Part 4

Worse than the physical ills, in both cases, are the mental ills that follow the acquiring and gradual development of these diseases. The man or woman becomes imbued with the idea of his physical unworthiness, luckily for mankind, but destructively to himself or herself. If intercourse is indulged in while the disease is in the system, this requires a brutalizing and hardening of the moral nature, sufficient to allow the man or woman to run the risk of infecting another woman or man with the horrible diseases and their attendant evils. The governments of the world are now stepping into this tabooed field, and doing much toward eradicating the diseases. In their first stages, a cure is comparatively sure; in the latter stages, the case is often hopeless. It is well, therefore, to act promptly, on any suspicion of having acquired the disease. Go, not to some medical quack, but to a reputable physician; and sooner or later you may be able to clean yourself of the serious mistake in your sex life. Having once passed through the living hell of venereal affection, it is a safe bet that you will not willingly undergo it again.

VII.

THE PURITY IDEAL

_Chastity._--The average mind defined chastity as abstinence; in this sense lifelong chastity is, in most cases, a perversion. The dictionary defines it as “pure from all unlawful sexual intercourse.” This brings up at once the question of what is unlawful. If by “unlawful” is meant “contrary to statute law,” this definition is inaccurate; and there is not always virtue in such chastity. For there is a higher law, of which the statutory law is merely a tardy crystallization. The actual law changes before the limping legislature alters the statute. One State, South Carolina, denies divorce for any cause whatever. Yet parties legally divorced and re-married outside that State, who return to it and live in the second mating, are certainly not unchaste. If love has left a married couple, their intercourse thereafter may be called unchaste; and if one or both of the parties find love elsewhere, and live it, this is chaste in the better sense.

More than this, a female animal, even living in a state of promiscuity, as some by their natures do, is never unchaste. For she has always the power of selecting her mate or mates. Charlotte Perkins Gilman follows the best thought when she defines chastity, “not as abstinence, but as selection.” In this higher sense, chastity is a virtue.

It may just as well be recognized that the moral standards of our culture are changing, at a greater rate than for the last thousand years. It has taken that long and much longer for woman to acquire enough inner power to set on foot the forces that could liberate her from her world-wide subjection to man. Now the forces have been liberated, and for better or for worse the woman of the future will be a freer, finer, and better rounded human being than the woman of the past was. She has acquired education, a share in the knowledge of the universe in which she lives. She has acquired a sound body, fit to bear strong children. She has acquired a strong and well-functioning mind, thereby giving a better heritage of mental aptitude to her children, and thereby making herself more fit as a mother to direct them in their formative years. She has acquired a part control over the essential purse-strings, the pocket-book, the economic power; she can no longer be bought and sold as a horse or a plough, but can herself buy her will of the world.

The old double standard of morality, of wild oats, marriage, and post-marital indulgence for men, and strict monogamy or prostitution for women, has already been thrown overboard by the new woman. She can dictate to her prospective husband now: “Come to me with a clean body, or do not come at all. Do not expect, either before marriage or afterwards, to indulge in sexual wanderings that I may not share.” She is not insisting, shrewd observers say, in an absolute monogamy, which runs counter to the sexual nature of the race; she is, instead, lifting man higher toward the strict monogamy enforced upon her, and at the same time is stepping consciously and intelligently a little lower than this strict monogamy into a world that will permit intelligent and regulated erotic experiments and experiences. For the sexual morality of the future will not be handed down in a ready-made decalog by some future Moses from a White House Sinai, but will gradually evolve and crystallize out of sober and intelligent experimentation. It will never be a hard-and-fast series of “Thou-shalt-nots”; it will be much more liberal, offering more than one way of allowed love life.

_Sexual Morality, Today and Tomorrow._--The keynote of the new sexual morality is freedom, on both sides. This means, first, freedom from financial considerations. Love is a deep-rooted instinct, whose fruition means years or a lifetime of happiness or unhappiness for the individuals concerned, and the creation, in progeny, of the men and women of the future. None of these things can be purchased ready-made in the market for cash. A man can not buy a woman’s love, or a child to do him honor; neither can woman or man sell these things. Yet under the present system, as a hangover of the past, these things must be bought. A woman, contemplating marriage, had to consider almost primarily whether her prospective husband could feed and house her and her children satisfactorily. All three, wife, kept woman, and prostitute, had to consider the financial: all three were lowered by the consideration. This element has been and is being taken out of the love life entirely. The result of this elimination will be wholesome all along the line. Love will be experienced for love, and not for money.

