Part 1

OUR CHANGING MORALITY _A SYMPOSIUM_

EDITED BY FREDA KIRCHWEY

ALBERT & CHARLES BONI NEW YORK 1924

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALBERT & CHARLES BONI, INC.

_Printed in the United States of America by_ J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK

INTRODUCTION

BY FREDA KIRCHWEY

The subject of sex has been treated in this generation with a strange, rather panic-stricken lack of balance. Obscenity hawks its old wares at one end of the road and dogmatic piety shouts warnings at the other--while between is chaos. And the chaos extends beyond ideas and talk, beyond novels and scenarios and Sunday feature stories, into the realm of actual conduct. Religion has indeed found substantial matter for its words of caution and disapproval: never in recent generations have human beings so floundered about outside the ropes of social and religious sanctions.

But while John Roach Straton and Billy Sunday point a pleasant way toward hell, while sensationalism finds in new manners of life subject for five-inch headlines, and while modern novelists make their modern characters stumble through pages of inner conflict to ends of darkness and desperation, a few people are at work quietly sorting out the elements of chaos and holding fragments of conduct up in the sun and air to find what they really are made of.

No one seeks to argue chaos away. Certainly Mr. Straton and Mr. Sunday are right: Men and women are ignoring old laws. In their relations with each other they are living according to tangled, conflicting codes. Remnants of early admonitions and relationships, the dictates of custom, the behavior of their friends, their own tastes and desires, elusive dreams of a loveliness not provided for by rules--all these are scrambling to fill the gap that was left when Right and Wrong finally followed the other absolute monarchs to an empty, nominal existence somewhere in exile. But the traditional, ministerial method with chaos was not Jehovah’s method. He brought order and light into the world; but the way of our current moralists has been to clamp down the hatches even though “sin” bubbled beneath. A few courageous, matter-of-fact glances into the depths have been embodied in the articles in this volume. The men and women who have written them have approached the subject variously; the fragments they have brought up to examine do not necessarily fit together. But none of these writers is afraid to saunter up to the edge and see what moral disorder looks like.

Some of them find it thoroughly disagreeable. They believe that old laws were born of old desires and find their sanctions in the emotions of men. They seek for new and rational ways back to the sort of stability provided by the traditional relationships of men and women. Others find in contemporary manners merely the disorder incident to reconstruction; they find there tentative beginnings rather than ruinous endings. They see chaos as an interesting laboratory, filled with strange ferments and the pungent odors of new compounds. None of these writers offers dogmatic conclusions--and in this they differ delightfully from our most popular novelists and preachers. They present facts, they analyze and interpret; they suggest directions, they even prophesy. But they never announce or warn or reprove. When these chapters first appeared as articles in _The Nation_ it became evident that this exercise of thought was itself commonly held to be a simple blasphemy. Letters from readers came in scores charging the articles with the sin of intelligence where only faith and conformity were tolerable. Dogma is so deep in the bone of even the more enlightened and adult members of our modern world that the most modest doubt regarding the success of monogamy or the virtue of chastity becomes in some way an insult to Moses or Saint Paul.

It is interesting to see how many of the authors of this group of articles find a connection between the changing standards of sex behavior and the increasing freedom of women. Are women forcing this change? Or does freedom itself make change inevitable? Possibly only the woman in the isolation of the home is able to sustain the double load of her own virtue and her husband’s ideals. Out in the world, in contact and competition with men, she is forced to discriminate; questions are thrust upon her. The old rules fail to work; bewildering inconsistencies confront her. Things that were sure become unsure. And slowly, clumsily, she is trying to construct a way out to a new sort of certainty in life; she is seeking something to take the place of the burden of solemn ideals and reverential attitudes that rolled off her shoulders when she emerged. That some such process may be going on is hinted at in more than one of these articles. Certainly, of the factors involved in modern sex relations, women and economic conditions are the two that have suffered the most revolutionary change; and men’s morals must largely shape themselves to the patterns laid down by these two masters of life.

