will start to work powerfully towards their finest pursuits, if solely by significantly reinforcing the disinclination to marriage that already exists among the many higher form of males. The girl of true discretion, I’m satisfied, would a lot relatively marry a superior man, even on unfavourable phrases, than make John Smith her husband, serf and prisoner at one stroke.
The legislation should finally acknowledge this truth and make provision for it. The common husband, maybe, deserves little succour. The girl who pursues and marries him, although she could also be moved by egocentric goals, needs to be correctly rewarded by the state for her service to it—a service certainly to not be flippantly estimated in a navy age. And that reward could conveniently take the shape, as within the United States, of statutes giving her title to a big share of his actual property and requiring him to give up most of his revenue to her, and releasing her from all obedience to him and from all obligation to maintain his home so as. But the girl who aspires to increased sport needs to be fairly prepared, it appears to me, to resign a few of these benefits in compensation for the better honour and satisfaction of being spouse to a person of benefit, and mom to his kids. All that’s wanted is legal guidelines permitting her, if she’s going to, to resign her proper of dower, her proper to upkeep and her immunity from self-discipline, and to make another phrases that she could also be led to treat as equitable. At current girls are unable to make most of those concessions even when they might: the legal guidelines of nearly all of western nations are rigid. If, for instance, an Englishwoman ought to agree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit herself to the self-discipline, not of the present statutes, however of the elder frequent legislation, which allowed a husband to right his spouse corporally with a stick no thicker than his thumb, it could be competent for any sentimental neighbour to set the settlement at naught by haling her husband earlier than a Justice of the Peace for carrying it out, and it’s a secure wager that the Justice of the Peace would jail him.
This plan, nonetheless novel it might appear, is definitely already in operation. Many a married girl, as a way to maintain her husband from revolt, makes roughly disguised surrenders of sure of the rights and immunities that she has below current legal guidelines. There are, for instance, even in America, girls who practise the home arts with competence and diligence, regardless of the plain indisputable fact that no authorized penalty can be visited upon them in the event that they failed to take action. There are girls who comply with exterior trades and professions, contributing a share to the household exchequer. There are girls who obey their husbands, even towards their finest judgments. There are, most quite a few of all, girls who wink discreetly at husbandly departures, overt or in mere intent, from the oath of chemical purity taken on the altar. It is a commonplace, certainly, that many completely happy marriages admit a celebration of the third half. There can be extra of them if there have been extra girls with sufficient serenity of thoughts to see the sensible benefit of the association. The hassle with such triangulations isn’t primarily that they contain perjury or that they provide any basic offence to the spouse; if she avoids banal theatricals, in truth, they generally have the impact of augmenting the husband’s devotion to her and respect for her, if solely because the fruit of comparability. The hassle with them is that only a few males amongst us have sense sufficient to handle them intelligently. The masculine thoughts is instantly taken in by specious values; the common married man of Protestant Christendom, if he succumbs in any respect, succumbs to some meretricious and flamboyant creature, bent solely upon fleecing him. Here is the place the cruel realism of the Frenchman reveals its superiority to the sentimentality of the lads of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would no extra consider taking a mistress with out consulting his spouse than he would consider standing for workplace with out consulting his spouse. The result’s that he’s seldom victimized. For one Frenchman ruined by girls there are a minimum of 100 Englishmen and Americans, even supposing 100 occasions as many Frenchmen have interaction in that form of recreation. The case of Zola is typical. As is well-known, his amours had been rigorously supervised by Mme. Zola from the primary days of their marriage, and in consequence his life was wholly free from scandals and his thoughts was by no means distracted from his work.
But no matter the way forward for monogamous marriage, there’ll by no means be any decay of that agreeable adventurousness which now lies on the backside of all transactions between the sexes. Women could emancipate themselves, they could borrow the entire bag of masculine methods, they usually could treatment themselves of their current need for the vegetable safety of marriage, however they are going to by no means stop to be girls, and as long as they’re girls they are going to stay provocative to males. Their chief allure immediately lies exactly in the truth that they’re harmful, that they threaten masculine liberty and autonomy, that their sharp minds current a menace vastly better than that of acts of God and the general public enemy—and they are going to be harmful for ever. Men concern them, and are fascinated by them. They know the way to present their tooth charmingly; the extra enlightened of them have perfected an outstanding strategy of fascination. It was Nietzsche who known as them the recreation of the warrior—not of the poltroon, keep in mind, however of the warrior. A profound saying. They have an infinite capability for rewarding masculine trade and enterprise with small and irresistible flatteries; their acute understanding combines with their capability for evoking concepts of magnificence to make them incomparable companions when the intense enterprise of the day is finished, and the time has come to increase comfortably within the interstellar ether.
Every man, I daresay, has his personal notion of what constitutes good peace and contentment, however all of these notions, regardless of the elemental battle of the sexes, revolve round girls. As for me—and I hope I could also be pardoned, at this late stage in my inquiry, for intruding my very own persona—I reject the 2 commonest of them: ardour, a minimum of in its extra adventurous and melodramatic features, is just too thrilling and alarming for therefore indolent a person, and I’m too egoistic to have a lot need to be mothered. What, then, stays for me? Let me attempt to describe it to you.
It is the shut of a busy and vexatious day—say half previous 5 – 6 o’clock of a winter afternoon. I’ve had a cocktail or two, and am stretched out on a divan in entrance of a fireplace, smoking. At the sting of the divan, shut sufficient for me to succeed in her with my hand, sits a girl not too younger, however nonetheless handsome and well-dressed—above all, a girl with a delicate, low-pitched, agreeable voice. As I snooze she talks—of something, all the pieces, all of the issues that girls speak of: books, music, the play, males, different girls. No politics. No enterprise. No faith. No metaphysics. Nothing difficult and vexatious—however keep in mind, she is clever; what she says is clearly expressed, and sometimes picturesquely. I observe the positive sheen of her hair, the gorgeous lower of her frock, the glint of her white tooth, the arch of her eye-brow, the sleek curve of her arm. I take heed to the beautiful murmur of her voice. Gradually I go to sleep—however just for an immediate. At as soon as, observing it, she raises her voice ever so little, and I’m awake. Then to sleep once more—slowly and charmingly down that slippery hill of desires. And then awake once more, after which asleep once more, and so forth.
I ask you severely: may something be extra unutterably stunning? The sensation of falling asleep is to me probably the most beautiful on the planet. I enjoyment of it a lot that I even stay up for demise itself with a sneaking marvel and need. Well, right here is sleep poetized and made doubly candy. Here is sleep set to the best music on the planet. I match this example towards any that you just ran consider. It isn’t solely enchanting; additionally it is, in a really true sense, ennobling. In the top, when the woman grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrows one way or the other purged and glorified. I’m a greater man in my very own sight. I’ve grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I’ve been genuinely, utterly and unregrettably completely happy.
At the top I crave the indulgence of the aesthetic reader for the imperfections essentially seen in all that I’ve right here set down—imperfections not solely resulting from incomplete data and fallible logic, but in addition, and maybe extra importantly, to sure basic weaknesses of the intercourse to which I’ve the honour to belong. A person is inseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a canine is inseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in all the pieces he says and does, however they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses the majestic thriller of girl. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in her precise presence, so he places on apathetic and unescapable clownishness when he essays to dissect her within the privateness of the laboratory. There is not any e book on girl by a person that’s not a stupendous compendium of posturings and imbecilities. There are however two books that present even a superficial need to be trustworthy—”The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage,” by Sir Almroth Wright, and this one. Wright made a gallant try to inform the reality, however earlier than he obtained half manner by his job his ineradicable donkeyishness as a male overcame his scientific frenzy as a psychologist, and so he swiftly washed his fingers of the enterprise, and affronted the even handed with a half baked and preposterous e book. Perhaps I’ve failed too, and much more ingloriously. If so, I’m stuffed with honest and indescribable remorse.
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It is my honest hope that nothing I’ve right here exhibited can be mistaken by the the Aristocracy and gentry for ethical indignation. No such feeling, in fact, is in my coronary heart. Moral judgments, as outdated Friedrich used to say, are international to my nature. Setting apart the huge herd which exhibits no definable character in any respect, it appears to me that the minority distinguished by what is often thought to be an extra of sin could be very far more admirable than the minority distinguished by an extra of advantage. My expertise of the world has taught me that the typical wine-bibber is a much better fellow than the typical prohibitionist, and that the typical rogue is healthier firm than the typical poor drudge, and that the worst white, slave dealer of my acquaintance is a decenter man than the very best vice crusader. In the identical manner I’m satisfied that the typical lady, no matter her deficiencies, is tremendously superior to the typical man. The very ease with which she defies and swindles him in a number of capital conditions of life is the clearest of proofs of her normal superiority. She didn’t receive her current excessive immunities as a present from the gods, however solely after a protracted and sometimes bitter combat, and in that combat she exhibited forensic and tactical skills of a really admirable order. There was no weak point of man that she didn’t penetrate and make the most of. There was no trick that she didn’t put to efficient use. There was no system so daring and inordinate that it daunted her.
The newest and biggest fruit of this female expertise for fight is the extension of the suffrage, now common within the Protestant international locations, and even advancing in these of the Greek and Latin rites. This fruit was garnered, not by an assault en masse, however by a mere foray. I imagine that almost all of ladies, for causes that I shall presently expose, weren’t anticipating the extension, and regard it as of small worth at the moment. They know that they will get what they need with out going to the precise polls for it; furthermore, they’re out of sympathy with many of the brummagem reforms advocated by the skilled suffragists, female and male. The mere assertion of the present suffragist platform, with its lengthy listing of quack sure-cures for all of the sorrows of the world, is sufficient to make them smile sadly. In specific, they’re sceptical of all reforms that rely on the mass motion of immense numbers of voters, massive sections of whom are wholly devoid of sense. A standard lady, certainly, no extra believes in democracy within the nation than she believes in democracy at her personal fireplace; she is aware of that there should be a category to order and a category to obey, and that the 2 can by no means coalesce. Nor is she vulnerable to the inventory sentimentalities upon which the entire democratic course of is predicated. This was proven very dramatically within the United States on the nationwide election of 1920, during which the late Woodrow Wilson was introduced all the way down to colossal and ignominious defeat—the primary normal election during which all American ladies might vote. All the sentimentality of the state of affairs was on the facet of Wilson, and but absolutely three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised ladies voters voted in opposition to him. He is, regardless of his skills for deception, a poor well-liked psychologist, and so he made a clumsy effort to fetch the women by tear-squeezing: each connoisseur will keep in mind his bathos about breaking the center of the world. Well, only a few ladies imagine in damaged hearts, and the trigger isn’t far to hunt: virtually each lady above the age of twenty-five has a damaged coronary heart. That is to say, she has been vastly upset, both by failing to nab some fairly fellow that her coronary heart was set on, or, worse, by truly nabbing him, after which discovering him to be a bounder or an imbecile, or each. Thus strolling the world with damaged hearts, ladies know that the harm isn’t critical. When he pulled out the Vox angelica cease and commenced sobbing and snuffling and blowing his nostril tragically, the discovered physician merely drove all the ladies voters into the arms of the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding, who was too silly to invent any points in any respect, however merely took detrimental benefit of the mistrust aroused by his opponent.
