monogamous marriage and woman

“it should be remembered that the progress of a nation is stimulated and the stability of society is increased by the most humanising of all institutions, marriage.”—walter heape.

it is commonly asserted—i am not sure whether it is really believed—that woman is instinctively monogamous, whereas man by his sexual nature is bent towards polygamy.

now, my experience and desire for truth forces me to doubt the reality of this view. i believe that the woman’s superiority in this matter of constancy, even when it is present, is not fundamental to the female character any more than it is fundamental to the character of the male, and, indeed, i am inclined to think that it is the man who in his desire is more bent than woman towards complete faithfulness in the sexual partnership, and if it is the wife who more often is apparently and outwardly constant in marriage than the husband, it is because such conduct is expected of her and has been forced upon her by the conventions of her life. we must see things a little more as they are. compared with woman, man is a comparatively constant creature, romantic, and not readily moved from his love when once it is fixed. i am very certain that i am right in this. no man leaves a woman till she sends him from her: while she wants him, and lets him feel that she wants him, he is hers.

what is symbolised by the myth representing eve as first[190] eating of the fruit and then offering it to adam: the representation of the man in subjection to the woman, the bending of his action to her will through his need of her; the active r?le being here rightly attributed to the woman which man in the blindness of his masculine conceit has pretended to hold himself: this piece of symbolism has left deep marks throughout the entire history of marriage and is active in all the relationships of the two sexes.

maybe woman is what man has made her; but this is an outside thing, a social tag, having reference only to her position in the world. man has not touched woman’s soul. he cannot. there are many things which a man must learn that woman knows from the beginning. to love is one of them. woman teaches man that, and he does not learn easily. and it is in these trials, these efforts of his to find himself, that woman contributes in so great a measure to the making or the marring, of the man. the soul of a man passes from the hollow of one woman’s hand to the hollow of another’s. he loves first that extension of himself called “mother,” and from her he passes on to other less individualised relationships. and each woman, with cruel hands or with kind, presses deep the imprint of her hold upon his plastic clay.

yes, it is women who mould the lives of men as it is women who give them birth.

it is strangely difficult to induce in good women to-day a practical understanding of their almost limitless power over men. each woman is able to create perpetually in the man she loves the qualities she desires; a power infinitely greater, as i believe, than can be ever gained through individual self-assertion.

and if woman feels this power of being the source of[191] creating energy to man (and it belongs to all women, although many of them have lost the consciousness of their gift), this knowledge is the very centre of her being, the flame which feeds life; and she is intensely and supremely happy just in so far as she is steeped in sacrifice. i do not hope, however, to convince any woman who does not know within herself already the gladness of this service to man, and i diverge a little from my main subject in making these remarks.

a glance back at the beginnings of marriage should teach women a little modesty, for there we see that the wife’s constancy was directly dependent on the conditions of her marriage. under the maternal form, where the husband lived in the home of the wife, her sexual liberty was in many cases greater than his. and there is abundant proof that full advantage was taken both by unmarried and married women of such freedom wherever it was allowed.[76] woman is not instinctively inclined to virtue. and an inherent desire towards faithfulness in marriage has not, i am certain, always acted more strongly in women than it has in men; indeed, i am not sure that the opposite is not true.

the development of the personal relationship in marriage is intimately dependent on patriarchy. again i am compelled to assert this truth. the establishment of paternity as a working and acknowledged fact was comparatively a late achievement. under the conditions of the maternal clan, the family was incomplete; it consisted only of the mother and children. this was not a natural condition, and therefore was not permanent. the new stage was ushered in by what may perhaps be called “the social[192] annunciation of paternity.” and this led eventually to the establishment of marriage in the form in which we understand it to-day.

