3.29. THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.
The individual attitudes of men to women and of women to men are
necessarily determined to a large extent by certain general ideas of
relationship, by institutions and conventions. One of the most important
and debatable of these is whether we are to consider and treat women as
citizens and fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men and
grouped in positions of at least material dependence to individual men.
Our decision in that direction will affect all our conduct from the
larger matters down to the smallest points of deportment; it will affect
even our manner of address and determine whether when we speak to a
woman we shall be as frank and unaffected as with a man or touched with
a faint suggestion of the reserves of a cat which does not wish to be
suspected of wanting to steal the milk.
Now so far as that goes it follows almost necessarily from my views upon
aristocracy and democracy that I declare for the conventional equality
of women, that is to say for the determination to make neither sex nor
any sexual characteristic a standard of superiority or inferiority, for
the view that a woman is a person as important and necessary, as much to
be consulted, and entitled to as much freedom of action as a man. I
admit that this decision is a choice into which temperament enters, that
I cannot produce compelling reasons why anyone else should adopt my
view. I can produce considerations in support of my view, that is all.
But they are so implicit in all that has gone before that I will not
trouble to detail them here.
The conception of equality and fellowship between men and women is an
idea at least as old as Plato and one that has recurred wherever
civilization has reached a phase in which men and women were
sufficiently released from militant and economic urgency to talk and
read and think. But it has never yet been, at least in the historical
period and in any but isolated social groups, a working structural idea.
The working structural idea is the Patriarchal Family in which the woman
is inferior and submits herself and is subordinated to the man, the head
of the family.
We live in a constantly changing development and modification of that
tradition. It is well to bring that factor of constant change into mind
at the outset of this discussion and to keep it there. To forget it, and
it is commonly forgotten, is to falsify every issue. Marriage and the
Family are perennially fluctuating institutions, and probably scarcely
anything in modern life is changing so much; they are in their legal
constitution or their moral and emotional quality profoundly different
things from what they were a hundred years ago. A woman who marries
nowadays marries, if one may put it quantitatively, far less than she
did even half a century ago; the married woman's property act, for
example, has revolutionized the economic relationship; her husband has
lost his right to assault her and he cannot even compel her to cohabit
with him if she refuses to do so. Legal separations and divorces have
come to modify the quality and logical consequences of the bond. The
rights of parent over the child have been even more completely
qualified. The State has come in as protector and educator of the
children, taking over personal powers and responsibilities that have
been essential to the family institution ever since the dawn of history.
It inserts itself more and more between child and parent. It invades
what were once the most sacred intimacies, and the Salvation Army is now
promoting legislation to invade those overcrowded homes in which
children (it is estimated to the number of thirty or forty thousand) are
living as I write, daily witnesses of their mother's prostitution or in
constant danger of incestuous attack from drunken fathers and brothers.
And finally as another indication of profound differences, births were
almost universally accidental a hundred years ago; they are now in an
increasing number of families controlled and deliberate acts of will. In
every one of their relations do Marriage and the Family change and
continue to change.
But the inherent defectiveness of the human mind which my metaphysical
book sets itself to analyze, does lead it constantly to speak of
Marriage and the Family as things as fixed and unalterable as, let us
say, the characteristics of oxygen. One is asked, Do you believe in
Marriage and the Family? as if it was a case of either having or not
having some definite thing. Socialists are accused of being "against the
Family," as if it were not the case that Socialists, Individualists,
high Anglicans and Roman Catholics are ALL against Marriage and the
Family as these institutions exist at the present time. But once we have
realized the absurdity of this absolute treatment, then it should become
clear that with it goes most of the fabric of right and wrong, and
nearly all those arbitrary standards by which we classify people into
moral and immoral. Those last words are used when as a matter of fact we
mean either conforming or failing to conform to changing laws and
developing institutional customs we may or may not consider right or
wrong. Their use imparts a flavour of essential wrong-doing and
obliquity into acts and relations that may be in many cases no more than
social indiscipline, which may be even conceivably a courageous act of
defiance to an obsolescent limitation. Such, until a little while ago,
was a man's cohabitation with his deceased wife's sister. This, which
was scandalous yesterday, is now a legally honourable relationship,
albeit I believe still regarded by the high Anglican as incestuous
wickedness.
Now I will not deal here with the institutional changes that are
involved in that general scheme of progress called Socialism. I have
discussed the relation of Socialism to Marriage and the Family quite
fully in my "New Worlds for Old" ("New Worlds for Old" (A. Constable and
Co., 1908).) and to that I must refer the reader. Therein he will see
how the economic freedom and independent citizenship of women, and
indeed also the welfare of the whole next generation, hang on the idea
of endowing motherhood, and he will find too how much of the nature of
the marriage contract is outside the scope of Socialist proposals
altogether.
Apart from the broad proposals of Socialism, as a matter of personal
conviction quite outside the scope of Socialism altogether, I am
persuaded of the need of much greater facilities of divorce than exist
at present, divorce on the score of mutual consent, of faithlessness, of
simple cruelty, of insanity, habitual vice or the prolonged imprisonment
of either party. And this being so I find it impossible to condemn on
any ground, except that it is "breaking ranks" and making a confusion,
those who by anticipating such wide facilities as I propose have sinned
by existing standards. How far and in what manner such breaking of ranks
is to be condoned I will presently discuss. But it is clear it is an
offence of a different nature from actions one believes to be in
themselves and apart from the law reprehensible things.