Once the ladies of Christendom grow to be comfortable in using the poll, and eliminate the preposterous harridans who obtained it for them and who now search to inform them what to do with it, they’ll proceed to a scotching of lots of the sentimentalities which at the moment corrupt politics. For one factor, I imagine that they’ll provoke measures in opposition to democracy—the worst evil of the present-day world. When they arrive to the matter, they’ll actually not ordain the extension of the suffrage to youngsters, criminals and the insane briefly, to these ever extra inflammable and knavish than the male hinds who’ve loved it for therefore lengthy; they’ll attempt to result in its restriction, little by little, to the small minority that’s clever, agnostic and self-possessed—say six ladies to at least one man. Thus, out of their larger intuition for actuality, they’ll make democracy protected for a democracy.
The curse of man, and the reason for almost all his woes, is his stupendous capability for believing the unbelievable. He is endlessly embracing delusions, and every new one is worse than all which have gone earlier than. But the place is the delusion that ladies cherish—I imply habitually, firmly, passionately? Who will draw up an inventory of propositions, held and maintained by them in sober earnest, which are clearly not true? (I allude right here, in fact, to real ladies, to not suffragettes and different such pseudo-males). As for me, I mustn’t prefer to undertake such an inventory. I do know of nothing, the truth is, that correctly belongs to it. Women, as a category, imagine in not one of the ludicrous rights, duties and pious obligations that males are endlessly gabbling about. Their superior intelligence is on no account extra eloquently demonstrated than by their ironical view of all such phantasmagoria. Their recurring angle towards males is considered one of aloof disdain, and their recurring angle towards what males imagine in, and get into sweats about, and bellow for, is considerably the identical. It takes twice as lengthy to transform a physique of ladies to some new fallacy because it takes to transform a physique of males, and even then they halt, hesitate and are filled with mordant criticisms. The ladies of Colorado had been voting for 21 years earlier than they succumbed to prohibition sufficiently to permit the person voters of the state to undertake it; their very own majority voice was in opposition to it to the top. During the interval the boys voters of a dozen non-suffrage American states had gone shrieking to the mourners’ bench. In California, enfranchised in 1911, the ladies rejected the dry revelation in 1914. National prohibition was adopted throughout the struggle with out their votes—they didn’t get the franchise all through the nation till it was within the Constitution—and it’s with out their assist at the moment. The American man, regardless of his status for lawlessness, is definitely very a lot afraid of the police, and in all of the areas the place prohibition is now truly enforced he makes excuses for his poltroonish acceptance of it by arguing that it’ll do him good in the long term, or that he must sacrifice his personal needs to the widespread weal. But it’s virtually unattainable to search out an American lady of any tradition who’s in favour of it. One and all, they’re against the turmoil and corruption that it entails, and resentful of the invasion of liberty underlying it. Being realists, they haven’t any perception in any program which proposes to remedy the pure swinishness of males by laws. Every regular lady believes, and fairly precisely, that the typical man could be very very like her husband, John, and he or she is aware of very properly that John is a weak, foolish and knavish fellow, and that any effort to transform him into an archangel in a single day is certain to come back to grief. As for her view of the typical creature of her personal intercourse, it’s marked by a cynicism so penetrating and so damaging {that a} clear assertion of it might shock past endurance.
Thus there’s not the slightest likelihood that the enfranchised ladies of Protestantdom, as soon as they grow to be comfortable in using the poll, will give any heed to the ex-suffragettes who now presume to guide and instruct them in politics. Years in the past I predicted that these suffragettes, tried out by victory, would grow to be idiots. They are actually onerous at work proving it. Half of them dedicate themselves to advocating reforms, mainly of a sexual character, so totally preposterous that even male politicians and newspaper editors snort at them; the opposite half succumb absurdly to the blandishments of the old-time male politicians, and so enroll themselves within the nice political events. A lady who joins considered one of these events merely turns into an imitation man, which is to say, a donkey. Thereafter she is nothing however an obscure cog in an historical and creaking machine, the only intelligible function of which is to keep up a horde of scoundrels in public workplace. Her vote is immediately set off by the vote of some sister who joins the opposite camorra. Parenthetically, I could add that all the girls to take to this political immolation appear to me to be frightfully plain. I do know these of England, Germany and Scandinavia solely by their portraits within the illustrated papers, however these of the United States I’ve studied at shut vary at numerous massive political gatherings, together with the 2 nationwide conventions first following the extension of the suffrage. I’m certainly no fastidious fellow—the truth is, I choose a sure melancholy decay in ladies to the loud, circus-wagon brilliance of youth—however I provide you with my phrase that there have been not 5 ladies at both nationwide conference who might have embraced me in digital camera with out first giving me chloral. Some of the chief stateswomen on present, the truth is, had been so downright hideous that I felt faint each time I had to have a look at them.
The reform-monging suffragists appear to be equally devoid of the extra caressing items. They could also be full of altruistic ardour, however they actually have dangerous complexions, and never a lot of them know costume their hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed on the alleged lubricity of the male-the single normal, medical certificates for bridegrooms, birth-control, and so forth. The motive right here, I imagine, is mere rage and jealousy. The lady who isn’t pursued units up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her intercourse, and needs to make it a felony. No genuinely engaging lady has any such want. She likes masculine admiration, nevertheless violently expressed, and is kind of capable of maintain herself. More, she is properly conscious that only a few males are daring sufficient to supply it and not using a plain invitation, and this consciousness makes her extraordinarily cynical of all ladies who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the extra clever ladies that I do know, certainly, are unanimously of the opinion that no woman in her proper senses has ever been truly seduced for the reason that world started; at any time when they hear of a case, they sympathize with the person. Yet extra, the traditional lady of vigorous charms, roving about amongst males, all the time tries to attract the admiration of those that have beforehand admired elsewhere; she prefers the skilled to the novice, and estimates her talent by the attractiveness of the huntresses who’ve hitherto stalked it. The iron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she will get a person in any respect, should get one wholly with out sentimental expertise. If he has any, her crude manoeuvres make him snort and he’s repelled by her lack of pulchritude and amiability. All such suffragists (save a couple of miraculous beauties) marry ninth-rate males after they marry in any respect. They need to put up with the kind of castoffs who’re virtually able to fall in love with girl physicists, embryologists, and embalmers.
Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of those indignant viragoes will come to naught. Men will carry on pursuing ladies till hell freezes over, and ladies will hold luring them on. If the latter enterprise had been deserted, the truth is, the entire recreation of affection would play out, for not many males take any discover of ladies spontaneously. Nine males out of ten can be fairly glad, I imagine, if there have been no ladies on the planet, as soon as they’d grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically all males are their happiest when they’re engaged upon actions—for instance, consuming, playing, looking, enterprise, journey—to which ladies usually are not ordinarily admitted. It is ladies who seduce them from such celibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in entrance of the hound. The strategy to put an finish to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist alarmists speak about is to shave the heads of all the gorgeous ladies on the planet, and pluck out their eyebrows, and pull their enamel, and put them in khaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to put on scents, or to make use of lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as ordinary, errors the fish for the fly.
The current public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is mainly as a consequence of the truth that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very silly, mistake them for spokesmen for the entire physique of ladies, and so present them politeness. But quickly or late—and possibly disconcertingly quickly—the good mass of smart and agnostic ladies will flip upon them and depose them, and thereafter the girl vote can be now not on the disposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettes proceed to fill the newspapers with nonsense, as soon as that change has been effected, will probably be solely as a minority sect of tolerated idiots, just like the Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists and different such fanatics of at the moment. This was the historical past of the extension of the suffrage in all the American states that made it earlier than the nationwide enfranchisement of ladies and will probably be repeated within the nation at massive, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women usually are not taken in by quackery as readily as males are; the hardness of their shell of logic makes it troublesome to penetrate to their feelings. For one lady who testifies publicly that she has been cured of most cancers by some swindling patent drugs, there are no less than twenty masculine witnesses. Even such frauds because the favorite American elixir, Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, that are ostensibly treatments for particularly female ills, anatomically unattainable within the male, are mainly swallowed, so an clever druggist tells me, by males.
My personal perception, based mostly on elaborate inquiries and lengthy meditation, is that the grant of the poll to ladies marks the hid however none the much less actual starting of an enchancment in our politics, and, in the long run, in our complete idea of presidency. As issues stand, an clever grappling with a few of the capital issues of the commonwealth is nearly unattainable. A politician usually prospers underneath democracy, not in proportion as his rules are sound and his honour incorruptible, however in proportion as she excels within the manufacture of sonorous phrases, and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences in opposition to them. Our politics thus degenerates right into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins; the male voter, a coward in addition to an ass, is endlessly taking fright at a brand new one and electing some mountebank to put it. For 100 years previous the folks of the United States, probably the most horrible current democratic state, have scarcely had a political marketing campaign that was not based mostly upon some preposterous concern—first of slavery after which of the manumitted slave, first of capitalism after which of communism, first of the outdated after which of the novel. It is a peculiarity of ladies that they don’t seem to be simply set off by such alarms, that they don’t fall readily into such facile tumults and phobias. What begins a male assembly to snuffling and trembling most violently is exactly the factor that may trigger a feminine assembly to smell. What we’d like, to beat back mobocracy and safeguard a civilized type of authorities, is extra of this sniffing. What we’d like—and in the long run it should come—is a sniff so highly effective that it’ll name a halt upon the navigation of the ship from the forecastle, and put a reliable employees on the bridge, and lay a course that’s describable in intelligible phrases.