Much has been said about sex--and everything remains to be said. Largely, new conclusions will be reached through new processes of living. People will act--and then a new code will grow up. But along the way guidance and interpretation are deeply needed, if only to take the place of the pious imprecations of those who fear life and hate the dangers and uncertainties of thought and emotion.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION v _By Freda Kirchwey_

STYLES IN ETHICS 3 _By Bertrand Russell_

MODERN MARRIAGE 19 _By Arthur Garfield Hays_

CHANGES IN SEX RELATIONS 37 _By Elsie Clews Parsons_

TOWARD MONOGAMY 53 _By Charlotte Perkins Gilman_

WOMEN--FREE FOR WHAT? 69 _By Edwin Muir_

VIRTUE AND WOMEN 85 _By Isabel Leavenworth_

WHERE ARE THE FEMALE GENIUSES? 107 _By Sylvia Kopald_

MAN AND WOMAN AS CREATORS 129 _By Alexander Goldenweiser_

DOMINANT SEXES 147 _By M. Vaerting_

MODERN LOVE AND MODERN FICTION 167 _By J. W. Krutch_

CAN MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS? 183 _By Floyd Dell_

LOVE AND MARRIAGE 197 _By Ludwig Lewisohn_

COMMUNIST PURITANS 207 _By Louis Fischer_

STEREOTYPES 219 _By Florence Guy Seabury_

WOMEN AND THE NEW MORALITY 235 _By Beatrice M. Hinkle_

Styles in Ethics By Bertrand Russell

Hon. Bertrand Arthur William Russell

_is a mathematician, writer, and lecturer on international affairs and problems of government. Born at Trellech, England, May 18th, 1872. F.R.S. 1908; Late Lecturer and Fellow Trinity College, Cambridge. Heir presumptive to 2nd Earl Russell. Author of “German Social Democracy,” 1896; “Essay on the Foundation of Geometry,” 1897; “Philosophy of Leibnitz,” 1900; “Principles of Mathematics,” 1903; with D. A. N. Whitehead, “Principia Mathematica,” 1910; “Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy,” 1914; “Principles of Social Reconstruction,” 1917; “Why Men Fight,” 1917; “Mysticism and Logic,” 1918; “Roads to Freedom,” 1918; “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy,” 1919; “The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism,” 1920; “The Analysis of the Mind,” 1921; “The Problem of China,” 1922; “The A. B. C. of Atoms,” 1923; “Icarus, or the Future of Science,” 1924._

OUR CHANGING MORALITY

STYLES IN ETHICS

BY BERTRAND RUSSELL

In all ages and nations positive morality has consisted almost wholly of prohibitions of various classes of actions, with the addition of a small number of commands to perform certain other actions. The Jews, for example, prohibited murder and theft, adultery and incest, the eating of pork and seething the kid in its mother’s milk. To us the last two precepts may seem less important than the others, but religious Jews have observed them far more scrupulously than what seem to us fundamental principles of morality. South Sea Islanders could imagine nothing more utterly wicked than eating out of a vessel reserved for the use of the chief. My friend Dr. Brogan made a statistical investigation into the ethical valuations of undergraduates in certain American colleges. Most considered Sabbath-breaking more wicked than lying, and extra-conjugal sexual relations more wicked than murder. The Japanese consider disobedience to parents the most atrocious of crimes. I was once at a charming spot on the outskirts of Kioto with several Japanese socialists, men who were among the most advanced thinkers in the country. They told me that a certain well beside which we were standing was a favorite spot for suicides, which were very frequent. When I asked why so many occurred they replied that most were those of young people in love whose parents had forbidden them to marry. To my suggestion that perhaps it would be better if parents had less power they all returned an emphatic negative. To Dr. Brogan’s undergraduates this power of Japanese parents to forbid love would seem monstrous, but the similar power of husbands or wives would seem a matter of course. Neither they nor the Japanese would examine the question rationally; both would decide unthinkingly on the basis of moral precepts learned in youth.

When we study in the works of anthropologists the moral precepts which men have considered binding in different times and places we find the most bewildering variety. It is quite obvious to any modern reader that most of these customs are absurd. The Aztecs held that it was a duty to sacrifice and eat enemies captured in war, since otherwise the light of the sun would go out. The Book of Leviticus enjoins that when a married man dies without children his brother shall marry the widow, and the first son born shall count as the dead man’s son. The Romans, the Chinese, and many other nations secured a similar result by adoption. This custom originated in ancestor-worship; it was thought that the ghost would make himself a nuisance unless he had descendants (real or putative) to worship him. In India the remarriage of widows is traditionally considered something too horrible to contemplate. Many primitive races feel horror at the thought of marrying any one belonging to one’s own totem, though there may be only the most distant blood-relationship. After studying these various customs it begins at last to occur to the reader that possibly the customs of his own age and nation are not eternal, divine ordinances, but are susceptible of change, and even, in some respects, of improvement. Books such as Westermarck’s “History of Human Marriage” or Müller-Lyer’s “Phasen der Liebe,” which relate in a scientific spirit the marriage customs that have existed and the reasons which have led to their growth and decay, produce evidence which must convince any rational mind that our own customs are sure to change and that there is no reason to expect a change to be harmful. It thus becomes impossible to cling to the position of many who are earnest advocates of _political_ reform and yet hold that reform in our moral precepts is not needed. Moral precepts, like everything else, can be improved, and the true reformer will be as open-minded in regard to them as in regard to other matters.