now for the first time the home was firmly founded. the father was the head of the domestic hearth: he was the priest of sacrifice at the domestic altar. his ancestors were present in the spirit and all the members of the family honoured them. and in their presence nothing unclean was tolerated. the wife at the moment when, as a bride, she crossed the threshold of the home, or was carried across it, gave up her own kindred and her own gods. her husband’s home was now her home, his gods were her gods.[77]

so strong an insistence has been made on the evils of the wife’s subjection to the husband, which arose under this system of marriage, that we have lost sight of the enduring benefits that from the beginning to the end must be connected with it. there is much nonsense talked and written about the patriarchal home. its conditions and rules were slowly established for the workable happiness of all its members, not, as is too often assumed, arbitrarily imposed by the will of men. the duties of the husband and the wife were regulated by tradition, and all the service in the home was a holy service. by fixing the father to the family and securing his protection and toil for the children a future stability as well as fuller happiness was made possible. i do not see that this advantage could have been gained, or can now be maintained, under any other form of marriage. nature herself seems to condemn man in his capacity as father. so delicate is the bond which binds him to the child compared with the bond which binds the[193] mother, so readily can he be pushed outside the circle of the family, where, as a member apart, he will inevitably seek his own interests and pleasure.

the most ancient form of marriage under father-right was polygamy. wives and children were a source of wealth in primitive communities. as a rule there was a principal wife for the procreation of legitimate children, but in addition a wealthy man had several subordinate wives or concubines. polygamy has always been dependent on the possession of property. the position of each wife and that of her children was fixed by custom, sometimes enforced by law; in no case was a man free from obligations in regard to any woman who had “been to him as a wife”; even an unfruitful and childless woman could not be cast aside without provision being made for her. it is important to remember this. however distasteful the idea of legalised polygamy must be, and i believe it is distasteful to the majority of women and men (and this not from ethical reasons, but on account of deep and instinctive desires), it is certain that an open recognition of unions outside of marriage does prevent an escape from sexual responsibility on the part of men. i shall consider this question in fuller detail in a later chapter,[78] just now we are concerned with the development of marriage.

out of this patriarchal polygamy monogamic marriage gradually arose. the long upward process by which the change was accomplished cannot be stated here. one factor i would emphasise, as its force has never, i think, been sufficiently recognised. polygamy tends to disappear with the development of the conception of fatherhood. as i have asserted already, the child is bound to its mother and[194] belongs to her whatever the form of marriage, but the same force does not act in the case of the father. the child belongs to him much more closely under monogamy than under polygamy or any other form of marriage. now men do want the possession of their children. thus a desire to have many children by several wives gives place to the desire to have a closer connection with fewer children born of one loved wife. as the marriage relations become more firmly established the partners in each union are held more closely to each other and to their children, and are pledged to greater purity of life.

there were, of course, many causes that contributed to this result. chastity, first imposed upon the wife because she was the property of her husband and might transgress this rule only with his permission, came in time to bind men, though for a different reason. for the limits set to the sexual freedom of women acted also on them, since they were thus deprived of the means of obtaining women for themselves, without violating the rights of other men.

in this and other ways we find that polygamy was threatened on many sides. as an accepted and legalised form of marriage it tends to disappear with the conditions under which social life is developed. like the maternal marriage, and other primitive experiments in sexual associations, polygamy is not a form of marriage that can be regarded as a permanent expression of the marriage law: that is, it is experimental and suitable to special conditions; it is not a final form, growing up by custom from earlier practices, or one which strives for mastery and will not tolerate other co-existent forms. on the other hand, monogamy has always been characterised by the strongest self-assertion, and from the earliest times we find it triumphing,[195] and more and more seeking to exclude other forms of marriage.

these facts of the past history of marriage need to be considered by those who seek to bring discredit on monogamous marriage. various reformers, too frightenedly concerned with the present shortage of men, increasing as it will enormously the disproportion between the number of the two sexes, have jumped to the conclusion that polygamy is likely to be legalised in the near future. i do not believe it. at least, it will not be polygamy under the form we have known it in the past. polygamy has always been connected with the property value of woman and is dependent upon wealth. for this reason, even if for no other, polygamy will not replace monogamous marriages. such a marriage system could not be supported by war-impoverished countries. the remedy must be a different one, as presently i shall show.