But my scepticisms about the current legal institutions and customary
code are not exhausted by these modifications I have suggested. I
believe firmly in some sort of marriage, that is to say an open
declaration of the existence of sexual relations between a man and a
woman, because I am averse to all unnecessary secrecies and because the
existence of these peculiarly intimate relationships affects everybody
about the persons concerned. It is ridiculous to say as some do that
sexual relations between two people affect no one but themselves unless
a child is born. They do, because they tend to break down barriers and
set up a peculiar emotional partnership. It is a partnership that kept
secret may work as anti-socially as a secret business partnership or a
secret preferential railway tariff. And I believe too in the general
social desirability of the family group, the normal group of father,
mother and children, and in the extreme efficacy in the normal human
being of the blood link and pride link between parent and child in
securing loving care and upbringing for the child. But this clear
adhesion to Marriage and to the Family grouping about mother and father
does not close the door to a large series of exceptional cases which our
existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.
For example, monogamy in general seems to me to be clearly indicated (as
doctors say) by the fact that there are not several women in the world
for every man, but quite as clearly does it seem necessary to recognize
that the fact that there are (or were in 1901) 21,436,107 females to
20,172,984 males in our British community seems to condemn our present
rigorous insistence upon monogamy, unless feminine celibacy has its own
delights. But, as I have said, it is now largely believed that the
sexual life of a woman is more important to her than his sexual life to
a man and less easily ignored.
It is true also on the former side that for the great majority of people
one knows personally, any sort of household but a monogamous one
conjures up painful and unpleasant visions. The ordinary civilized woman
and the ordinary civilized man are alike obsessed with the idea of
meeting and possessing one peculiar intimate person, one special
exclusive lover who is their very own, and a third person of either sex
cannot be associated with that couple without an intolerable sense of
privacy and confidence and possession destroyed. It is difficult to
imagine a second wife in a home who would not be and feel herself to be
a rather excluded and inferior person. But that does not abolish the
possibility that there are exceptional people somewhere capable of, to
coin a phrase, triangular mutuality, and I do not see why we should
either forbid or treat with bitterness or hostility a grouping we may
consider so inadvisable or so unworkable as never to be adopted, if
three people of their own free will desire it.
The peculiar defects of the human mind when they approach these
questions of sex are reinforced by passions peculiar to the topic, and
it is perhaps advisable to point out that to discuss these possibilities
is not the same thing as to urge the married reader to take unto himself
or herself a second partner or a series of additional partners. We are
trained from the nursery to become secretive, muddle-headed and
vehemently conclusive upon sexual matters, until at last the editors of
magazines blush at the very phrase and long to put a petticoat over the
page that bears it. Yet our rebellious natures insist on being
interested by it. It seems to me that to judge these large questions
from the personal point of view, to insist upon the whole world without
exception living exactly in the manner that suits oneself or accords
with one's emotional imagination and the forms of delicacy in which one
has been trained, is not the proper way to deal with them. I want as a
sane social organizer to get just as many contented and law-abiding
citizens as possible; I do not want to force people who would otherwise
be useful citizens into rebellion, concealments and the dark and furtive
ways of vice, because they may not love and marry as their temperaments
command, and so I want to make the meshes of the law as wide as
possible. But the common man will not understand this yet, and seeks to
make the meshes just as small as his own private case demands.
Then marriage, to resume my main discussion, does not necessarily mean
cohabitation. All women who desire children do not want to be entrusted
with their upbringing. Some women are sexual and philoprogenitive
without being sedulously maternal, and some are maternal without much or
any sexual passion. There are men and women in the world now, great
allies, fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor want to live
constantly together. It is at least conceivable that there are women
who, while desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great careers for
the work of maternity, women again who would be happiest managing and
rearing children in manless households that they might even share with
other women friends, and men to correspond with these who do not wish to
live in a household with wife and children. I submit, these temperaments
exist and have a right to exist in their own way. But one must recognize
that the possibility of these departures from the normal type of
household opens up other possibilities. The polygamy that is degrading
or absurd under one roof assumes a different appearance when one
considers it from the point of view of people whose habits of life do
not centre upon an isolated home.
All the relations I have glanced at above do as a matter of fact exist
to-day, but shamefully and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an
unmerited and unnecessary ignominy. The punishment for bigamy seems to
me insane in its severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to the
common seducer. Better ruin a score of women, says the law, than marry
two. I do not see why in these matters there should not be much ampler
freedom than there is, and this being so I can hardly be expected to
condemn with any moral fervour or exclude from my society those who have
seen fit to behave by what I believe may be the standards of A.D. 2000
instead of by the standards of 1850. These are offences, so far as they
are offences, on an altogether different footing from murder, or
exacting usury, or the sweating of children, or cruelty, or transmitting
diseases, or unveracity, or commercial or intellectual or physical
prostitution, or any such essentially grave anti-social deeds. We must
distinguish between sins on the one hand and mere errors of judgment and
differences of taste from ourselves. To draw up harsh laws, to practise
exclusions against everyone who does not see fit to duplicate one's own
blameless home life, is to waste a number of courageous and exceptional
persons in every generation, to drive many of them into a forced
alliance with real crime and embittered rebellion against custom and the
law.
