Part 4

Let us go back for a few decades and see if we can catch the values of our time confusedly shaping themselves within the framework of human life. I say shaping themselves, for as Nietzsche said fifty years ago, the time of the conscious valuers has passed; our values for a century have not been created, they have happened. They happened because men had become skeptical not merely of God, or of the existence of a moral order, but of life itself, and could not set before themselves any purpose justifying life, but only its bare mechanism, work, duty, the preservation of society. It has been, thus, one of the main achievements of modern thought to banish from the world the notion of enjoyment. This was begun first in a philosophical way by the utilitarians, who were reasonably convinced that, factories existing for the first time as far as they knew in history, it was incumbent on men to work in them. A fine philosophy, truly; yet men believed in it. After the utilitarians came the advocates of self-help, who showed that the utilitarian policy might not be without individual advantage; that if one cut off one’s pleasures, or at least those which cost money, one might win a bizarre, undreamed-of success. The anchorites of wealth arose, the great men who, when they had acquired riches which might have built a new Florence, if scarcely a new Jerusalem, could make no use of them, preferring to teach in Sunday-schools and endow universities. In the eyes of these men wealth was justified only if it could not be enjoyed, for enjoyment was the one thing which went against all their ideas, all those instincts which had set them where they stood. Wealth, thus, could not be enjoyed, could not be used, for when they had reached their end the means still remained means.

The disciples of Smiles have disappeared; men get rich in other ways now; nevertheless a whole view of life has been left behind which we have not fundamentally questioned. The Victorians established the basis of morals in utility; we have come to the stage when we imagine that the basis of life itself is utility. For recreation as an end in itself we have so little appreciation that even sport has become a kind of duty, and nothing is more devastating than the scorn of a conscientious athlete for those who, enjoying perfectly good health, do not go to the trouble of keeping themselves fit. A little unpremeditated pleasure still persists in our common lives, in fox-trotting, drinking, and revues, but it is without either taste or resource; it is not expression but simply relaxation, an amusing way of being tired. The one thing that people will not pardon is the taking of pleasure seriously as an end in itself. The æsthete, at the Renaissance a type of the opulence of life, and quite a common, indeed an expected type, is in our day an aberration demanding our satire when once we have overcome our indignation. Nothing shows more disastrously how incapable we are of entertaining the conviction that life in itself, apart from the labor necessary to make it possible, is a thing worth living. Even art has justified itself for several decades chiefly by its social utility, and only now, against strong opposition, is it escaping from the barriers set up by the generation overawed by Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells. The notion that men may be on the earth for something else than sweating is dead. We have arrived at an amazing incapacity for joy; and life is to us always less worth living than it should be.

This exaltation of means has brought about a general instrumentalization of life. It weighs heavily upon men; but upon women its weight is crushing, for women have not such a ready capacity as men for transforming themselves to the image of their functions, and they disfigure themselves more in the attempt. Consequently, as woman has taken a large and larger part in our tentative and unsatisfactory civilization she has undergone, in fact and in people’s minds, a distorting process. It is true, woman, lovely woman, the fair charmer, has passed away; but we are hardly better off now when she has become a term like economics. After the economic man has come the economic woman; that is, an entity almost as useful as machinery, and for the inner culture of mankind almost as uninteresting.

How, in striving for emancipation, woman has reached such a dismal stage in her development is one of the saddest stories of our time. The age is an age of work; woman desires freedom, the right of every human being; and freedom in such an age can only mean the freedom to work. But to work, except in a few vocations such as art, is in our time to specialize oneself, and the freedom of women has necessarily resolved itself into a permission to do little things which can give them no final satisfaction. Their freedom is bounded by the slavery under which men, too, suffer; and in changing their occupations they have not escaped from the cage, but only out of one compartment of it into another, a little more cheerless than the first. They have achieved a little more liberty than they had before; but this liberty is disenchanting because it leaves them as far away as ever from the full liberty of their spirit. Perhaps in no other age has woman been, in a deep, instinctive sense, so skeptical as she is at present.