Müller-Lyer, from the point of view of family institutions, divides the history of civilization into three periods--the clan period, the family period, and the personal period. Of these the last is only now beginning; the other two are each divided into three stages--early, middle, and late. He shows that sexual and family ethics have at all times been dominated by economic considerations; hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and industrial tribes or nations have each their own special kinds of institutions. Economic causes determine whether a tribe will practice polygamy, polyandry, group marriage, or monogamy, and whether monogamy will be lifelong or dissoluble. Whatever the prevailing practice in a tribe it is thought to be the only one compatible with virtue, and all departures from it are regarded with moral horror. Owing to the force of custom it may take a long time for institutions to adapt themselves to economic circumstances; the process of adaptation may take centuries. Christian sexual ethics, according to this author, belong to the middle-family period; the personal period, now beginning, has not yet been embodied in the laws of most Christian countries, and even the late-family period, since it admits divorce under certain circumstances, involves an ethic to which the church is usually opposed.

Müller-Lyer suggests a general law to the effect that where the state is strong the family is weak and the position of women is good, whereas where the state is weak the family is strong and the position of women is bad. It is of course obvious that where the family is strong the position of women must be bad, and vice versa, but the connection of these with the strength or weakness of the state is less obvious, though probably in the main no less true. Traditional China and Japan afforded good instances. In both the state was much weaker than in modern Europe, the family much stronger, and the position of women much worse. It is true that in modern Japan the state is very strong, yet the family also is strong and the position of women is bad; but this is a transitional condition. The whole tendency in Japan is for the family to grow weaker and the position of women to grow better. This tendency encounters grave difficulties. I met in Japan only one woman who appeared to be what we should consider emancipated in the West--she was charming, beautiful, high-minded, and prepared to make any sacrifice for her principles. After the earthquake in Tokio the officer in charge of the forces concerned in keeping order in the district where she lived seized her and the man with whom she lived in a free union and her twelve-year-old nephew, whom he believed to be her son; he took them to the police station and there murdered them by slow strangulation, taking about ten minutes over each except the boy. In his account of the matter he stated that he had not had much difficulty with the boy, because he had succeeded in making friends with him on the way to the police station. The boy was an American citizen. At the funeral, the remains of all three were seized by armed reactionaries and destroyed, with the passive acquiescence of the police. The question whether the murderer deserved well of his country is now set in schools, half the children answering affirmatively. We have here a dramatic confrontation of middle-family ethics with personal ethics. The officer’s views were those of feudalism, which is a middle-family system; his victims’ views were those of the nascent personal period. The Japanese state, which belongs to the late-family period, disapproved of both.

The middle-family system involves cruelty and persecution. The indissolubility of marriage results in appalling misery for the wives of drunkards, sadists, and brutes of all kinds, as well as great unhappiness for many men and the unedifying spectacle of daily quarrels for the unfortunate children of ill-assorted couples. It involves also an immense amount of prostitution, with its inevitable consequence of widespread venereal disease. It makes marriage, in most cases, a matter of financial bargain between parents, and virtually proscribes love. It considers sexual intercourse always justifiable within marriage, even if no mutual affection exists. It is impossible to be too thankful that this system is nearly extinct in the Western nations (except France). But it is foolish to pretend that this ideal held by the Catholic church and in some degree by most Protestant churches is a lofty one. It is intolerant, gross, cruel, and hostile to all the best potentialities of human nature. Nothing is gained by continuing to pay lip-service to this musty Moloch.

The American attitude on marriage is curious. America, in the main, does not object to easy divorce laws, and is tolerant of those who avail themselves of them. But it holds that those who live in countries where divorce is difficult or impossible ought to submit to hardships from which Americans are exempt, and deserve to be held up to obloquy if they do not do so. An interesting example of this attitude was afforded by the treatment of Gorki when he visited the United States.

There are two different lines of argument by which it is possible to attack the general belief that there are universal absolute rules of moral conduct, and that any one who infringes them is wicked. One line of argument emerges from the anthropological facts which we have already considered. Broadly speaking the views of the average man on sexual ethics are those appropriate to the economic system existing in the time of his great-grandfather. Morality has varied as economic systems have varied, lagging always about three generations behind. As soon as people realize this they find it impossible to suppose that the particular brand of marriage customs prevailing in their own age and nation represents eternal verities, whereas all earlier and later marriage customs, and all those prevailing in other latitudes and longitudes, are vicious and degraded. This shows that we ought to be prepared for changes in marriage customs, but does not tell us what changes we ought to desire.