Second is the realization that marriages are not made in heaven, but on earth, and are, accordingly, human relationships, of a contractual or quasi-contractual nature, which may be terminated like any other human relationship. Our whole method of mating is haphazard in the extreme; there is no provision for adequate knowledge of the proposed partner; there is the reverse of a certainty that this woman or man, thrown in contact with man or woman through proximity or unplanned causes, is a human organism so sensitive physically, mentally, and spiritually that it can co-operate helpfully with our own. Men and woman make mistakes, in love choice as elsewhere. The new morality will propose a dignified way of terminating such mistakes. At the present time, the divorce laws hold in practice that the man and woman who realize their unfitness for each other, and determine to secure a divorce, are criminals, guilty of collusion; this, at least, is the law in many states and nations. Divorce laws in harmony with the new morality will permit a man and woman, who have erred in their love choice to part as friends, rather than as enemies.

Thirdly, the new morality will by no means insist that all mating be within the strict palings of monogamous marriage. If a man or a woman, having carefully considered what will be lost and what gained by a wider type of love relationships, determines to risk the experiment, without taking advantage of other women or men, this is an individual choice; and the new morality in all matters is giving the individual as much intelligent choice as it can, consonant with social safety. Such relationships are like laboratory experiments in eugenics for the good of the race; they may result in unhappiness, but the very discovery that unhappiness has resulted is a social fact which may aid future decisions. If, to the contrary, happiness results, this is also a social fact which may aid future decisions.

The question of the home and the children is linked with this. Neither of these, as at present conducted, are matters of great human glory; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s extended studies of each should be read, to get a new and intelligent slant upon our homes and our child-rearing. Motherhood is a great benefit to society; motherhood pensions and similar remedies are steps toward a social repayment for this benefit. More than this, if Haldane is at all correct, reproduction and sexual union may be separated in fact in the future; in which case, much greater liberality of union will be the usual thing. These matters are all experimental; the important thing is to look at them with something of a scientific detachment, rather than with a bitter bias and prejudice, based upon what Moses reported was said to him out of the thunders above a South Arabian mountain, or what the English common law or the Latin ecclesiastical law provided a thousand years ago. We are tending toward efficiency in all human concerns upon the industrial field; we are tending, more slowly but no less certainly, upon the extension of efficiency to matters connected with the home.

Woman’s labor, or rather, the labor in the home, will not always remain upon the low domestic stage: man’s labor moved out of the domestic stage into the stage of factory and commercial house several centuries ago. Scientific information and the care of experts are invaluable in home management and child rearing, no less than in the rotation of crops and the development of fatter hogs or slimmer dahlia stems. Child rearing will slowly be included in matters where efficiency and modern methods will prevail; and, if this involves in the end some form of institutional raising, in greater or less degree, it should be understood in advance that this will date from a period where our culture is determined by human beings as well as by money; and that the institutions of the future will be administered by those who today make a success of their individual establishments, rather than by those who today make a failure of the institutions committed to their care. The fact that institutions for the feeble-minded today are a failure is no proof that institutions for the sound-minded tomorrow will be failures. No one recommends that the business of the U. S. Steel Company or the great railroad lines be taken out of the office, and put back in the individual homes. No one, in a more enlightened age, will desire to see the anarchic and haphazard era of domestic rearing of children and of domestic home management, by paid or unpaid domestics, ever return to a world that has known a better system.

_The Ideal of Purity._--To the man facing the future, these things may be said in conclusion. First, guard well your youth; it is your day of growth, and not your day for sexual indulgence. Second, guard well your mating period. It is not an hour for excessive indulgence. It is an hour for engendering mutual happiness and satisfaction in yourself and your mate; and an hour for intelligent direction of the upbringing of your children, so that they may be free from the poisonous and vicious ignorance that may have blighted or come near blighting your own life. Third, broaden yourself constantly. Keep your body at the peak of its physical fitness, and your mind at the peak of its mental fitness. Bodily fitness will go far toward preparing you for mental fitness; if you will feed your mind as carefully as you feed your body, with the food of man’s best knowledge of the facts concerning the whole universe, and his highest dreams as embodied in art and literature, you will thereby make your soul or spirit fit as well.

You will, if you are wise, elect an ideal of purity. Purity means a recognition that love is a matter, not of barter and sale, but of desire permeating body and mind and spirit. Love looks backward, around it, and forward: it is built upon the past, it controls today, it builds for the future. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see god, said a great ancient teacher. It may well be that the pure in heart will be blessed, because they shall see god within. Only by a life fit in every particular shall man attain to a development of that inner light, that innate godhead, that contribution toward the development of the race’s highest idealism in practice and thought, which is perhaps man’s highest achievement on this dusty planet.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Typos silently corrected, but inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.

Missing word “are” added to page 60: “Neither of these, as at present conducted, are matters of ...”