And for all this the age--an age in which labor has a fantastic prominence--is responsible; for it is in a time when everybody works, and when there is nothing conceivable that one can do but work, that the cantankerous question of inequality arises. Only in a race can one be slower than another; only then does the necessity to become as good a runner as the fastest come home poignantly to every one. But if it should happen that life is not a race at all? Where leisure is regarded as a more important thing than work and work falls into its proper, subordinate place as the mere means to leisure one does not think very much about inequality, for it has no longer any urgent importance. Nor does one set much value, except in superficials, on uniformity. Among people free from crushing labor (as the whole human race may some time be) there has always been delight in diversity and scorn for uniformity; for, to people enjoying their spirit and the world, diversity even when it is exasperating is of infinite interest, giving a satisfying sense of the richness of life.

Comedy--and comedy is idleness tolerantly enjoying itself--is founded, it has been said, upon a recognition of the equality of the sexes; but it would be more just to say that it is founded upon a view of life into which the notions of equality and inequality do not enter at all, because they are unnecessary. To Congreve and Stendhal women were not the inferior sex, for, in spite of the conventions in which ostensibly they moved, they were free, and therefore interesting. And remote as these figures are from us, they demonstrate a very useful truth, that the way to get over our stupid obsession with inequality is to reach a stage where diversity will be the norm, involving disadvantage to no one. Toward that stage, which can only be made possible by a more general leisure, we are moving, if what the reformers and the scientists tell us is true. It will be a stage in which rules will have more importance than laws and spontaneous actions than obligations; and most of the things we do will be regarded as play rather than duty. Conduct will probably be about a fourth of life, instead of the three-fourths postulated by Matthew Arnold. And although this state has not come yet and may not come for a long time, it would be as sensible to found a philosophy upon it as upon a period of transition as dismal and impermanent as ours. Moreover the values of the past are against us as well as those of the future which we imagine. There is a certain ignobility in the dispute over human inequality, a failure to rise to the human level. It is not a question but a misunderstanding, which the accumulated imaginative culture of the world might have made impossible. A little sense of the richness of life would disperse it. Who would be so fantastic as to say that Falstaff is greater or less than Ophelia, or whether Uncle Toby is the exact equal of Anna Karenina? To ask the question is to evoke at once an image of the diverse riches of human nature and of the poverty of mind which can reduce it to such terms, destroying all interest and all nuance.

But where our instrumental philosophy has had the most grotesque effect has been upon our conception of love. People have come to regard love as merely a device for propagating the race. Now this view of love is not new; it has always been dear to the bourgeoisie, who have always thought it a matter of immense moment that they should have sons to carry on their businesses when they were dead. It is the immemorial philistine conception of love: the strange thing is that it has been taken over by the intelligentsia and glorified. This is in the strictest sense a revolution in thought. No one who has written beautifully of love has thought of it as the intellectuals think. To Plato and Dante the essence of love did not reside in procreation; nor has procreation been anything but a divine accident to the poets. And that is in the human tradition, and probably in the natural order of things; for it is possible that both love and procreation are most perfect when they are unpremeditated, and the child comes as a gift and a surprise; for in the fruits of joy there is a principle of exuberance which distinguishes them from the fruits of duty.

The intellectuals have destroyed the humanistic conception of love as pure spontaneity, as expression, by setting its justification not within itself, but in the child. In “Man and Superman” Mr. Shaw makes Tanner say that if our love did not produce another human being to serve the community, the community would have the sacred right of killing us off, just as the hive kills off the drones who do not attain the queen bee. But what does that mean? It means that happiness is of no importance, that it is a matter of the slightest moment whether, in a life which will never be given to us again, we realize some of the potentialities of our being or pass through it blind to the end. If it is worth while living at all, this must needs be the precise opposite of the truth. The child, like everything else, is justified; but it is not justified because it adds to the potential wealth of society, but because it adds to our present delight, and moreover lives a life as valid as our own. The truth is that we dare not admit that any pleasure whatever has a right to exist without serving society, and serving it deliberately. The joys of other generations have become our duties; and it is significant that Mr. Shaw and the bulk of the intelligentsia are at one on the birth-rate with the Roman Catholic Church, that church which has on many occasions through its theologians affirmed its belief that sensual love is a guilty thing, and, using its own kind of logic, has exhorted man to multiply and replenish the earth.