The second line of argument is more positive and more important. Popular morality--including that of the churches, though not that of the great mystics--lays down rules of conduct rather than ends of life. The morality that ought to exist would lay down ends of life rather than rules of conduct. Christ says: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”; this lays down one of the ends of life. The Decalogue says: “Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath Day”; this lays down a rule of action. Christ’s conduct to the woman taken in adultery showed the conflict between love and moral rules. All his priests, down to our own day, have gone directly contrary to his teachings on this point, and have shown themselves invariably willing to cast the first stone. The belief in the importance of rules of conduct is superstitious; what is important is to care for good ends. A good man is a man who cares for the happiness of his relations and friends, and, if possible, for that of mankind in general, or, again, a man who cares for art and science. Whether such a man obeys the moral rules laid down by the Jews thousands of years ago is quite unimportant. Moreover a man may obey all these rules and yet be extremely bad.

Let us take some illustrations. I have a friend, a high-minded man, who has taken part in arduous and dangerous enterprises of great public importance and is almost unbelievably kind in all his private relations. This man has a wife who is a dipsomaniac, who has become imbecile, and has to be kept in an institution. She cannot divorce him because she is imbecile; he cannot divorce her because she affords him no ground for divorce. He does not consider himself morally bound to her and is therefore, from a conventional point of view, a wicked man. On the other hand a man who is perpetually drunk, who kicks his wife when she is pregnant, and begets ten imbecile children, is not generally regarded as particularly wicked. A business man who is generous to all his employees but falls in love with his stenographer is wicked; another who bullies his employees but is faithful to his wife is virtuous. This attitude is rank superstition, and it is high time that it was got rid of.

Sexual morality, freed from superstition, is a simple matter. Fraud and deceit, assault, seduction of persons under age, are proper matters for the criminal law. Relations between adults who are free agents are a private matter, and should not be interfered with either by the law or by public opinion, because no outsider can know whether they are good or bad. When children are involved the state becomes interested to the extent of seeing that they are properly educated and cared for, and it ought to insure that the father does his duty by them in the way of maintenance. But neither the state nor public opinion ought to insist on the parents living together if they are incompatible; the spectacle of parents’ quarrels is far worse for children than the separation of the parents could possibly be.

The ideal to be aimed at is not life-long monogamy enforced by legal or social penalties. The ideal to be aimed at is that all sexual intercourse should spring from the free impulse of both parties, based upon mutual inclination and nothing else. At present a woman who sells herself successively to different men is branded as a prostitute, whereas a woman who sells herself for life to one rich man whom she does not love becomes a respected society leader. The one is exactly as bad as the other. The individual should not be condemned in either case; but the institutions producing the individual’s action should be condemned equally in both cases. The cramping of love by institutions is one of the major evils of the world. Every person who allows himself to think that an adulterer must be wicked adds his stone to the prison in which the source of poetry and beauty and life is incarcerated by “priests in black gowns.”

Perhaps there is not, strictly speaking, any such thing as “scientific” ethics. It is not the province of science to decide on the ends of life. Science can show that an ethic is unscientific, in the sense that it does not minister to any desired end. Science also can show how to bring the interest of the individual into harmony with that of society. We make laws against theft, in order that theft may become contrary to self-interest. We might, on the same ground, make laws to diminish the number of imbecile children born into the world. There is no evidence that existing marriage laws, particularly where they are very strict, serve any social purpose; in this sense we may say that they are unscientific. But to proclaim the ends of life, and make men conscious of their value, is not the business of science; it is the business of the mystic, the artist, and the poet.

Modern Marriage and Ancient Laws

By Arthur Garfield Hays

Arthur Garfield Hays

_is an attorney practicing in New York City. He was manager of the New York State La Follette campaign, 1924._

MODERN MARRIAGE AND ANCIENT LAWS

BY ARTHUR GARFIELD HAYS

“Are we married?” This was a query recently put to a New York lawyer. The woman wanted to have been married, but wished not to be married any longer; at the same time she rather objected to a divorce. The man did not care much about it, so long as he could marry, or marry again, without too much inconvenience arising from the earlier entanglement. The lawyer’s answer was so obvious that it might have been made by a layman: “How do I know?”

The two had been living together, had called each other husband and wife, and had in general passed as such, but at the beginning of the relationship each had felt that if one wanted to be free the other would not hold him or her; it was agreed that they should have no financial responsibility for each other and that there should be nothing about the arrangement which would make it last “till death do us part.” In speaking of themselves as “husband and wife” they had intended the words to represent merely a formula of their own.