there is a strange idea among some people that sexual happiness can be gained by breaking away from the traditional bonds; it is the visible sign of our confusion as a people and the want of happiness in our lives. we should not set at naught the experience of the ages. polygamy is an institution which in the growth of civilisation belongs only to primitive or non-progressive states. no race or nation has ever risen to front rank, or even secondary rank, under this marriage system. our preference for monogamy goes beyond laws and religions. it is that deeply rooted thing—a matter of racial experience and desire. it is the best way that we have yet found of men and women living together.

the individual household, where both parents share in the common interest of bringing up the children, is the[196] foundation on which monogamy has been built up and on which it must stand. if the conditions of the home are seriously changed, and the duty of providing and caring for the children is taken out of the hands of either or of both parents, a change in marriage practice will follow. i do not think you can hold the one if you let the other go. for westermarck is right, and children should not be regarded as the result of marriage, but rather marriage is the result of children. and love between parents implies duties and sorrows on each side; without this, love, even of the most passionate kind, loses its quality and tends to become an ephemeral or even a corrupt thing.

there is much stupidity in the view of many reformers of marriage who fail to see that, however hard it is to live faithfully as man and wife, the monogamic ideal of marriage does so appeal to our emotional nature, that men and women are seriously unhappy in trying to destroy it. fortunately it is easier to talk of “love’s freedom” than it is to act as if it ever could be free. in spite of what advanced people say, some feeling of duty will always exist as long as it at all hurts us to hurt others. the immorality that says, “do what you desire irrespective of others,” is as yet beyond most of us.

attempts to solve these problems quickly are bound to fail. intellectual revolutionists are, i think, too hopeful with regard to what may be done to produce a harmony of sexual needs. the optimism that once prevailed in economics is being transformed to sexual matters. once people supposed that if every one followed his own interests, a harmony would automatically establish itself in the economy of society. now they tend to say the same about sex. they put forward many solutions, but they do not[197] as a rule make use of these solutions, even when they could, in their own lives. they say what they do not believe, either with conscious insincerity, or because they are ignorant of life and are used to trying to get effects with words.

intellectual views of life and of what is right and wrong always tend to break people into groups, each struggling to explain everything according to one theory, built on a single principle. and as the result of caring so much for one thing people seem quite unable to grasp any facts that do not refer to their own one particular reform, they are not even able to consider it as part of a world in which there is anything else. all the evil in marriage is due to too large families and population pressing on the food supply, we are told by one class of enthusiasts, while others point to men’s tyranny over women. votes for women would have a magical effect: men are all bad, say some. the father is a parasite, unnecessary except for his share in begetting the child; the mother is the one parent. all would be well if legal marriage were abolished and motherhood made free, is the view common among one class of reformers. eugenical breeding and the sterilisation of the unfit is the remedy brought forward by others. many suggest economic changes and the endowment of motherhood.

but the matter is not so simple as these reformers seem to believe. and i doubt if any outward change is really capable of producing the prompt kind of penny-in-the-slot results that its supporters claim that it can. the complexity of marriage, in particular, the occurrence of sexual disharmonies so present and active for misery to-day, are ignored by all intellectual reformers. it is because they have no emotional hold of life as a whole that they find it easy to squeeze all life into their magic theories.[198] for myself i can see no sure remedy: and were i asked to state one, i could say only: “a few thousand years more of development: a growth towards consciousness and a fuller understanding of the meaning of life.”

marriage is not a matter of abstract principles: it will always be difficult. if it is anything that can be stated, it is a social practice, preserving unity and order amongst those who find these qualities of service in the art of living. we should humble ourselves to accept the lessons of life, then we should be more careful of simple human needs.

a very slight knowledge of existing marriages is sufficient to convince even the most optimistic believer that true mating is hard. i do not believe that most marriages are unhappy, but i do know that only the very few are happy. with many partners, and even those who are passionate lovers, the attraction of sex always seems to fall short of its end; it draws the two together in a momentary self-forgetfulness, but for the rest it seems rather to widen their separateness; they are secret to one another in everything, united only in the sexual embrace.

and the man who has not found his way already to the soul of a woman by some other means, will not do so through the channels of sex. for a woman wants to be loved for what she is, not for what the man wants from her. and for this reason those men who have in them no faculty for friendship will be likely always to meet with coldness on the part of their wives in response to their continued ardour. such men do not understand that despite all their sexual proneness they are psychologically impotent.

