III. THE ETHICS OF MATING

Toward Equality.—The whole course of woman, for the last hundred years, has been toward a relative equality with man. It will be recalled that the first situation was a female superiority, in all essential matters; she had sole choice of her mate, as among animals, and was in charge of all important tribal matters. This was followed by man’s dominance, and the subject of women. Now the scales are swinging back toward justice, toward a situation in which the peculiar merits and abilities of each sex will complement the other, and in which mankind can go forward, man and woman hand in hand, toward a realization of the noblest dreams yet dreamed by the race.

There can never be more than a relative equality; for absolute equality is unknown in nature. Woman, by the very essence of her purpose as mother of posterity and keeper of the home, is now, and may forever be, bound to deal with lesser and more intimate affairs than men; that is, to think more personally and concretely, and less impersonally and abstractly, than men. Many women have shown a tendency to negative this; yet even in the works of such brilliant women as George Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Wolstonescraft, and others, the typical woman’s note is not wanting, of brilliant detail rather than lofty generalization. Men have made our civilization, such as it is. They have made a government and a social system which judges by dollars, and not by persons; a government which spends vast sums yearly for better pigs, and nothing, or comparatively nothing, for better babies. The influence of woman in our politics and our body social will be to counterbalance this by an emphasis upon persons rather than dollars. Prostitution will largely be ended; wars will be lessened and perhaps abolished; the conservation of human life and happiness will rank higher than the conservation of cotton plants and oil wells.

The struggle has, in the main, already been won. A hundred years ago, a woman could not vote or hold office. We have seen women in state legislatures; in the national legislature; upon the state and federal bench; and seated in the capitol of the largest state in the union. We may yet see a woman in the president’s chair. A hundred years ago, woman could not receive a general education, or engage in industry, professional, or artistic life, on the same terms as man. Today, there is no field in which she is not seen; no important institution of learning which withholds from her the human heritage of the rich achievements of men. A hundred years ago, she was dependent upon a man for a meal-ticket; he held the purse strings. Her choice lay between wife of a man who would feed and house her; mistress of a man who would feed and house her; or harlot of many men who would feed and house her. Today, she has conquered the economic field, and can afford to buy her will of the world. She does not need to marry for a meal-ticket; she has control of her own purse-strings. She is still incapacitated temporarily by child-bearing; but motherhood pensions by the state are a step toward removing this disability, which is so vitally helpful to the state. She can afford, let it be said again with all impressiveness, to buy her will of the world; and she will do so.

What the standpatters and regressives, who oppose woman’s entry into the world of affairs, fail to take into account, is the difference between sex and human affairs. Man is fitted to be a mate, a husband, a father; that is his sex business. Woman is fitted to be a mate, a wife, a mother; that is her sex business. Men and women both are fitted to go beyond this, into spheres neither male nor female, but human. Such matters as industry and business, in all of its phases; as professional life, in all of its ramifications; as the world of art and literature, in all of its beauties,—these are all human concerns, and not sex affairs. They are neither male nor female: they are human. In them both the man and the woman of the future will find themselves at home.

Choice of a Mate.—The standpatters and regressives are especially exercised over the fear that the woman will seek to wrest from man the right to select a mate. Having lost everything else, they still cling to the idea that it is immodest for a woman to propose, and proper for a man to propose. During all the matriarchate, woman did the choosing; as she does throughout the animal kingdom. There was nothing immodest here. Indirectly, match-making mammas and designing daughters do much of the actual choosing here; when this is covered over with a veil of hypocrisy, a pretense that the male victims are really the choosers, the standpatters find nothing immodest here.

There is an essential difference between male choice and female choice. The man, following the biological imperative to fertilize at all costs, starts out after a group of women, determined to capture one of them for his mate. Which does he capture? Of course, the one he catches up with first; and that means, the slowest of the group, the one least fleet of foot, the one least fit to be the mother of his children and of the future. When a woman is wooed by a number of men, which does she choose for her mate? Not the weakest, the slowest, the one least fit to be the father of her children; but, to the very contrary, she chooses normally the finest, strongest, best, wisest, of all of her suitors. Woman marries upward; man, downward. So it will be a good thing for the race when the choice is no longer, in public esteem, essentially a male prerogative; but is at least a matter of mutual agreement. There is nothing immodest, and everything modest, in a woman’s letting a man know, in all seriousness, that she is willing to marry him. The proposal, as well as the acceptance, would ideally be a mutual thing.

