burden of sex rests on the female, it is fitting
that she should
be less called upon for renunciation.
It thus seems probable that the increase of moral
responsibility may tend
to make a woman's conduct more intelligible to
others;[310] it will in any
case certainly tend to make it less the concern of
others. This is
emphatically the case as regards the relations of sex.
In the past men
have been invited to excel in many forms of virtue; only one virtue has
been open to women. That is no longer possible. To place upon a woman the
main responsibility for her own sexual conduct is to
deprive that conduct
of its conspicuously public character as a virtue or a vice. Sexual union,
for a woman as much as for a man, is a physiological
fact; it may also be
a spiritual fact; but it is not a social act. It is, on the contrary, an
act which, beyond all other acts, demands retirement and mystery for its
accomplishment. That indeed is a general human, almost zoölogical, fact.
Moreover, this demand of mystery is more especially made by woman in
virtue of her greater modesty which, we have found
reason to believe, has
a biological basis. It is not until a child is born or conceived that the
community has any right to interest itself in the sexual acts of its
members. The sexual act is of no more concern to the
community than any
other private physiological act. It is an impertinence, if not an outrage,
to seek to inquire into it. But the birth of a child is a social act. Not
what goes into the womb but what comes out of it
concerns society. The
community is invited to receive a new citizen. It is
entitled to demand
that that citizen shall be worthy of a place in its
midst and that he
shall be properly introduced by a responsible father and a responsible
mother. The whole of sexual morality, as Ellen Key has said, revolves
round the child.
At this final point in our discussion of sexual morality we may perhaps be
able to realize the immensity of the change which has
been involved by the
development in women of moral responsibility. So long as responsibility
was denied to women, so long as a father or a husband, backed up by the
community, held himself responsible for a woman's sexual behavior, for
her "virtue," it was necessary that the whole of sexual morality should
revolve around the entrance to the vagina. It became
absolutely essential
to the maintenance of morality that all eyes in the
community should be
constantly directed on to that point, and the whole
marriage law had to be
adjusted accordingly. That is no longer possible. When a woman assumes her
own moral responsibility, in sexual as in other matters, it becomes not
only intolerable but meaningless for the community to
pry into her most
intimate physiological or spiritual acts. She is herself directly
responsible to society as soon as she performs a social act, and not
before.
In relation to the fact of maternity the realization of all that is
involved in the new moral responsibility of women is
especially
significant. Under a system of morality by which a man is left free to
accept the responsibility for his sexual acts while a
woman is not equally
free to do the like, a premium is placed on sexual acts which have no end
in procreation, and a penalty is placed on the acts
which lead to
procreation. The reason is that it is the former class of acts in which
men find chief gratification; it is the latter class in which women find
chief gratification. For the tragic part of the old
sexual morality in its
bearing on women was that while it made men alone
morally responsible for
sexual acts in which both a man and a woman took part, women were rendered
both socially and legally incapable of availing
themselves of the fact of
masculine responsibility unless they had fulfilled
conditions which men
had laid down for them, and yet refrained from imposing upon themselves.
The act of sexual intercourse, being the sexual act in which men found
chief pleasure, was under all circumstances an act of
little social
gravity; the act of bringing a child into the world,
which is for women
the most massively gratifying of all sexual acts, was
counted a crime
unless the mother had before fulfilled the conditions
demanded by man.
That was perhaps the most unfortunate and certainly the most unnatural of
the results of the patriarchal regulation of society. It has never existed
in any great State where women have possessed some
degree of regulative
power.
It has, of course, been said by abstract theorists
that women
have the matter in their own hands. They must never
love a man
until they have safely locked him up in the legal
bonds of
matrimony. Such an argument is absolutely futile,
for it ignores
the fact that, while love and even monogamy are
natural, legal
marriage is merely an external form, with a very
feeble power of
subjugating natural impulses, except when those
impulses are
weak, and no power at all of subjugating them
permanently.
Civilization involves the growth of foresight, and
of
self-control in both sexes; but it is foolish to
attempt to place
on these fine and ultimate outgrowths of
civilization a strain
which they could never bear. How foolish it is has
been shown,
once and for all, by Lea in his admirable _History
of Sacerdotal
Celibacy_.
Moreover, when we compare the respective aptitudes
of men and
women in this particular region, it must be
remembered that men
possess a greater power of forethought and self-
control than
women, notwithstanding the modesty and reserve of
women. The
sexual sphere is immensely larger in women, so that
when its
activity is once aroused it is much more difficult
to master or
control. (The reasons were set out in detail in the
discussion of
"The Sexual Impulse in Women" in volume iii of these _Studies_.)
It is, therefore, unfair to women, and unduly favors
men, when
too heavy a premium is placed on forethought and
self-restraint
in sexual matters. Since women play the predominant