The clash between sovereign choice and societal duty in love and procreation

“ And when health and the humours of daily life have passed into the domain of this social discipline, when it is admitted that the community must primarily control the primary habits, when all law begins, so to speak, next to the skin or nearest the vitals --- then indeed it will appear absurd that marriage and maternity should not be similarly ordered. Then indeed it will seem to be illogical, and it will be illogical, that love should be free when life has lost its freedom. ”

“ Here we are on the watershed between the old and the new morality. The course of the former is determined by doubts of, and that of the latter by belief in, the resources of the power in human nature. The doubts of the former lead to the obligation of the individual to submit himself to the claims of society; the belief of the latter leads to the liberty of the individual to choose his own duty to society. ”

“ What shall we say of that authority, more venerable and august than any individual witness, the time-honoured tradition of the human race? An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life. It is around and about us and within us; we cannot think except in the forms and processes of thought which it supplies. Is it possible to doubt and to test it? and if possible, is it right?
We shall find reason to answer that it is not only possible and right, but our bounden duty; ”

“ The law for father and son and mother and daughter is not the law of love: it is the law of revolution, of emancipation, of final supersession of the old and worn-out by the young and capable. I tell you, the first duty of manhood and womanhood is a Declaration of Independence: the man who pleads his father's authority is no man: the woman who pleads her mother's authority is unfit to bear citizens to a free people.
ANN [watching him with quiet curiosity] I suppose you will go in seriously for politics some day, Jack.
TANNER [heavily let down] Eh? ”

“ With the enhancement of life as love’s standard of morality, it is thus impossible, as we maintained at the beginning, to decide in advance whether either a free or a married love, an interrupted or a continued marriage, voluntary childlessness or parentage, is moral or immoral; for the result depends in each individual case on the will, the choice, which lies behind it, and only the development of events can decide the nature of this will and this choice.
It is true enough that human beings are often weaker in execution than in resolve. ”

“ But as the individual cannot attain his highest life-enhancement or fulfil his own purpose otherwise than in connection with the race, he acquires duties also towards it, and not least as a sexual202 being. If life has given the individual a lot which renders moral parentage possible, and conditions which are favourable to new lives, then the only moral limitation of the number of children is one which—in and by means of the individual’s own life-enhancement and that of the children—is to the advantage of the whole community. ”

“ Instead of divine codes of the morality of sexual relations, the desire of, and responsibility for, the enhancement of the race will be the support of morals. But the knowledge of the parents that396 the meaning of life is also in their own lives, that they thus do not exist solely for the sake of their children, may liberate them from other duties of conscience which at present bind them in respect of the children, above all that of keeping up a union in which they themselves perish. ”

“ The query of a humourist, why he should do anything for posterity since posterity had done nothing for him, set me to thinking in my early youth in the most serious way. I felt that posterity had done much for its forefathers. It had given them an infinite horizon for the future beyond the bounds of their daily effort. We must in the child see the new fate of the human race; we must carefully treat the fine threads in the child's soul because these are the threads that one day will form the woof of world events. ”

“ It is thus only a question of time when the respect of society for a sexual union shall not depend upon the form of cohabitation that makes a couple of human beings become parents, but only upon the value of the children they thus create as new links in the chain of generations. Men and women will then dedicate to their mental and bodily fitness for the mission of the race the same religious earnestness that Christians devote to the salvation of their souls. ”

“ A great and healthy will to live is what our time needs in the matter of the erotic emotions and claims. It is here that there is a menace of real dangers from the woman’s side; and it is, amongst other things, to avert these dangers that new forms of marriage must be created.
A human material increasing in value and in capacity for development—this is what the earth will produce. The chances of obtaining this may be decreased under fixed, but favoured under freer, forms of sexual life. It is not only because the present day demands more freedom that these claims are full of promise. ”

“ For the beginning of a new life, select the most favorable time, which will be when the bodily health is at its height; when the mind is free from care and anxiety; when the heart is joyous, cheerful, and filled with hope, love, high aspirations, pure and beautiful thoughts. If, as one writer says, it is the duty of every human pair engaging in the reproductive act to bring into existence the most perfect specimen of the race of which they are capable, then it becomes a monstrous crime to enter into relations which may produce a contrary result. ”

“ During the last year of education, however, the subject of marriage will be dwelt upon, in its bearing on individual happiness and on social well-being, in relation to the welfare of the next generation and to the continuous development of the race. The most careful and deliberate choice of partners for life will be inculcated as the highest social duty; while the young women will be so trained as to look with scorn and loathing on all men who in any way willfully fail in their duty to society—on idlers and malingerers, on drunkards and liars, on the selfish, the cruel, or the vicious. ”

“ The law of inheritance, which makes it easy for the degenerate to contract marriage, and women’s need of maintenance have, on the other hand, falsified the instinct of the latter in this direction. The prevailing customs and ideas of morality have as a rule deprived future mothers of their full freedom of choice and thus to a great extent neutralised the importance146 of womanly love’s selection for the spiritual and bodily improvement of the race. ”