The officers nominated by the male citizens in fashionable democracies earlier than the extension of the suffrage had been normally chosen, not for his or her competence however for his or her mere expertise for idiocy; they mirrored precisely the male weak point for no matter is rhetorical and mawkish and feeble and unfaithful. Consider, for instance, what occurred in a salient case. Every 4 years the male voters of the United States selected from amongst themselves one who was put ahead as the person most match, of all resident males, to be the primary citizen of the commonwealth. He was chosen after interminable dialogue; his {qualifications} had been totally canvassed; very massive powers and dignities had been put into his arms. Well, what did we generally discover after we examined this gentleman? We discovered, not a profound thinker, not a frontrunner of sound opinion, not a person of notable sense, however merely a wholesaler of notions so childish that they need to wants disgust a sentient suckling—briefly, a spouting geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported assumptions and hole moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought had been flattered after they had been known as understandable—particularly, a Wilson, a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding.
This was the male champion. I don’t enterprise upon the cruelty of evaluating his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a lady of like fame and place; all I ask of you is that you simply weigh them, for sense, for shrewdness, for clever grasp of obscure relations, for mental honesty and braveness, with the concepts of the typical midwife.
I’ve spoken with some disdain of the suffragette. What is the matter along with her, essentially, is straightforward: she is a lady who has stupidly carried her envy of sure of the superficial privileges of males to such a degree that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes her blind to their worthless and sometimes mainly imaginary character. In specific, she centres this frenzy of hers upon one particular privilege, to wit, the alleged privilege of promiscuity in amour, the trendy droit du seigneur. Read the books of the chief girl Savonarolas, and you can find working by means of them an hysterical denunciation of what’s known as the double normal of morality; there’s, certainly, a complete literature devoted completely to it. The existence of this double normal appears to drive the poor ladies half frantic. They bellow raucously for its abrogation, and demand that the frivolous male be visited with much more idiotic penalties than these which now go to the aberrant feminine; some even advocate gravely his mutilation by surgical procedure, that he could also be pressured into rectitude by a bodily incapacity for sin.
All this, in fact, is hocus-pocus, and the considered usually are not deceived by it for an immediate. What these virtuous bel dames truly want of their hearts isn’t that the male be decreased to chemical purity, however that the franchise of dalliance be prolonged to themselves. The most basic acquaintance with Freudian psychology exposes their secret animus. Unable to ensnare males underneath the current system, or in any respect occasions, unable to ensnare males sufficiently appetizing to arouse the envy of different ladies, they leap to the idea that it might be simpler if the foundations had been much less exacting. This idea exposes their deficiency within the chief character of their intercourse: correct statement. The reality is that, even when they possessed the liberty that males are supposed to own, they might nonetheless discover it troublesome to attain their ambition, for the typical man, no matter his stupidity, is no less than eager sufficient in judgment to choose a single wink from a genuinely engaging lady to the final delirious favours of the everyday suffragette. Thus the idea of the whoopers and snorters of the trigger, in its esoteric in addition to in its public side, is unsound. They are merely ladies who, of their tastes and processes of thoughts, are two-thirds males, and the actual fact explains their failure to attain presentable husbands, and even consolatory betrayal, fairly as successfully because it explains the prepared credence they offer to political and philosophical absurdities.
The reality is that the image of male carnality that such ladies conjure up belongs virtually wholly to fable, as I’ve already noticed in coping with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a paralogist on a considerably increased airplane. As they depict him of their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white-slave buying and selling and ophthalmia neonatorum, the typical male grownup of the Christian and cultured international locations leads a lifetime of gaudy lubricity, rolling magnificently from one liaison to a different, and with an virtually limitless queue of ruined milliners, dancers, charwomen, parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison and despair. The lifetime of man, as these furiously envious ones see it, is the lifetime of a number one actor in a boulevard revue. He is a polygamous, multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and unconscionable debauche, a monster of promiscuity; prodigiously untrue to his spouse, and even to his associates’ wives; fathomlessly libidinous and fantastically glad.
Needless to say, this image bears no extra relation to the information than a dissertation on main technique by a navy “expert” promoted from dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I communicate with none embarrassing naming of names) had been engaging sufficient to males to get close to sufficient to sufficient males to know sufficient about them for his or her function they might paralyze the Dorcas societies with no such cajoling libels. As a matter of sober reality, the typical man of our time and race is kind of incapable of all these incandescent and intriguing divertisements. He is way extra virtuous than they make him out, far much less schooled in sin, far much less enterprising and ruthless. I don’t say, in fact, that he’s pure in coronary heart, for the possibilities are that he is not; what I do say is that, within the overwhelming majority of instances, he’s pure in act, even within the face of temptation. And why? For a number of major causes, not to enter minor ones. One is that he lacks the braveness. Another is that he lacks the cash. Another is that he’s essentially ethical, and has a conscience. It takes extra sinful initiative than he has in him to plunge into any affair save probably the most informal and sordid; it takes extra ingenuity and intrepidity than he has in him to hold it off; it takes extra money than he can conceal from his consort to finance it. A person might power his precise spouse to share the direst poverty, however even the least vampirish lady of the third half calls for to be courted in what, contemplating his station in life, is the grand method, and the bills of that grand method scare off all save a small minority of specialists in deception. So lengthy, certainly, as a spouse is aware of her husband’s revenue precisely, she has a positive technique of holding him to his oaths.
Even more practical than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the opposite increased vertebrate, certainly, is his extreme timorousness, his simple yielding to alarms, his incapacity for journey and not using a crowd behind him. In his regular incarnation he’s no extra able to initiating an extra-legal affair—in any respect occasions, above the mawkish harmlessness of a flirting match with a cigar woman in a cafe-than he’s of scaling the battlements of hell. He likes to consider himself doing it, simply as he likes to consider himself main a cavalry cost or climbing the Matterhorn. Often, certainly, his self-importance leads him to think about the factor carried out, and he admits by winks and blushes that he’s a nasty one. But on the backside of all that tawdry pretence there’s normally nothing extra materials than an oafish smirk at some disgusted shop-girl, or a scraping of shins underneath the desk. Let any lady who’s disquieted by stories of her husband’s derelictions determine to herself how lengthy it might have taken him to suggest to her if left to his personal enterprise, after which let her ask herself if that’s the case pusillanimous a creature may very well be imaged within the position of Don Giovanni.
Finally, there’s his conscience—the amassed sediment of ancestral faintheartedness in numerous generations, with imprecise spiritual fears and superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a conscience? Yes, expensive associates, a conscience. That conscience could also be imperfect, inept, unintelligent, brummagem. It could also be indistinguishable, at instances, from the mere concern that somebody could also be wanting. It could also be shot by means of with hypocrisy, stupidity, play-acting. But nonetheless, as consciences go in Christendom, it’s genuinely entitled to the identify—and it’s all the time in motion. A person, keep in mind, isn’t a being in vacuo; he’s the fruit and slave of the atmosphere that bathes him. One can not enter the House of Commons, the United States Senate, or a jail for felons with out changing into, in some measure, a rascal. One can not fall overboard with out transport water. One can not cross by means of a contemporary college with out carrying away scars. And by the identical token one can not dwell and have one’s being in a contemporary democratic state, 12 months in and 12 months out, with out falling, to some extent no less than, underneath that ethical obsession which is the hall-mark of the mob-man let out. A citizen of such a state, his nostril buried in Nietzsche, “Man and Superman,” and different such superior literature, might caress himself with the notion that he’s an immoralist, that his soul is stuffed with soothing sin, that he has reduce himself free from the revelation of God. But all of the whereas there is part of him that continues to be a sound Christian, a moralist, a proper considering and forward-looking man. And that half, in instances of stress, asserts itself. It might not fear him on unusual events. It might not cease him when he swears, or takes a nip of whiskey behind the door, or goes motoring on Sunday; it might even let him alone when he goes to a leg-show. But the second a concrete Temptress rises earlier than him, her nostril snow-white, her lips rouged, her eyelashes drooping provokingly—the second such an deserted wench has at him, and his lack of prepared funds begins to conspire together with his lack of braveness to assault and wobble him—at that exact second his conscience flares into operate, and so finishes his enterprise. First he sees problem, then he sees the hazard, then he sees improper. The result’s that he slinks off in trepidation, and one other vampire is baffled of her prey.
It is, certainly, the key scandal of Christendom, no less than within the Protestant areas, that almost all males are trustworthy to their wives. You will a journey a great distance earlier than you discover a married man who will admit that he’s, however the information are the information, and I’m certainly not one to flout them.
The origin of the delusion that the typical man is a Leopold II or Augustus the Strong, with the amorous expertise of a guinea pig, isn’t far to hunt. It lies in three elements, the which I rehearse briefly:
1. The idiotic self-importance of males, resulting in their everlasting boasting, both by open mendacity or sinister hints.
2. The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, Y. M. C. A. secretaries, and different such libidinous poltroons as to what they might do themselves if they’d the braveness.
3. The ditto of sure suffragettes as to ditto.
Here you may have the genesis of a generalization that offers the much less vital kind of ladies a substantial amount of pointless uneasiness and vastly augments the pure conceit of males. Some pornographic outdated fellow, within the discharge of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, places in a night ploughing by means of such books as “The Memoirs of Fanny Hill,” Casanova’s Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of Gaius Petronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal he arises with the conviction that life amid the purple lights should be one stupendous whirl of deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or Piccadilly at evening are out for revels that may have brought about protests in Sodom and Nineveh, that the typical man who chooses hell leads an existence akin to that of a Mormon bishop, that the world outdoors the Bible class is packed like a sardine-can with betrayed salesgirls, that each man who would not imagine that Jonah swallowed the whale spends his complete leisure leaping by means of the seventh hoop of the Decalogue. “If I were not saved and anointed of God,” whispers the vice director into his personal ear, “that is what I, the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing. The late King David did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late King Edward VII was not beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his name has its suggestions. Millions of others go the same route…. Ergo, Up, guards, and at ’em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants! Order out the seachlights and scaling-ladders! Swear in four hundred more policemen! Let us chase these hell-hounds out of Christendom, and make the world safe for monogamy, poor working girls, and infant damnation!”
Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his personal secret aspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that the unconsecrated, whereas sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are free from his different weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of resourcefulness, his conscience. As I’ve mentioned, they don’t seem to be. The overwhelming majority of those that seem within the public haunts of sin are there, to not interact in overt acts of ribaldry, however merely to tremble agreeably upon the sting of the abyss. They are the identical skittish experimentalists, exactly, who throng the halfway at a world’s honest, and go to smutty exhibits, and soak up intercourse magazines, and browse the kind of books that our vice crusading pal reads. They prefer to conjure up the charms of carnality, and to assist out their considerably sluggish imaginations by precise peeps at it, however with regards to taking a forthright header into the sulphur they normally fail to muster up the braveness. For one clerk who succumbs to the houris of the pave, there are 5 hundred who succumb to lack of means, the warnings of the intercourse hygienists, and their very own miserable consciences. For one “clubman”—i.e., bagman or suburban vestryman—who invades the ladies’s outlets, engages the love of some harmless miss, lures her into infamy after which sells her to the Italians, there are one thousand who by no means get any additional than asking the worth of cologne water and discharging a couple of furtive winks. And for one husband of the Nordic race who maintains a blonde refrain woman in oriental luxurious across the nook, there are ten thousand who’re as true to their wives, 12 months in and 12 months out, as so many convicts within the death-house, and can be no extra able to any such loathsome malpractice, even within the face of free alternative, than they might be of slicing off the ears of their younger.
I’m sorry to explode a lot romance. In specific, I’m sorry for the suffragettes who specialize within the double normal, for after they get into pantaloons eventually, and have the brand new freedom, they’ll uncover to their sorrow that they’ve been pursuing a chimera—that there’s actually no such animal because the male anarchist they’ve been denouncing and envying—that the wholesale fornication of man, no less than underneath Christian democracy, has little extra precise existence than trustworthy promoting or sound cooking. They have adopted the porno maniacs in embracing a bit of buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes it is going to flip to ashes of their arms.
Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the braveness and enterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere bodily valour, a top quality during which the typical man is way exceeded by the typical jackal or wolf, have extra of each. If the implications, to a person, of the slightest descent from virginity had been one-tenth as swift and barbarous as the implications to a younger woman in like case, it might take a division of infantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that lex talionis in the entire western world. As issues stand at the moment, even with the percentages so tremendously in his favour, the typical male hesitates and is thus not misplaced. Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders should you doubt it. They present that the weekly receipts of feminine recruits upon the wharves of sin are all the time greater than the demand; that extra younger ladies enter upon the vermilion profession than could make respectable livings at it; that the stress of the temptation they maintain out is the chief consider corrupting our undergraduates. What was the primary act of the American Army when it started summoning its younger clerks and faculty boys and plough arms to conscription camps? Its first act was to mark off a so-called ethical zone round every camp, and to safe it with trenches and machine weapons, and to place a variety of volunteer termagants to patrolling it, that the assembled jeunesse is likely to be protected of their rectitude from the immoral advances of the adjoining milkmaids and poor working ladies.
I’ve given three causes for the prosperity of the notion that man is a pure polygamist, bent eternally upon recent dives into Lake of Brimstone No. 7. To these one other must be added: the thirst for martyrdom which exhibits itself in so many ladies, significantly underneath the upper types of civilization. This unhealthy urge for food, the truth is, could also be described as considered one of civilization’s ailments; it’s virtually exceptional in additional primitive societies. The savage lady, unprotected by her impolite tradition and compelled to heavy and relentless labour, has retained her bodily power and with it her honesty and self-respect. The civilized lady, steadily degenerated by a larger ease, and helped down that hill by the pretensions of civilized man, has turned her infirmity right into a advantage, and so impacts a feebleness that’s truly far past the truth. It is by this route that she will be able to most successfully disarm masculine mistrust, and get what she desires. Man is flattered by any acknowledgment, nevertheless insincere, of his superior power and capability. He likes to be leaned upon, appealed to, adopted docilely. And this tribute to his would possibly caresses him on the psychic airplane in addition to on the airplane of the clearly bodily. He not solely enjoys serving to a lady over a gutter; he additionally enjoys serving to her dry her tears. The result’s the huge pretence that characterizes the relations of the sexes underneath civilization—the double pretence of man’s crafty and autonomy and of lady’s dependence and deference. Man is all the time in search of somebody to boast to; lady is all the time in search of a shoulder to place her head on.
This female affectation, in fact, has steadily taken on the power of a hard and fast behavior, and so it’s got a sure assist, by a well-recognized technique of self-delusion, in actuality. The civilized lady inherits that behavior as she inherits her crafty. She is born half satisfied that she is actually as weak and helpless as she later pretends to be, and the prevailing folklore gives her limitless corroboration. One of the resultant phenomena is the enjoyment of martyrdom that one so usually finds in ladies, and significantly within the least alert and introspective of them. They take a heavy, unhealthy pleasure in struggling; it subtly pleases them to be onerous put upon; they prefer to image themselves as slaughtered saints. Thus they all the time discover one thing to complain of; the very situations of home life give them a superabundance of medical materials. And if, by any likelihood, such materials exhibits a falling off, they’re uneasy and sad. Let a lady have a husband whose conduct isn’t moderately open to query, and she’s going to invent legendary offences to make him bearable. And if her invention fails she can be plunged into the utmost distress and humiliation. This reality most likely explains many mysterious divorces: the husband was not too dangerous, however too good. For public opinion amongst ladies, keep in mind, doesn’t favour the girl who is stuffed with a placid contentment and has no masculine torts to report; if she says that her husband is wholly passable she is seemed upon as a numskull much more dense that he’s himself. A person, talking of his spouse to different males, all the time praises her extravagantly. Boasting about her soothes his self-importance; he likes to fire up the envy of his fellows. But when two ladies speak of their husbands it’s primarily atrocities that they describe. The most esteemed lady gossip is the one with the longest and most numerous repertoire of complaints.
This craving for martyrdom explains one of many generally famous characters of ladies: their keen aptitude for bearing bodily ache. As now we have seen, they’ve truly a very good deal much less endurance than males; large accidents shock them extra severely and kill them extra rapidly. But when acute algesia is unaccompanied by any profounder phenomena they’re undoubtedly capable of bear it with a far larger present of resignation. The motive isn’t far to hunt. In ache a person sees solely an invasion of his liberty, power and shallowness. It flooring him, masters him, and makes him ridiculous. But a lady, extra refined and devious in her processes of thoughts, senses the dramatic impact that the spectacle of her struggling makes upon the spectators, already full of compassion for her feebleness. She would thus a lot somewhat be praised for dealing with ache with a martyr’s fortitude than for devising some technique of eliminating it–the first considered a person. No lady might have invented chloroform, nor, for that matter, alcohol. Both medicine supply an escape from conditions and experiences that, even in aggravated kinds, ladies relish. The lady who drinks as males drink—that’s, to boost her threshold of sensation and ease the agony of dwelling—almost all the time exhibits a deficiency in female characters and an undue preponderance of masculine characters. Almost invariably you can find her useless and boastful, and filled with different marks of that bombastic exhibitionism which is so sterlingly male.
This female yearning for martyrdom, in fact, usually takes on a downright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist. Women present many different traits of the identical type. To be a lady underneath our Christian civilization, certainly, means to dwell a life that’s heavy with repression and dissimulation, and this repression and dissimulation, in the long term, can not fail to provide results which are indistinguishable from illness. You will discover a few of them described at size in any handbook on psychoanalysis. The Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, Poul Bjerre, argue, certainly, that womanliness itself, as it’s encountered underneath Christianity, is a illness. All ladies endure from a suppressed revolt in opposition to the inhibitions pressured upon them by our synthetic tradition, and this suppressed revolt, by well-known Freudian means, produces a posh of psychological signs that’s acquainted to all of us. At one finish of the size we observe the suffragette, along with her grotesque adoption of the male perception in legal guidelines, phrases and talismans, and her hysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she couldn’t put to make use of if she had it. And on the different finish we discover the snuffling and neurotic lady, along with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant pruderies and her pathological delusions. As Ibsen noticed way back, it is a man’s world. Women have damaged a lot of their outdated chains, however they’re nonetheless enmeshed in a formidable community of artificial taboos and sentimentalities, and it’ll take them one other era, no less than, to get real freedom. That that is true is proven by the deep unrest that but marks the intercourse, regardless of its latest progress towards social, political and financial equality. It is nearly unattainable to discover a man who actually needs that he had been a lady, however virtually each lady, at a while or different in her life, is gnawed by a remorse that she isn’t a person.
Two of the toughest issues that ladies need to bear are (a) the silly masculine disinclination to confess their mental superiority, and even their equality, and even their possession of a standard human gear for thought, and (b) the equally silly masculine doctrine that they represent a particular and ineffable species of vertebrate, with out the pure instincts and appetites of the order—to adapt a phrase from Hackle, that they’re transcendental and virtually gaseous mammals, and marked by a whole lack of sure salient mammalian characters. The first imbecility has already involved us at size. One finds traces of it even in works professedly dedicated to disposing of it. In one such guide, for instance, I come across this: “What all the skill and constructive capacity of the physicians in the Crimean War failed to accomplish Florence Nightingale accomplished by her beautiful femininity and nobility of soul.” In different phrases, by her possession of some recondite and indescribable magic, sharply separated from the unusual psychological processes of man. The idea is unsound and preposterous. Miss Nightingale completed her helpful work, not by magic, however by onerous widespread sense. The drawback earlier than her was merely considered one of group. Many males had tackled it, and all of them had failed stupendously. What she did was to convey her female sharpness of wit, her female clear-thinking, to bear upon it. Thus attacked, it yielded rapidly, and as soon as it had been dropped at order it was simple for different individuals to hold on what she had begun. But the opinion of a person’s world nonetheless prefers to credit score her success to some mysterious angelical high quality, unstatable in lucid phrases and having no extra actuality than the divine inspiration of an archbishop. Her terribly acute and correct intelligence is thus conveniently put upon the desk, and the amour propre of man is stored inviolate. To confess frankly that she had extra sense than any male Englishman of her era can be to utter a reality too harsh to be bearable.
The second delusion generally exhibits itself within the idea, already mentioned, that ladies are devoid of any intercourse intuition—that they undergo the odious caresses of the lubricious male solely by a strong effort of the need, and with the only object of discharging their responsibility to posterity. It can be unattainable to enter this delusion with correct candour and at due size in a piece designed for studying aloud within the home circle; all I can do is to refer the scholar to the books of any competent authority on the psychology of intercourse, say Ellis, or to the confidences (if they’re obtainable) of any complaisant bachelor of his acquaintance.