“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”; and that being so, it is the task of those who are a little more serious than the serious to set about discovering the principles of glory and enjoyment in life. And--I am setting down a truism--the main principle of enjoyment for the human race is not art, nor thought, nor the practice of virtue, but for man, woman, and for woman, man. The exchange of happiness between the sexes is not only the creative agent in human life, perpetuating it; it is also the thing which gives the perpetuation of life its chief meaning. People have always felt this vaguely; it has made labor endurable to them; but hardly ever have they recognized it clearly, and to the poets and artists who know it they have always responded a little skeptically. They have thought of love as a justification a little too materialistic for life; but love is only materialistic when it is regarded as a means.

To accept men and women as ends in themselves, to enter into their life as one of them, is to partake of absolute life, that life which at every moment realizes itself, existing for its own sake. We cannot live in that life continuously; for the accomplishment of the intricate purposes of society we must at certain times and with part of our minds regard our fellow-creatures as instruments; but the more we tend to do so the more we banish joy from life. Life does not consist, whatever the utilitarians may say, in functioning, but in living; and life comes into being where men and women, not as functions, but as self-constituted entities, intersect. This is the state which in religion as well as art has been called life; this is the final life of the earth, beyond which there is no other. We may accept it or pass it by; but whatever we may do with it, it is our chief end, giving meaning to the multitudinous pains of humanity. This commerce between men and women is not merely sexual, in the narrow sense which we have given the word; it involves every human joy, all the thoughts and aspirations of mankind stretching into infinity. It is the thing which has inspired all great artists, mystical as well as earthy. It is the point of reference for any morality which is not a disguised kind of adaptation; for virtue consists in the capacity to partake freely of human happiness. All reform, all economic and political theory has a meaning in so far as it makes for this; and that was recognized by the first reformers, the utopians who had not yet become mere specialists in reform.

The libertarian movement has been such a dismal affair, thus, not because it has been too free, but because it has not been free enough. The democracies and the women of the world have been potentially liberated; but not so very long ago they were slaves, and they have still a slave’s idea of freedom. Instead of equal joys they have asked for equal obligations; and the whole world is in the grip of a psychological incapacity to escape from the idea of obligation. Against the unreasonable solemnity which this has imposed on everything there is little left for us except a deliberate and reasonable light-heartedness; this, and the faith that the human race will some time attain the only kind of freedom worth striving for, a freedom in joy.

Virtue for Women

By Isabel Leavenworth

Isabel Leavenworth

_is an instructor in philosophy at Barnard College_.

VIRTUE FOR WOMEN

BY ISABEL LEAVENWORTH

In the turmoil of discussion regarding present modes of sex life one can discern a pretty general approval of just one element in the whole situation: the ideal by which the good woman has for so long been controlled. It is commonly held that if changes are to be made they should be in the direction of persuading men, and also the few women who have been at fault, to be just as good as our good women have always been. Thus the young girl of to-day is criticized on the ground that instead of raising men to her level she is descending to theirs. Even those who are inclined to belittle the damage which she is doing to the social structure accompany their mild defense with the consoling reminder that human nature does not change and that in the end the girl of to-day will turn out as well as did the girls of yesterday; that is, she will finally come around to the good old feminine way of doing things.

It seems to me most unfortunate that the majority of people hope to improve matters through an extension of the feminine ideals of the past. In the established scheme of things one finds a peculiarly gross form of immorality, an immorality incommensurably greater than the dreaded evil of promiscuity; and it is only as an element in this total scheme that woman’s ideals have any significance. The fact that they have always constituted one side of a “double standard” is not merely something which may be said about their relation to other elements after their essential characteristics have been considered. These characteristics can be described only in terms of the double standard and of its attendant evils. It would be as impossible, then, to destroy the double standard and still keep the feminine ideal intact as it would be to preserve the convex nature of a mathematical curve while destroying the concave. According to the present system there is a standard of conduct set up for women which is to constitute virtue. This standard is a combination of specific positive commands and, more especially, of specific prohibitions. There are certain things which no nice woman will do--a great many things, in fact. She must learn them by heart and accept them on faith as the Pythagoreans must have had to learn their curious list of taboos, a list running from the taboo against eating beans to that against sitting on a quart measure. This ideal of virtue does not apply with equal rigidity to men; quite different things are expected of them and accepted for them. It is obvious that two such conflicting ideals by the very nature of their combination will produce a class of women who do not live up to the standard of virtue set them as members of their sex. This class is not merely an excrescence but an integral part of the situation created by the total sex ideal of society. The function of women of this class is to make possible for men the way of life commonly considered as suited to their sex and to make possible a virtuous life for the remainder of womankind. In fulfilling this function such women lose, in the eyes of society, their moral nature and forfeit the right to live within the pale of social morality. They are considered unfit for normal social intercourse and are denied those relationships and responsibilities which ordinarily serve as the basis for moral growth. From all normal responsibility toward them society regards itself as released. That which is personal, the inner life, the character, the soul--whatever one prefers to call it--having been sacrificed in the service of the social scheme, one is to treat what is left as of no value in itself, but merely as an instrument to be used in the service of man’s pleasure or woman’s virtue. The prostitute is to society that one thing, defined by the purpose which she serves, and that is all she is, all she is allowed to be. The depersonalization, the moral non-existence, one might call it, of a large number of women is, then, implicit in the social system currently accepted. It is not a punishment meted out to those who fail to act in accordance with the social scheme (though it is as such, of course, that society defends it) but is itself an absolutely essential element in the social scheme, an element woven in and out through the entire fabric of current sex morality.