“ In those cases, again, where the law would definitely forbid marriage, this would doubtless be no hindrance to diseased people having offspring outside wedlock. But the same is true, of course, of all legal enactments: the best people do not require them, the worst do not obey them, but through them the ideas of justice of the majority are cultivated.
Only those who are ignorant of the laws of psychological transformation doubt the possibility of the simultaneous enhancement of the feeling of love and the racial sense. ”

“ It is possible, with sufficient certainty, to show from criminal statistics that degenerate children are the creation of society itself. By allowing them to be forced into "the path of virtue," by punishment, society behaves like a tyrant, who has put out a man's eyes and then beats him because he cannot by himself find his road.
The categorical imperative for the social consciousness at the present moment, is an effective legislation for the protection of children and women.
Wherever industry is developed, the woman is taken away from the home, the child from play and school. ”

“ A deep physiological truth is hidden in the use of language when one speaks of unchained passions; the passions, under the prevailing system of education, are really only beasts of prey imprisoned in cages.
While fine words are spoken about individual development, children are treated as if their personality had no purpose of its own, as if they were made only for the pleasure, pride, and comfort of their parents; and as these aims are best advanced when children become like every one else, people usually begin [Pg 119] by attempting to make them respectable and useful members of society. ”

“ Everything that philanthropy now does to heal the injurious and disintegrating effects of the capitalistic industrial system is on the whole wasted power. Children's crèches, kindergartens, providing meals for children, hospitals, vacation homes, cannot with all their noble efforts replace a hundredth part of [Pg 88] the life energy, taken directly or indirectly from the new generation by women working outside the home.
There are some people who expect the problem of domestic life to be solved by collective institutions which will take care of the children, and give them meals. ”

“ What we must insist upon is that marriage shall be a partnership, deliberately entered into by two equal persons, economically independent of each other, attracted to each other by that physical and temperamental affinity which we call love; and that we shall import into the relationship no extraneous notions of state-service or of race-preservation which may interfere with the freedom and spontaneity of the relation thus established. The bearing of children may be a service to the nation; but no child is well-born who is not born simply of the joyful mutual selfgiving of man and woman. ”

“ On the other hand, love, treated as a synthesis of spiritual sympathy and the life of the race, as the vital force through which a human being’s existence is enhanced and beautified, is to them worthless; and the idea of a distinction between the nature of woman and of man is to them meaningless. They demand of both complete abstinence outside marriage, and within it they permit only certain few exceptions, which nature’s yet imperfect arrangements render necessary for the continuance of the race. ”

“ It results from the foregoing that the ideal form of marriage is considered to be the perfectly free union of a man and a woman, who through mutual love desire to promote the happiness of each other and of the race.
But as development does not proceed by leaps no one can hope that the whole of society will attain this ideal otherwise than through transitional forms. ”

“ The box of mischief thus opened in society, what is to preserve private virtue, the only security of public freedom and universal happiness?
Let there be then no coercion ESTABLISHED in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper places. And, now that more equitable laws are forming your citizens, marriage may become more sacred; your young men may choose wives from motives of affection, and your maidens allow love to root out vanity. ”

“ Nay, many misfortunes depend upon pure trifles, which two people with courage and foresight might easily have dealt with, if the instinct of happiness had not been silenced by consideration for convention. The more a woman has enjoyed personal liberty before marriage, the less she can endure not to have a moment or a corner in her home which she can call her own. And the more the people of the present day enlarge their individual freedom of movement, their need of solitude in other respects, the more will both man and woman enlarge them in marriage. ”

“ The way of evolution is to demand of love all that friendship affords—and infinitely more! But the rich spiritual intercourse between female fellow-workers and fellow-students, as also between comrades of different sexes, is now preparing the third historical stage of development, that of individual sympathy. It is true that great love has been individually sympathetic in all ages. What is new is that an ever greater number of spirits are guided by the same need; that the possibility of great love has become apparent to many, not only to a chosen few. ”

“ But its solution of love’s deepest conflict—that between the claims of the individual and those of the race—is prejudicial to the will of nature as well as to the conditions of civilisation. Independently of both factors, these zealots believe they can attain that white world of purity which attracts their minds, afflicted as they are30 by the impurity and misery with which sexual relations still load existence. They forget that above the snow-line only the poorest forms of life can flourish. But human development tends towards the production of an ever richer and stronger series of forms. ”

“ For it is one thing to have the right to one’s great emotion; another to have the right or the possibility of one’s full happiness.
Love may be never so free in its social aspect;346 no freedom of morals or of divorce can release the sons of men from the inevitable sufferings of their own nature, nor from the inevitable conflicts of their connection with the past. These sufferings and conflicts have been made so deep by life itself that there is indeed no necessity for the law to make them deeper. ”