As to Children.—The tendency of life, and the purpose of mating, is to have children. Economic organization today makes children a hardship, and indeed a luxury, in all but the very poorest homes. The very poor, at times impelled onward by their religion (which subserves the ruling economic class, ever desirous of a large number of the working class), proceed to have many more children than they can raise even with the bleakest necessities of life. The educated classes, with more background of culture, adjudge that they cannot afford to have any children at all, or can have only one, two, or three. Statistics not so long ago indicated that half of the children born in this country died before reaching manhood; which means that the educated and cultured classes do not even replace themselves, while the country and the world is populated with the haphazard offspring, children born in filth and poverty, and yanked up rather than reared, of the poorest, most inefficient, least intelligent and least cultured of the community. More than this, the very wealthy, through their wealth-disease and natural inertia, elect to have few or no children, as a rule. If men had deliberately set about framing a system of reproduction which would breed down the human stock, they could not have arrived at a better one than the present system.

The intelligent co-operation of men and women in politics and social planning will inevitably alter this condition; lifting the poor, and seeing to the continuation of the species by the most fit. In fact, the despised poor, the past few decades, in various countries, have shown a commendable ability to lift themselves; it may ultimately be their efforts that raise the social level. The wise couple, having educated themselves as well as possible, and with some of the economic load of today removed, will mutually decide to have a normal family, of four or five children. Fewer is unfair to the children themselves; and the fact of parenthood is one of the great helpful shaping influences on the life of any adult man or woman. It is an indispensable experience toward complete manhood or womanhood.

Double and Single Codes.—Down to the last two decades, men have insisted upon a double code of morality. By this, men were expected, as adolescents, to sow their wild oats, to enjoy women sexually; and then to marry a pure woman, and after marriage to have the right to continue their varied sexual experiences. Meanwhile, women were to be absolutely pure, if they were to be on the market as wives; and, if these were proposed to by no man, they were to gratefully accept the lot of spinster or old maid, and wither into a vinegary sterile branch, diseased with ingrown sex. The woman who took one step aside from the narrow path, who sowed one smallest oatling, was thereafter damned, outlawed, a social pariah, the prey of every man. Needless to say, any woman who could be seduced by a man was at once lowered into the level of the prostitute; and virtuous women and ordinary men united in casting stones upon her in the daytime, while the men visited her at night. Saintly old Augustine phrased the vicious teaching:

“Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb the whole world with lust.”

The prostitute, then, was to be kept in a living hell, to render the lot of the virtuous women the easier; not that men eased up in their attempts on the honors of wives and maidens. Needless to say, with the altered status of woman, with her economic ability today to buy her will of the world, she will not buy the iniquitous old double standard of morality. She may essay to buy a single standard for both, a standard of monogamy, pure and simple. It is doubtful if she could compel men to follow this, even if she had sole control of the purse-strings, which she has not. But her actions, since her financial liberation, have not indicated that this is her universal desire. She will probably achieve a single standard for men and women, more elastic than the one mentioned: a standard by which men and women can select monogamy, a limited promiscuity, or whatever arrangement they prefer, so long as it is voluntary, and no advantage be taken of the young and the untaught.

Duration of Courtship.—It is obvious that true mating must be contemporaneous with true love; true conjugal love, with as much of the element of the romantic as the parties can acquire. When love ends, mating becomes immoral. Yet it should not be lightly surrendered by either party. Any love relationship is a social thing, affecting parents and relatives, and properly including the production of children, in most cases. All this should be soberly considered; it does not make love, but it should cause parties to consider carefully, in order not to give up love for a light or frivolous cause. Marriage is a difficult matter of readjustments, on both sides. Friction is inevitable, as in any human association. There must be a mutual give and take, a tolerance and forbearance on both sides.

One of the soundest methods of prolonging normal love is a continuation of the courtship, on the part of both men and women. Wives are too prone, having become married, to assume that their chase (the sole object of their life being, they are taught, to marry a meal-ticket) is over; and that the husband, tied to them for life, can not escape. Accordingly, they neglect him, give all their attention to clubs, social affairs, and what not, or, more commonly and seriously, give an inordinate amount of attention to their children, shutting their husbands out from the love and attention they are entitled to. This is one of the surest methods of killing conjugal love. Men, on their part, too often regard the winning of the woman as the completion of their chase; they have her, have her locked and tied with a marriage ring and license, and can now stray and play outside the marriage fence with impunity. Or they may remain sexually faithful, while discontinuing their courtship, and substituting their business affairs for the former important matter of courtship. This is just as sure a method of ending conjugal love.

The ideal arrangement means a continuance of the period of courtship as long as the mating lasts. Each party must make the effort—a pleasant one, with rich rewards—of keeping the desire of the mated partner alive and eager. At times there is an advantage in a similarity of interests without the house, as well as concerning their joint home affairs. Husband and wife who can collaborate in any work are, as a rule, in a more advantageous position to retain their conjugal interest in each other. Each mating is an experiment, with the odds somewhat against continuing happiness, as life develops today. Only a fine and consistent attempt, a constant sight of the other’s needs and wishes, a genuine sympathy or feeling with the partner, will preserve the average marriage. Yet the gain is no slight thing; there is perhaps no human gain, in the love field, as high.