The glad tidings preached by Christ had been clearly extremely beneficial to ladies. He lifted them to equality earlier than the Lord when their very possession of souls was nonetheless doubted by the vast majority of rival theologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set worth upon their sagacity, and one of the crucial disdained of their intercourse, a girl previously in public life, was amongst His common advisers. Mariolatry is thus on no account the invention of the mediaeval popes, as Protestant theologians would have us imagine. On the opposite, it’s plainly discernible within the Four Gospels. What the mediaeval popes truly invented (or, to be exact, reinvented, for they merely borrowed the weather of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of ladies’s inferiority, the exact reverse of the factor credited to them. Committed, for sound causes of self-discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they needed to assist it by depicting all visitors with ladies within the mild of a hazardous and ignominious enterprise. The consequence was the deliberate group and improvement of the idea of feminine triviality, lack of duty and normal looseness of thoughts. Woman turned a kind of satan, however with out the admired intelligence of the common demons. The look of ladies saints, nevertheless, provided a continuing and embarrassing criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional ladies had been match to take a seat upon the appropriate hand of God—and so they had been usually proving it, and forcing the church to acknowledge it—then certainly all ladies couldn’t be as dangerous because the books made them out. There thus arose the idea of the angelic lady, the pure vestal; we see her at full size within the romances of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the long run was a kind of double doctrine, first that ladies had been devils and secondly that they had been angels. This preposterous dualism has merged, as now we have seen, right into a compromise dogma in fashionable instances. By that dogma it’s held, on the one hand, that ladies are unintelligent and immoral, and alternatively, that they’re free from all these weaknesses of the flesh which distinguish males. This, roughly talking, is the notion of the typical male numskull at the moment.
Christianity has thus each libelled ladies and flattered them, however with the load all the time on the facet of the libel. It is subsequently, at backside, their enemy, as the faith of Christ, now wholly extinct, was their pal. And as they steadily throw off the shackles which have certain them for a thousand years they present appreciation of the actual fact. Women, certainly, usually are not naturally spiritual, and they’re rising much less and fewer spiritual as 12 months chases 12 months. Their unusual devotion has little if any pious exaltation in it; it’s a routine apply, power on them by the masculine notion that an look of holiness is correct to their lowly station, and a masculine feeling that church-going in some way retains them so as, and out of doings that may be much less reassuring. When they exhibit any real spiritual fervour, its sexual character is normally so apparent that even the vast majority of males are cognizant of it. Women by no means go flocking ecstatically to a church during which the agent of God within the pulpit is an aged asthmatic with a watchful spouse. When one finds them pushed to frenzies by the deserves of the saints, and weeping over the sorrows of the heathen, and dashing out to haul the entire vicinage as much as grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement earlier than the heavenly throne, it’s fairly protected to imagine, even with out an precise go to, that the ecclesiastic who has labored the miracle is a good and toothsome fellow, and a very good deal extra aphrodisiacal than discovered. All the good preachers to ladies in fashionable instances have been males of suave and ingratiating behavior, and the good majority of them, from Henry Ward Beecher up and down, have been taken, quickly or late, in transactions way more appropriate to the boudoir than to the footstool of the Almighty. Their well-known killings have all the time been made among the many silliest kind of ladies—the type, briefly, who fall so wanting the traditional acumen of their intercourse that they’re bemused by mere magnificence in males.
Such ladies are in a minority, and so the intercourse exhibits a very good deal fewer spiritual lovers per mille than the intercourse of sentiment and perception. Attending, a number of years in the past, the gladiatorial exhibits of the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I used to be always struck by the good preponderance of males within the pen dedicated to the saved. Men of all ages and in monumental numbers got here swarming to the altar, loudly bawling for assist in opposition to their sins, however the ladies had been something however quite a few, and the few who appeared had been mainly both chlorotic adolescents or pathetic outdated Saufschwestern. For six nights working I sat straight beneath the gifted exhorter with out seeing a single feminine convert of what statisticians name the child-bearing age—that’s, the age of most intelligence and attraction. Among the male simpletons bagged by his yells throughout this time had been the president of a railroad, half a dozen wealthy bankers and retailers, and the previous governor of an American state. But not a lady of comparable place or dignity. Not a lady that any self-respecting bachelor would care to chuck underneath the chin.
This cynical view of non secular emotionalism, and with it of the entire inventory of ecclesiastical balderdash, might be accountable, no less than partially, for the reluctance of ladies to enter upon the sacerdotal profession. In these Christian sects which nonetheless bar them from the pulpit—normally on the imperfectly hid floor that they don’t seem to be equal to its alleged calls for upon the morals and the mind—one by no means hears of them protesting in opposition to the prohibition; they’re fairly content material to depart the degrading imposture to males, who’re higher fitted for it by expertise and conscience. And in these baroque sects, mainly American, which admit them they present no eagerness to placed on the stole and chasuble. When the primary clergywoman appeared within the United States, it was predicted by alarmists that males can be pushed out of the pulpit by the brand new competitors. Nothing of the type has occurred, neither is it in prospect. The complete corps of feminine divines within the nation is likely to be herded into one small room. Women, when literate in any respect, are far too clever to make efficient ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of actuality is in limitless opposition to the entire sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humour stands in opposition to the snorting that’s inseparable from pulpit oratory.
Those ladies who enter upon the spiritual life are virtually invariably moved by some motive distinct from mere pious irritation. It is a commonplace, certainly, that, in Catholic international locations, ladies are pushed into convents by financial concerns or by disasters of amour far oftener than they’re drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives of the feminine saints, and you will notice what number of of them tried marriage and failed at it earlier than ever they turned to faith. In Protestant lands only a few ladies undertake it as a occupation in any respect, and among the many few a secular impulse is nearly all the time seen. The woman who’s out of the blue overcome by a want to minister to the heathen in international lands is almost invariably discovered, on inspection, to be a woman harbouring a idea that it might be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In level of reality, she duly marries him. At house, maybe, she has discovered it unattainable to get a husband, however within the remoter marches of China, Senegal and Somaliland, with no white competitors current, it’s equally unattainable to fail.
What stays of the alleged piety of ladies is little greater than a social behavior, bolstered in most communities by a paucity of different and extra inviting divertissements. If you may have ever noticed the ladies of Spain and Italy at their devotions you needn’t be advised how a lot the worship of God could also be a mere excuse for rest and gossip. These ladies, of their each day lives, are surrounded by a formidable community of mediaeval taboos; their regular human want for ease and freedom in intercourse is opposed by masculine mistrust and superstition; they meet no strangers; they see and listen to nothing new. In the home of the Most High they escape from that vexing routine. Here they might brush shoulders with a crowd. Here, so to talk, they might crane their psychological necks and stretch their non secular legs. Here, above all, they might come into some kind of contact with males comparatively extra affable, cultured and charming than their husbands and fathers—to wit, with the rev. clergy.
Elsewhere in Christendom, although ladies usually are not fairly so relentlessly watched and penned up, they really feel a lot the identical want of selection and pleasure, and each are likewise on faucet within the temples of the Lord. No one, I’m positive, want be advised that the typical missionary society or church stitching circle isn’t primarily a non secular group. Its precise function is exactly that of the absurd golf equipment and secret orders to which the decrease and least resourceful lessons of males belong: it gives a way of refreshment, of self-expression, of non-public show, of political manipulation and boasting, and, if the pastor occurs to be attention-grabbing, of discreet and virtually lawful intrigue. In the course of a life largely dedicated to the research of pietistic phenomena, I’ve by no means met a single lady who cared an genuine rattling for the precise heathen. The attraction of their salvation is all the time virtually purely social. Women go to church for a similar motive that farmers and convicts go to church.
Finally, there’s the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most components of Christendom, holds out the one bait of magnificence that the inhabitants are ever cognizant of. It gives music, dim lights, comparatively formidable structure, eloquence, formality and thriller, the caressing meaninglessness that’s on the coronary heart of poetry. Women are way more conscious of such issues than males, who’re ordinarily fairly as devoid of aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The angle of the everyday man towards magnificence in its numerous kinds is, the truth is, an angle of suspicion and hostility. He doesn’t regard a murals as merely inert and silly; he regards it as, in some indefinable manner, positively offensive. He sees the artist as knowledgeable voluptuary and scoundrel, and would no extra belief him in his family than he would belief a colored clergyman in his hen-yard. It was males, and never ladies, who invented such sordid and literal faiths as these of the Mennonites, Dunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to stunning ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their nice expertise for decreasing the ineffable thriller of faith to a mere bawling of idiots. The regular lady, in as far as she has any faith in any respect, strikes irresistibly towards Catholicism, with its poetical obscurantism. The evangelical Protestant sects have a tough time holding her. She can no extra be an precise Methodist than a gentleman is usually a Methodist.
This inclination towards magnificence, in fact, is dismissed by the typical male blockhead as not more than a feeble sentimentality. The reality is that it’s exactly the other. It is definitely not sentimentality to be moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony of the mass, and even, say, by these timid imitations of it which one observes in sure Protestant church buildings. Such proceedings, no matter their defects from the standpoint of a pure aesthetic, are in any respect occasions vastly extra stunning than any of the personal acts of the people who participate in them. They raise themselves above the barren utilitarianism of on a regular basis life, and no much less above the maudlin sentimentalities that males search pleasure in. They supply a way of escape, handy and alluring, from that sordid routine of thought and occupation which ladies revolt in opposition to so pertinaciously.
I’ve mentioned that the faith preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct on the planet) was extremely beneficial to ladies. This was not saying, in fact, that ladies have repaid the praise by adopting it. They are, the truth is, detached Christians within the primitive sense, simply as they’re dangerous Christians within the antagonistic fashionable sense, and significantly on the facet of ethics. If they really settle for the renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it’s only in an effort to flout their substance underneath cowl of their look. No lady is actually humble; she is merely politic. No lady, with a free selection earlier than her, chooses self-immolation; probably the most she genuinely needs in that route is a spectacular martyrdom. No lady delights in poverty. No lady yields when she will be able to prevail. No lady is actually meek.