the word love is used in so general and indiscriminate a way to denote sometimes the most transitory impulse, and sometimes the most intimate and profound feeling, that a[199] mass of misunderstanding arises. love comes from the senses as well as from the soul, and the one emotion often is mistaken for the other. and what this serves to bring home to us is the dualism inherent in the marriages of a civilised age, in which the element of sexual masterfulness, being a natural expression of masculinity, is unintentionally active, a survival of very primitive instincts, which to-day struggle for mastery with newer emotions and sympathy, flaring up in a late expression to justify the need for sexual contrast.

it is, however, very necessary for me to guard against my meaning being mistaken, in case i should be thought to be supporting the view that men are less capable than women are of unselfish love, and feel only passion. i do not understand such a distinction. possibly it is true that affection can exist without passion, though if by “passion” sex-feeling is meant, it certainly is not true; and assuredly passion is the great and important part of love—nay, rather, it is love itself.

the truth is this: women have been taught for generations to look on love from a standpoint of unreality, and when in marriage they are forced to face some great fact in life, they are shocked and disillusioned. it is useless for women to go on acting as if sex desire was something of which nice people ought to be ashamed. marriage is really a contract in which the woman undertakes certain sexual duties as well as the man, and the woman has the advantage, for she possesses all that the man most wants.

we may not safely ask too much or too little from marriage or take too high or too low a view of it. but the christian view of the nature of marriage is at once too materialistic and too ascetic. the ancient world looked on[200] marriage as a religious duty. “to be mothers were women created, and to be fathers men.” christianity permitted marriage, but only as a necessary evil against the temptations of lust. “it is better to marry than to burn.”

this is, of course, a long past story. but such hateful view of marriage has left in every christian land an inheritance of evil. the sexual life was considered impure and a concession to the lower nature in man; true purity of life was to be attained only in celibacy. small wonder that marriage, thus regarded as an escape from worse evil and a cover to laxity of sexual conduct, is often so immoral. we see at once that the main evil of this gross misunderstanding of love must have fallen upon women. the woman was there just to keep the man in condition and from sin. i can hardly over-estimate the disastrous consequences both to marriage and to women of this unholy view of the sexual relationship.

the false glorification of asceticism, which denies the true nature of marriage while at the same time professedly regarding marriage as a sacrament, has involved a corresponding and unhealthy classifying of love into higher and lower, the spiritual and the physical; and the action of this double standard in the sexual life has led, on the one side, to the setting up of a theoretical ideal of conduct which, as few are able to follow it, tends to become an empty form, and this, on the other side, has led to a hidden laxity, within marriage and outside it.

i have emphasised this question of the unholy ascetic view of marriage because of its unspeakable evil, not only for women, but for the waste it entails to the race. it is the basis of most of the failures and diseases in our sexual life. as you know, our moral and religious systems regard the[201] body as the prison of the soul, and pay consequently no attention whatever to the body from the moral point of view. i desire a regeneration of all the instincts of the body through consciousness. i desire this much more for the health and happiness of women themselves than i do for the enjoyment of men.

but it is not going to be easy. the education of the senses is quite a new thing, and it is not even allowed to most women to possess them. the principle of “re-discovery” will have to be begun. we must teach woman that she wants love for herself; the man must not claim it from her as a right he has bought by marriage.

most women and some men do not realise (at least, they do not openly acknowledge) the immense disturbing power of sex and the claims the sexual life makes at some time on us all. to hear many people talk you would think it were possible to free ourselves at will of all those troubles and prejudices of sex that are our heritage from an uncountable past. love is something fiercer than hand-holding in the darkness of the cinema, or moon-gazing in the parks.

in fear we try to keep the blinds down so that love may be decently obscured. yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of life? the deepest of the emotions is sex, and its action, like all the emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths of the ordinary experience of each of us; it exercises its influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.