It is curious how many people feel that a choice between the present system and any other is reducible to a choice between different degrees of promiscuity. Promiscuity would be an evil, but it does not in itself involve this particular immorality. The worst evils in the present situation are due not to the “lower” half of the double standard but to the doubleness itself.

It is true that the ideal of womanly virtue is only one element in the conventional system of sex morality. But, like a Leibnitzian monad, it reflects the whole universe within itself--the universe of sex mores. It is in no real sense any “higher” than the ideal by which men have lived. They are warp and woof of the same fabric. According to this ideal it is woman’s prime duty to keep aloof from evil. This sounds commendable enough. And it would be at least innocuous if one could interpret it as meaning that woman should hold herself aloof from some imagined evil that would become existent were she to embrace it. This is not, however, a possible interpretation of the varied collection of prohibitions which it is her duty to respect. Their import is clearly enough that she is to keep aloof from evil which is already existent, which is an acknowledged part of her background. She is to shun all of those vulgarities, coarsenesses, and immoralities which are to enter into the lives of men and for which, one is forced to conclude, the “other” women are to provide. And from this other class of women she is, of course, to keep herself absolutely separate, distinct. I recently heard an elderly Boston lady make a remark which expresses the horror commonly aroused by any conduct which endangers the distinction between the two classes. “Do you know,” she said, “I heard that a young man of our set said he and his friends no longer had to go to girls of another kind for their enjoyment. They can get all they want from girls of their own class.” This was the outrage. The nice girls were allowing the classes to become confused. Much the same attitude is revealed in the frequent remark that the young girl of to-day appears like “any chorus girl” or like any “common woman.” The horrid picture is usually rounded off with the comment that you simply can’t tell the difference any more between the nice girl and the other kind. One can imagine that this might cause considerable inconvenience. Each of the two classes of women has served a special purpose and it is, to say the least, disconcerting for a person not to know which way to turn when he knows very well which purpose he wants fulfilled.

The precautions which a good woman takes to preserve her purity are indeed legion. There are places where no nice woman will go, situations with which she must have no immediate acquaintance, people with whom she must not associate; there are various embodiments of evil, in short, to which she must not expose herself. That these evils should exist, that they should be tolerated as meeting certain needs in the lives of men and be made possible by other women--all this the average good woman swallows without repulsion, or, more commonly, ignores. She is aroused to a state of true indignation only when her own moral exclusiveness, or that of her kind, is threatened. The same woman who accepts with a good deal of equanimity the fact that men she associates with also associate with “gay” women would be considerably upset if these men were to attempt to associate with both kinds of women at the same time. Why is the average woman so upset if a man of her acquaintance makes “improper advances”? Is it that she is horrified to find that he is willing to indulge his irregular sex desires? No. She is outraged because he thinks she is willing to indulge hers, because he holds her virtue too lightly. Sex evils, coarsenesses are then to be part of the good woman’s environment in the intimate sense that they often enter into the lives of the men she accepts as friends, even of the men with whom she is to have the most personal and supposedly ideal relationships. Her sole function is to turn her back on these evils. The point of prime importance to her is that they should not pollute her; and the first demand which she makes upon men is that they shall show their respect for this ideal by keeping her apart.