In their sensible ethics, certainly, ladies pay little heed to the precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the actual fact has handed into proverb. Their gentleness, just like the so-called honour of males, is seen solely in conditions which provide them no menace. The second a lady finds herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely harmful, both to her personal safety or to the well-being of these underneath her safety—say a baby or a husband—she shows a bellicosity which stops at nothing, nevertheless outrageous. In the courts of legislation one sometimes encounters a male extremist who tells the reality, the entire reality and nothing however the reality, even when it’s in opposition to his trigger, however no such lady has ever been on view for the reason that days of Justinian. It is, certainly, an axiom of the bar that ladies invariably lie upon the stand, and the entire effort of a barrister who has one for a shopper is dedicated to protecting her inside bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury is probably not unduly aroused. Women litigants virtually all the time win their instances, not, as is often assumed, as a result of the jurymen fall in love with them, however merely and solely as a result of they’re clear-headed, resourceful, implacable and with out qualms.
What is right here seen within the halls of justice, within the face of an unlimited technical gear for combating lying, is ten instances extra apparent in freer fields. Any man who’s so unlucky as to have a critical controversy with a lady, say within the departments of finance, theology or amour, should inevitably carry away from it a way of getting handed by means of a harmful and virtually ugly expertise. Women not solely chew within the clinches; they chew even in open combating; they’ve a dental attain, so to talk, of fantastic size. No assault is so determined that they won’t undertake it, as soon as they’re aroused; no system is so unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, needing to enhance my prose, I served for a 12 months or in order reporter for a newspaper in a police courtroom, and through that point I heard maybe 4 hundred instances of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, of their defence, virtually invariably pleaded justification, and a few of them advised such tales of studied atrocity on the home fireplace, each psychic and bodily, that the discovered Justice of the Peace discharged them with tears in his eyes and the very catchpolls within the courtroom needed to blow their noses. Many extra males than ladies go insane, and lots of extra married males than single males. The reality puzzles nobody who has had the identical alternative that I needed to discover out what goes on, 12 months in and 12 months out, behind the doorways of apparently glad properties. A lady, if she hates her husband (and lots of of them do), could make life so bitter and obnoxious to him that even loss of life upon the gallows appears candy by comparability. This hatred, in fact, is usually, and maybe virtually invariably, fairly justified. To be the spouse of an unusual man, certainly, is an expertise that should be very onerous to bear. The hollowness and self-importance of the guy, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these items should revolt any lady above the bottom. To be the article of the oafish affections of such a creature, even when they’re trustworthy and profound, can’t be anticipated to present any real pleasure to a lady of sense and refinement. His efficiency as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac way back noticed, unescapably suggests a gorilla’s efforts to play the violin. Women survive the tragicomedy solely by dint of their nice capability for play-acting. They are capable of act so realistically that always they deceive even themselves; the typical lady’s contentment, certainly, is not more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there should be innumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one generally wonders that so few ladies, with the factor so facile and so protected, poison their husbands. Perhaps it’s not fairly as uncommon as important statistics make it out; the deathrate amongst husbands could be very a lot increased than amongst wives. More than as soon as, certainly, I’ve gone to the funeral of an acquaintance who died out of the blue, and noticed a curious glitter within the eyes of the inconsolable widow.
Even on this age of emancipation, regular ladies have few critical transactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands; the enterprise of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence to senility. When they step outdoors their recurring circle they present the identical alert and keen wariness that they exhibit inside it. A person who has dealings with them should hold his wits about him, and even when he’s most cautious he’s usually flabbergasted by their sudden and unconscionable forays. Whenever lady goes into commerce she rapidly will get a status as a pointy dealer. Every little city in America has its Hetty Green, every sweating blood from turnips, every the phobia of all of the male usurers of the neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an amazon of barter takes his fortune into his arms; he has little extra likelihood of success in opposition to the female approach in enterprise than he has in opposition to the female approach in marriage. In each arenas the benefit of ladies lies of their freedom from sentimentality. In enterprise they deal with themselves wholly to their very own revenue, and provides no thought no matter to the hopes, aspirations and amour propre of their antagonists. And within the duel of intercourse they fence, to not make factors, however to disable and disarm. A person, when he succeeds in throwing off a lady who has tried to marry him, all the time carries away a maudlin sympathy for her in her defeat and dismay. But nobody ever heard of a lady who pitied the poor fellow whose trustworthy ardour she had discovered it expedient to spurn. On the opposite, ladies take enjoyment of such clownish agonies, and exhibit them proudly, and boast about them to different ladies.
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I have said that women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation. The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are is itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be brought up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to a few obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite the vast accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.
Turn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come most constantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits of mind are most clearly contrasted—to the field, to wit, of monogamous marriage. Surely no long argument is needed to demonstrate the superior competence and effectiveness of women here, and therewith their greater self-possession, their saner weighing of considerations, their higher power of resisting emotional suggestion. The very fact that marriages occur at all is a proof, indeed, that they are more cool-headed than men, and more adept in employing their intellectual resources, for it is plainly to a man’s interest to avoid marriage as long as possible, and as plainly to a woman’s interest to make a favourable marriage as soon as she can. The efforts of the two sexes are thus directed, in one of the capital concerns of life, to diametrically antagonistic ends. Which side commonly prevails? I leave the verdict to the jury. All normal men fight the thing off; some men are successful for relatively long periods; a few extraordinarily intelligent and courageous men (or perhaps lucky ones) escape altogether. But, taking one generation with another, as every one knows, the average man is duly married and the average woman gets a husband. Thus the great majority of women, in this clear-cut and endless conflict, make manifest their substantial superiority to the great majority of men.
Not many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value by marriage, at least as the institution is now met with in Christendom. Even assessing its benefits at their most inflated worth, they are plainly overborne by crushing disadvantages. When a man marries it is no more than a sign that the feminine talent for persuasion and intimidation—i.e., the feminine talent for survival in a world of clashing concepts and desires, the feminine competence and intelligence—has forced him into a more or less abhorrent compromise with his own honest inclinations and best interests. Whether that compromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his relative cowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms and effects, are almost identical. In the first case he marries because he has been clearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second he resigns himself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both cases his inherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of his opponent. It makes him cherish the fiction of his enterprise, and even of his daring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious operations against him. It makes him accept as real the bold play-acting that women always excel at, and at no time more than when stalking a man. It makes him, above all, see a glamour of romance in a transaction which, even at its best, contains almost as much gross trafficking, at bottom, as the sale of a mule.
A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature commonly apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize that marriage is a bargain in which he gets the worse of it, even when, in some detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He never, I believe, wants all that the thing offers and implies. He wants, at most, no more than certain parts. He may desire, let us say, a housekeeper to protect his goods and entertain his friends—but he may shrink from the thought of sharing his bathtub with anyone, and home cooking may be downright poisonous to him. He may yearn for a son to pray at his tomb—and yet suffer acutely at the mere approach of relatives-in-law. He may dream of a beautiful and complaisant mistress, less exigent and mercurial than any a bachelor may hope to discover—and stand aghast at admitting her to his bank-book, his family-tree and his secret ambitions. He may want company and not intimacy, or intimacy and not company. He may want a cook and not a partner in his business, or a partner in his business and not a cook. But in order to get the precise thing or things that he wants, he has to take a lot of other things that he doesn’t want—that no sane man, in truth, could imaginably want—and it is to the enterprise of forcing him into this almost Armenian bargain that the woman of his “choice” addresses herself. Once the game is fairly set, she searches out his weaknesses with the utmost delicacy and accuracy, and plays upon them with all her superior resources. He carries a handicap from the start. His sentimental and unintelligent belief in theories that she knows quite well are not true—e.g., the theory that she shrinks from him, and is modestly appalled by the banal carnalities of marriage itself—gives her a weapon against him which she drives home with instinctive and compelling art. The moment she discerns this sentimentality bubbling within him—that is, the moment his oafish smirks and eye rollings signify that he has achieved the intellectual disaster that is called falling in love—he is hers to do with as she will. Save for acts of God, he is forthwith as good as married.
This sentimentality in marriage is seldom, if ever, observed in women. For reasons that we shall examine later, they have much more to gain by the business than men, and so they are prompted by their cooler sagacity to enter upon it on the most favourable terms possible, and with the minimum admixture of disarming emotion. Men almost invariably get their mates by the process called falling in love; save among the aristocracies of the North and Latin men, the marriage of convenience is relatively rare; a hundred men marry “beneath” them to every woman who perpetrates the same folly. And what is meant by this so-called falling in love? What is meant by it is a procedure whereby a man accounts for the fact of his marriage, after feminine initiative and generalship have made it inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze of romance—in brief, by setting up the doctrine that an obviously self-possessed and mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most important adventure of her life, and with the keenest understanding of its utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost disembodied creature, enchanted and made perfect by a passion that has stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death. By this preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man is made glorious, and even gifted with a touch of flattering naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his wooing has assailed and overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in his arms; he has been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will upon her. Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles proudly, and divert the judicious with their boastful shouts.
Women, it is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious about embracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation. They never acknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase is, until the man has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off his retreat; to do otherwise would be to bring down upon their heads the mocking and contumely of all their sisters. With them, falling in love thus appears in the light of an afterthought, or, perhaps more accurately, in the light of a contagion. The theory, it would seem, is that the love of the man, laboriously avowed, has inspired it instantly, and by some unintelligible magic; that it was non-existent until the heat of his own flames set it off. This theory, it must be acknowledged, has a certain element of fact in it. A woman seldom allows herself to be swayed by emotion while the principal business is yet afoot and its issue still in doubt; to do so would be to expose a degree of imbecility that is confined only to the half-wits of the sex. But once the man is definitely committed, she frequently unbends a bit, if only as a relief from the strain of a fixed purpose, and so, throwing off her customary inhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury of a more or less forced and mawkish sentiment. It is, however, almost unheard of for her to permit herself this relaxation before the sentimental intoxication of the man is assured. To do otherwise—that is, to confess, even post facto, to an anterior descent,—would expose her, as I have said, to the scorn of all other women. Such a confession would be an admission that emotion had got the better of her at a critical intellectual moment, and in the eyes of women, as in the eyes of the small minority of genuinely intelligent men, no treason to the higher cerebral centres could be more disgraceful.