[202]

hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. the emotional self refuses at times to be controlled by the reason self. restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evil. for our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretences we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own deceit or collectively as a nation in the hope of controlling conduct.

this is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so foolish. the real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and want to do, and, therefore, are likely to go on doing. it is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost always fail to face.

having said this much, you will readily understand why i regard as necessary for the morality of marriage some public recognition of the relationship, and some accepted standard of conduct in it. we cannot, remembering the inherent defectiveness of our wills, safely hesitate and experiment in the liberties we can allow and the limits we must set to a force so strong as sexual love. still less can we allow to be done in secret and in shameful darkness things that we will not face in the light. the unregulated union in any form does not seem to me to be practicable. our sexual relationships are, or ought to be, so hedged about by duties, obligations, and consequences, that sexual conduct can never be considered as a personal question, and any society that permits such a view, whether openly acknowledged or secretly accepted, opens the way to real immorality and great unhappiness.

not all who cry “it is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards of legal marriage. we still feel the serpent’s sting of jealousy, and the old questions, “where do[203] you come from?” “what have you been doing to-night?” “who handled your body till daytime, while i watched and wept?” “in what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden with your smile?” are still felt in the heart, even if not uttered by the lips, of the most advanced and emancipated husbands and wives. for often we are forced into acts over which reason has no control. and our sex judgments are not merely moral, not just questions of understanding and forgiving, but also physical questions of the nerves, of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.

and marriage, i say, the old patriarchal marriage that the advanced people and the idealists alike scoff at, is necessary for most of us—it does through its checking influence help us, and, by setting clear limits and prescribing a fixed code of conduct, it certainly hinders, if it cannot destroy, irregular manifestations of love. moreover it does, by its ideal of faithfulness and duty to one mate, turn the imagination to desire fidelity. it is not so much that we could not love others, but that we shall not want to do so. our desire is the first necessity: all else will follow. it is the seed of everything that can grow up in marriage: it is the true magic power. and this desire is always active, every real marriage is a continual renewing of interest through love, and, if the partners are not interested in each other, they will seek for something else.

if we try to be faithful to one another in marriage, instead of outside of it, there will be for most of us a greater chance of enduring happiness than is likely under conditions where each individual couple sets up a standard of sexual conduct for themselves.

our minds to-day are certainly in conflict, and, in my opinion, it will be impossible to make much change in all[204] that is wrong without the refixing of moral standards. there is no kind of unity in our desires: we do not know what we want. we have broken down without building up. and when traditional rules for conduct are absent there must be confusion. for the existence of many standards, each with its own theory of what is good, is an evil which opens a clear way for license and unhappiness.

as i have tried to show, the two great faults of the modern reform movements connected with marriage and sexual conduct are their instability and externality. these faults are the direct result of too much intellectualism and too much individualism. we have gone astray because we have thought chiefly of our own immediate wants and been over eager for experience, without considering what the result of our action must be to others in the future. we have had no clear vision of evil and good. i feel almost that a mistaken vision—so long as it was a vision common to us all—would be better than no vision at all, which really is the result when each one of us gazes at our own particular star. this has been the blasting modern disease. and our inability to set up plain standards of right and wrong, with no ideals to strive after, has left vacant room for false ideals.

for i hold that the broad direction of our conduct follows straight from our faith. to believe in marriage is to want to do right in marriage. then do we fail, and our own union comes to disaster, it will be a personal failure, not a collective failure; we shall blame ourselves, not the institution of marriage. and to have this faith in marriage as a people—not as a law imposed upon us, but a necessary binding that we accept of our own wills—will bring us again to be unified by a comprehending idea: an ideal of[205] purpose and duty to one another and among us all in our sexual conduct, and in this way we shall be helped in right-doing. carried onwards by a ruling motive, we shall find unity of desire, with its value to life of an absolute standard. it is for this reason i care so deeply that the monogamic ideal of marriage—the living faithfully to one mate in thought and deed—should be held sacred by us all: held sacred, however greatly we may fail as individuals to attain to this ideal. our failures in faithful living may bring disaster to ourselves. but the institution of marriage can be hurt much more by the fading and loss of our belief in the duty of faithfulness.