This disdain of sentimental weakness, even in those higher reaches where it is mellowed by aesthetic sensibility, is well revealed by the fact that women are seldom bemused by mere beauty in men. Save on the stage, the handsome fellow has no appreciable advantage in amour over his more Gothic brother. In real life, indeed, he is viewed with the utmost suspicion by all women save the most stupid. In him the vanity native to his sex is seen to mount to a degree that is positively intolerable. It not only irritates by its very nature; it also throws about him a sort of unnatural armour, and so makes him resistant to the ordinary approaches. For this reason, the matrimonial enterprises of the more reflective and analytical sort of women are almost always directed to men whose lack of pulchritude makes them easier to bring down, and, what is more important still, easier to hold down. The weight of opinion among women is decidedly against the woman who falls in love with an Apollo. She is regarded, at best, as flighty creature, and at worst, as one pushing bad taste to the verge of indecency. Such weaknesses are resigned to women approaching senility, and to the more ignoble variety of women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in love with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow may succumb to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no woman of poise and self-respect, even supposing her to be transiently flustered by a lovely buck, would yield to that madness for an instant, or confess it to her dearest friend. Women know how little such purely superficial values are worth. The voice of their order, the first taboo of their freemasonry, is firmly against making a sentimental debauch of the serious business of marriage.
This disdain of the pretty fellow is often accounted for by amateur psychologists on the ground that women are anesthetic to beauty—that they lack the quick and delicate responsiveness of man. Nothing could be more absurd. Women, in point of fact, commonly have a far keener aesthetic sense than men. Beauty is more important to them; they give more thought to it; they crave more of it in their immediate surroundings. The average man, at least in England and America, takes a sort of bovine pride in his anaesthesia to the arts; he can think of them only as sources of tawdry and somewhat discreditable amusement; one seldom hears of him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful thing that his wife displays in the presence, of a fine fabric, an effective colour, or a graceful form, say in millinery.
The truth is that women are resistant to so-called beauty in men for the simple and sufficient reason that such beauty is chiefly imaginary. A truly beautiful man, indeed, is as rare as a truly beautiful piece of jewelry. What men mistake for beauty in themselves is usually nothing save a certain hollow gaudiness, a revolting flashiness, the superficial splendour of a prancing animal. The most lovely moving picture actor, considered in the light of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a piece of vulgarity; his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo clocks and hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction room. All women, save the least intelligent, penetrate this imposture with sharp eyes. They know that the human body, except for a brief time in infancy, is not a beautiful thing, but a hideous thing. Their own bodies give them no delight; it is their constant effort to disguise and conceal them; they never expose them aesthetically, but only as an act of the grossest sexual provocation. If it were advertised that a troupe of men of easy virtue were to appear half-clothed upon a public stage, exposing their chests, thighs, arms and calves, the only women who would go to the entertainment would be a few delayed adolescents, a psychopathic old maid or two, and a guard of indignant members of the parish Ladies Aid Society.
Men show no such sagacious apprehension of the relatively feeble loveliness of the human frame. The most effective lure that a woman can hold out to a man is the lure of what he fatuously conceives to be her beauty. This so-called beauty, of course, is almost always a pure illusion. The female body, even at its best is very defective in form; it has harsh curves and very clumsily distributed masses; compared to it the average milk-jug, or even cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent and gratifying design—in brief, an objet d’art. The fact was curiously (and humorously) display during the late war, when great numbers of women in all the belligerent countries began putting on uniforms. Instantly they appeared in public in their grotesque burlesques of the official garb of aviators, elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards, and so on, their deplorable deficiency in design was unescapably revealed. A man, save he be fat, i.e., of womanish contours, usually looks better in uniform than in mufti; the tight lines set off his figure.
But a woman is at once given away: she look like a dumbbell run over by an express train. Below the neck by the bow and below the waist astern there are two masses that simply refuse to fit into a balanced composition. Viewed from the side, she presents an exaggerated S bisected by an imperfect straight line, and so she inevitably suggests a drunken dollar-mark. Her ordinary clothing cunningly conceals this fundamental imperfection. It swathes those impossible masses in draperies soothingly uncertain of outline. But putting her into uniform is like stripping her. Instantly all her alleged beauty vanishes.
Moreover, it is extremely rare to find a woman who shows even the modest sightliness that her sex is theoretically capable of; it is only the rare beauty who is even tolerable. The average woman, until art comes to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and crudely articulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she is almost sure to be bow-legged. If she has good legs, she is almost sure to have bad teeth. If she has good teeth, she is almost sure to have scrawny hands, or muddy eyes, or hair like oakum, or no chin. A woman who meets fair tests all ’round is so uncommon that she becomes a sort of marvel, and usually gains a livelihood by exhibiting herself as such, either on the stage, in the half-world, or as the private jewel of some wealthy connoisseur.
But this lack of genuine beauty in women lays on them no practical disadvantage in the primary business of their sex, for its effects are more than overborne by the emotional suggestibility, the herculean capacity for illusion, the almost total absence of critical sense of men. Men do not demand genuine beauty, even in the most modest doses; they are quite content with the mere appearance of beauty. That is to say, they show no talent whatever for differentiating between the artificial and the real. A film of face powder, skilfully applied, is as satisfying to them as an epidermis of damask. The hair of a dead Chinaman, artfully dressed and dyed, gives them as much delight as the authentic tresses of Venus. A false hip intrigues them as effectively as the soundest one of living fascia. A pretty frock fetches them quite as surely and securely as lovely legs, shoulders, hands or eyes. In brief, they estimate women, and hence acquire their wives, by reckoning up purely superficial aspects, which is just as intelligent as estimating an egg by purely superficial aspects. They never go behind the returns; it never occurs to them to analyze the impressions they receive. The result is that many a man, deceived by such paltry sophistications, never really sees his wife—that if, as God is supposed to see her, and as the embalmer will see her—until they have been married for years. All the tricks may be infantile and obvious, but in the face of so naive a spectator the temptation to continue practising them is irresistible. A trained nurse tells me that even when undergoing the extreme discomforts of parturition the great majority of women continue to modify their complexions with pulverized talcs, and to give thought to the arrangement of their hair. Such transparent devices, to be sure, reduce the psychologist to a sour sort of mirth, and yet it must be plain that they suffice to entrap and make fools of men, even the most discreet. I know of no man, indeed, who is wholly resistant to female beauty, and I know of no man, even among those engaged professionally by aesthetic problems, who habitually and automatically distinguishes the genuine, from the imitation. He may do it now and then; he may even preen himself upon his unusual discrimination; but given the right woman and the right stage setting, and he will be deceived almost as readily as a yokel fresh from the cabbage-field.
Such poor fools, rolling their eyes in appraisement of such meagre female beauty as is on display in Christendom, bring to their judgments a capacity but slightly greater than that a cow would bring to the estimation of epistemologies. They are so unfitted for the business that they are even unable to agree upon its elements. Let one such man succumb to the plaster charms of some prancing miss, and all his friends will wonder what is the matter with him. No two are in accord as to which is the most beautiful woman in their own town or street. Turn six of them loose in millinery shop or the parlour of a bordello, and there will be no dispute whatsoever; each will offer the crown of love and beauty to a different girl.
And what aesthetic deafness, dumbness and blindness thus open the way for, vanity instantly reinforces. That is to say, once a normal man has succumbed to the meretricious charms of a definite fair one (or, more accurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out and grabbed him by the nose), he defends his choice with all the heat and steadfastness appertaining to the defense of a point of the deepest honour. To tell a man flatly that his wife is not beautiful, or even that his stenographer or manicurist is not beautiful, is so harsh and intolerable an insult to his taste that even an enemy seldom ventures upon it. One would offend him far less by arguing that his wife is an idiot. One would relatively speaking, almost caress him by spitting into his eye. The ego of the male is simply unable to stomach such an affront. It is a weapon as discreditable as the poison of the Borgias.
Thus, on humane grounds, a conspiracy of silence surrounds the delusion of female beauty, and so its victim is permitted to get quite as much delight out of it as if it were sound. The baits he swallows most are not edible and nourishing baits, but simply bright and gaudy ones. He succumbs to a pair of well-managed eyes, a graceful twist of the body, a synthetic complexion or a skilful display of ankles without giving the slightest thought to the fact that a whole woman is there, and that within the cranial cavity of the woman lies a brain, and that the idiosyncrasies of that brain are of vastly more importance than all imaginable physical stigmata combined. Those idiosyncrasies may make for amicable relations in the complex and difficult bondage called marriage; they may, on the contrary, make for joustings of a downright impossible character. But not many men, laced in the emotional maze preceding, are capable of any very clear examination of such facts. The truth is that they dodge the facts, even when they are favourable, and lay all stress upon the surrounding and concealing superficialities. The average stupid and sentimental man, if he has a noticeably sensible wife, is almost apologetic about it. The ideal of his sex is always a pretty wife, and the vanity and coquetry that so often go with prettiness are erected into charms. In other words, men play the love game so unintelligently that they often esteem a woman in proportion as she seems to disdain and make a mock of her intelligence. Women seldom, if ever, make that blunder. What they commonly value in a man is not mere showiness, whether physical or spiritual, but that compound of small capacities which makes up masculine efficiency and passes for masculine intelligence. This intelligence, at its highest, has a human value substantially equal to that of their own. In a man’s world it at least gets its definite rewards; it guarantees security, position, a livelihood; it is a commodity that is merchantable. Women thus accord it a certain respect, and esteem it in their husbands, and so seek it out.
So far as I can make out by experiments on laboratory animals and by such discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there is no biological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspection of women. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical or physiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no better than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to the maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it would seem, actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps not in proportion to weight. Their nervous responses, if anything, are a bit duller than those of men; their muscular coordinations are surely no prompter. One finds quite as many obvious botches among them; they have as many bodily blemishes; they are infested by the same microscopic parasites; their senses are as obtuse; their ears stand out as absurdly. Even assuming that their special malaises are wholly offset by the effects of alcoholism in the male, they suffer patently from the same adenoids, gastritis, cholelithiasis, nephritis, tuberculosis, carcinoma, arthritis and so on—in short, from the same disturbances of colloidal equilibrium that produce religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy, pyaemia, night sweats, the yearning to save humanity, and all other such distempers in men. They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and appetites. They react in substantially the same way to all chemical and mechanical agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered per ora to the most sagacious woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and just as deleteriously as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or an ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of Cote Rotie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional woman shows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man shows, and is as maudlin and idiotic as he is.
Nay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not inherent in any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not in any advantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are rather to be sought in a physical disadvantage—that is, in the mechanical inferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive capacity, their deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every one knows, is partly a direct heritage from those females of the Pongo pygmaeus who were their probable fore-runners in the world; the same thing is to be observed in the females of almost all other species of mammals. But it is also partly due to the effects of use under civilization, and, above all, to what evolutionists call sexual selection. In other words, women were already measurably weaker than men at the dawn of human history, and that relative weakness has been progressively augmented in the interval by the conditions of human life. For one thing, the process of bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinement has replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of them in infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of cultural complexity has made education more intricate, that the two functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and attention of a woman than they lay upon the strength and attention of any other female. And for another thing, the consequent disability and need of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming the already large vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept of attractiveness to feminine weakness, so that he has come to esteem his woman, not in proportion as she is self-sufficient as a social animal but in proportion as she is dependent. In this vicious circle of influences women have been caught, and as a result their chief physical character today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift as much as a man. She cannot walk as far. She cannot exert as much mechanical energy in any other way. Even her alleged superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has demonstrated in “Man and Woman,” is almost wholly mythical; she cannot, in point of fact, stand nearly so much hardship as a man can stand, and so the law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of observation in its assumption that, whenever husband and wife are exposed alike to fatal suffering, say in a shipwreck, the wife dies first.
So far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt platitude in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that has given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have done is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case; they have sought compensation for their impotence in one field by employing their resources in another field to the utmost, and out of that constant and maximum use has come a marked enlargement of those resources. On the one hand the sum of them present in a given woman has been enormously increased by natural selection, so that every woman, so to speak, inherits a certain extra-masculine mental dexterity as a mere function of her femaleness. And on the other hand every woman, over and above this almost unescapable legacy from her actual grandmothers, also inherits admission to that traditional wisdom which constitutes the esoteric philosophy of woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is thus in the position of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is not only naturally gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily competent masters. While a boy at the same period is learning from his elders little more than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry vices and a few degrading enthusiasms, his sister is under instruction in all those higher exercises of the wits that her special deficiencies make necessary to her security, and in particular in all those exercises which aim at overcoming the physical, and hence social and economic superiority of man by attacks upon his inferior capacity for clear reasoning, uncorrupted by illusion and sentimentality.
Here, it is obvious, the process of intellectual development takes colour from the Sklavenmoral, and is, in a sense, a product of it. The Jews, as Nietzsche has demonstrated, got their unusual intelligence by the same process; a contrary process is working in the case of the English and the Americans, and has begun to show itself in the case of the French and Germans. The sum of feminine wisdom that I have just mentioned—the body of feminine devices and competences that is handed down from generation to generation of women—is, in fact, made up very largely of doctrines and expedients that infallibly appear to the average sentimental man, helpless as he is before them, as cynical and immoral. He commonly puts this aversion into the theory that women have no sense of honour. The criticism, of course, is characteristically banal. Honour is a concept too tangled to be analyzed here, but it may be sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling of absolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man and woman out of which rises most of man’s complaint of its absence—to wit, the conflict culminating in marriage, already described—the security of the woman is not something that is in actual being, but something that she is striving with all arms to attain. In such a conflict it must be manifest that honor can have no place. An animal fighting for its very existence uses all possible means of offence and defence, however foul. Even man, for all his boasting about honor, seldom displays it when he has anything of the first value at hazard. He is honorable, perhaps, in gambling, for gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for him to be honorable in business, for business is bread and butter. He is honorable (so long as the stake is trivial) in his sports, but he seldom permits honor to interfere with his perjuries in a lawsuit, or with hitting below the belt in any other sort of combat that is in earnest. The history of all his wars is a history of mutual allegations of dishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always well grounded. The best imitation of honor that he ever actually achieves in them is a highly self-conscious sentimentality which prompts him to be humane to the opponent who has been wounded, or disarmed, or otherwise made innocuous. Even here his so-called honor is little more than a form of playacting, both maudlin and dishonest. In the actual death-struggle he invariably bites.
Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized. In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells calls a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages. Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who has been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and natural instincts-that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to his own ego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this commonweal is always overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the greatest good to the greatest number—of petty rogues, ignoramuses and poltroons.
The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under this cheese-monger’s civilization is far more marked in men than in women, and far more in inferior men than in men of the higher categories. It must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a university professor of history that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the race have been, wholly civilized, in the sense that the term is employed in newspapers and in the pulpit. Think of Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther, Frederick the Great, Cromwell, Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar, Hannibal, Alexander, and to come down to our own time, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Bismarck, Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes.
The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for controlling and concealing their emotions is not an indication that they are more civilized, but a proof that they are less civilized. This capacity, so rare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of respect, is a characteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its loss is one of the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon of civilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous, knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one’s self with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.
Women are nearly always against war in modern times, for the reasons brought forward to justify it are usually either transparently dishonest or childishly sentimental, and hence provoke their scorn. But once the business is begun, they commonly favour its conduct outrance, and are thus in accord with the theory of the great captains of more spacious days. In Germany, during the late war, the protests against the Schrecklichkeit practised by the imperial army and navy did not come from women, but from sentimental men; in England and the United States there is no record that any woman ever raised her voice against the blockade which destroyed hundreds of thousands of German children. I was on both sides of the bloody chasm during the war, and I cannot recall meeting a single woman who subscribed to the puerile doctrine that, in so vast a combat between nations, there could still be categories of non-combatants, with a right of asylum on armed ships and in garrisoned towns. This imbecility was maintained only by men, large numbers of whom simultaneously took part in wholesale massacres of such non-combatants. The women were superior to such hypocrisy. They recognized the nature of modern war instantly and accurately, and advocated no disingenuous efforts to conceal it.
The feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largely responsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid of passion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with something akin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by the fact that very few masculine observers, on the occasions when they give attention to the matter, are in a state of mind conducive to exact observation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that the minority of women who unquestionably are is of formidable dimensions. To be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in the Northern countries, makes them place a high value upon the virginal type of woman, and so this type tends to grow more common by sexual selection, but despite that fact, it has by no means superseded the normal type, so realistically described by the theologians and publicists of the Middle Ages. It would, however, be rash to assert that this long continued sexual selection has not made itself felt, even in the normal type. Its chief effect, perhaps, is to make it measurably easier for a woman to conquer and conceal emotion than it is for a man. But this is a mere reinforcement of a native quality or, at all events, a quality long antedating the rise of the curious preference just mentioned. That preference obviously owes its origin to the concept of private property and is most evident in those countries in which the largest proportion of males are property owners, i.e., in which the property-owning caste reaches down into the lowest conceivable strata of bounders and ignoramuses. The low-caste man is never quite sure of his wife unless he is convinced that she is entirely devoid of amorous susceptibility. Thus he grows uneasy whenever she shows any sign of responding in kind to his own elephantine emotions, and is apt to be suspicious of even so trivial a thing as a hearty response to a connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of such suspicions, there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good deal less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the domestic hearth.
I have a feeling that the husband of this sort—he is very common in the United States, and almost as common among the middle classes of England, Germany and Scandinavia—does himself a serious disservice, and that he is uneasily conscious of it. Having got himself a wife to his austere taste, he finds that she is rather depressing—that his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly delights a man, when some woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery of yielding to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast between her reserve in the presence of other men and her enchanting complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is enormously tickled. To the world in general she seems remote and unapproachable; to him she is docile, fluttering, gurgling, even a bit abandoned. It is as if some great magnifico male, some inordinate czar or kaiser, should step down from the throne to play dominoes with him behind the door. The greater the contrast between the lady’s two fronts, the greater his satisfaction-up to, of course, the point where his suspicions are aroused. Let her diminish that contrast ever so little on the public side—by smiling at a handsome actor, by saying a word too many to an attentive head-waiter, by holding the hand of the rector of the parish, by winking amiably at his brother or at her sister’s husband—and at once the poor fellow begins to look for clandestine notes, to employ private inquiry agents, and to scrutinize the eyes, ears, noses and hair of his children with shameful doubts. This explains many domestic catastrophes.
The man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely imaginary. One often encounters references to her in literature, but who has ever met her in real life? As for me, I doubt that such a monster has ever actually existed. There are, of course, women who spend a great deal of time denouncing and reviling men, but these are certainly not genuine man-haters; they are simply women who have done their utmost to snare men, and failed. Of such sort are the majority of inflammatory suffragettes of the sex-hygiene and birth-control species. The rigid limitation of offspring, in fact, is chiefly advocated by women who run no more risk of having unwilling motherhood forced upon them than so many mummies of the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in such noisome matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attract the attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises that are difficult or forbidden. But certainly the enterprise of dissuading such a propagandist from her gospel would not be difficult, and I know of no law forbidding it.
I’ll begin to believe in the man-hater the day I am introduced to a woman who has definitely and finally refused a chance of marriage to a man who is of her own station in life, able to support her, unafflicted by any loathsome disease, and of reasonably decent aspect and manners—in brief a man who is thoroughly eligible. I doubt that any such woman breathes the air of Christendom. Whenever one comes to confidential terms with an unmarried woman, of course, she favours one with a long chronicle of the men she has refused to marry, greatly to their grief. But unsentimental cross-examination, at least in my experience, always develops the fact that every one of these suffered from some obvious and intolerable disqualification. Either he had a wife already and was vague about his ability to get rid of her, or he was drunk when he was brought to his proposal and repudiated it or forgot it the next day, or he was a bankrupt, or he was old and decrepit, or he was young and plainly idiotic, or he had diabetes or a bad heart, or his relatives were impossible, or he believed in spiritualism, or democracy, or the Baconian theory, or some other such nonsense. Restricting the thing to men palpably eligible, I believe thoroughly that no sane woman has ever actually muffed a chance. Now and then, perhaps, a miraculously fortunate girl has two victims on the mat simultaneously, and has to lose one. But they are seldom, if ever, both good chances; one is nearly always a duffer, thrown in in the telling to make the bourgeoisie marvel.
The reason why all this has to be stated here is simply that women, who could state it much better, have almost unanimously refrained from discussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of general conspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the publication of the esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment that any such body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity and less discretion, area good deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli’s appalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of such men as Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, Benvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is very rarely that a Marie Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the veils which conceal the acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is transmitted from mother to daughter, so to speak, behind the door. One observes its practical workings, but hears little about its principles. The causes of this secrecy are obvious. Women, in the last analysis, can prevail against men in the great struggle for power and security only by keeping them disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched battle, with the devil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic inferiority would inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have to apply their peculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the danger of arousing the foe. He must be attached without any formal challenge, and even without any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the heart of what Nietzsche called the slave morality—in brief, a morality based upon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having for its foremost character a bold denial of its actual aim.
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