“ When the last fetter falls the evils that have resulted from the suppression of woman's will to freedom will pass. Child slavery, prostitution, feeblemindedness, physical deterioration, hunger, oppression and war will disappear from the earth.
In their subjection women have not been brave enough, strong enough, pure enough to bring forth great sons and daughters. Abused soil brings forth stunted growths. An abused motherhood has brought forth a low order of humanity. Great beings come forth at the call of high desire. Fearless motherhood goes out in love and passion for justice to all mankind. ”

“ The tigress is less terrible in defense of her offspring than will be the human mother. The daughters of such women will not be given over to injustice and to prostitution; the sons will not perish in industry nor upon the battle field. Nor could they meet these all too common fates if an undaunted motherhood were there to defend. Childhood and youth will be too valuable in the eyes of society to waste them in the murderous mills of blind greed and hate.
This is the dawn. Womanhood shakes off its bondage. It asserts its right to be free. In its freedom, its thoughts turn to the race. ”

“ When the womb becomes fruitful through the desire of an aspiring love, another Newton will come forth to unlock further the secrets of the earth and the stars. There will come a Plato who will be understood, a Socrates who will drink no hemlock, and a Jesus who will not die upon the cross. These and the race that is to be in America await upon a motherhood that is to be sacred because it is free. ”

“ When women have raised the standards of sex ideals and purged the human mind of its unclean conception of sex, the fountain of the race will have been cleansed. Mothers will bring forth, in purity and in joy, a race that is morally and spiritually free.
CHAPTER XV LEGISLATING WOMAN'S MORALS One of the important duties before those women who are demanding birth control as a means to a New Race is the changing of our so-called obscenity laws. ”

“ Then and then only can the mother cease to be an incubator and be a mother indeed. Then only can she transmit to her sons and daughters the qualities which make strong individuals and, collectively, a strong race.
Voluntary motherhood also implies the right of marriage without maternity. Two utterly different functions are developed in the two relationships. In order to give the mate relationship its full and free play, it is necessary that no woman should be a mother against her will. ”

“ Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives. So, in compliance with nature's working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we can expect of it efficient motherhood. If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman. ”

“ All the social handicaps and evils of the day are woven into these letters—and out of each of them rises these challenging facts: First, oppressed motherhood knows that the cure for these evils lies in birth control; second, society has not yet learned to permit motherhood to stand guard for itself, its children, the common good and the coming race. ”

“ We must put this means of freedom and growth into the hands of the masses.
We must set motherhood free. We must give the foreign and submerged mother knowledge that will enable her to prevent bringing to birth children she does not want. We know that in each of these submerged and semisubmerged elements of the population there are rich factors of racial culture. Motherhood is the channel through which these cultures flow. Motherhood, when free to choose the father, free to choose the time and the number of children who shall result from the union, automatically works in wondrous ways. ”

“ And there should be no question of virtue in all this, it must be a labour of love, without which the human race would be doomed to extinction.
The mutual duties of the two sexes are not, and cannot be, equally binding on both. Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of man-made laws; this inequality is not of man's making, or at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason. She to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children must hold herself responsible for them to their father. ”

“ Or, on the other hand, woman must be brought up for relentless competition with man in all the departments of production—thus necessarily losing more and more the power and the desire to provide the race with new human material—and the State must undertake the breeding as well as the rearing of children, in order to liberate her from the cares which at present most hinder her freedom of movement. ”

“ To every thoughtful person, it is becoming increasingly evident that the human race is approaching the parting of the ways for its future destiny. Either—speaking generally—the old division of labour, founded in nature, must continue: that by which the majority of women not only bear but also bring up the new generation within the home; that men—directly in marriage or indirectly through a State provision for mother212hood—should work for women’s support during the years they are performing this service to society ”

“ And only if women put their personal creative desire into their mission as mothers during their children’s first years, will the problem be solved of woman’s self-assertion and of her simultaneous devotion to the mission of the race.
No, is the answer of Charlotte Perkins Stetson5 and of many others with her; the solution is State care of children. Look at all the wretched homes, where the children lack the most necessary mental 230and bodily conditions for healthy development. The collective rearing of all children would be both better and cheaper. ”

“ The claim of society that a father or mother, radiant with possibilities of happiness, shall sacrifice these for the sake of the children, will be reduced when the sense of the value of life has341 grown and the duty of parents to live for their children is more often interpreted to mean that they must continue to be fully alive, with powers of renewal. ”

“ The inter-dependence which children create between their parents when these together care for and love them, is sometimes indissoluble. In most cases it is so strong as to form the real tie, without which laws twice as strict as the present ones would have no power to keep together two unwilling beings.
When speaking of love’s selection, we pointed to the signs which indicate that the feeling for the race—the feeling which from time immemorial has linked together man and woman at a common hearth, has raised the altar near it and round them both the town wall—is approaching its renaissance. ”

“ They are so because the claims are coming nearer and nearer to the399 kernel of the question—the certainty that love is the most perfect condition for the life-enhancement of the race and of the individual—and because the present time acknowledges the necessity of temporarily limiting freedom, though only by means of laws which will form an education in love.
Such a law must, for the sake of woman’s liberty, deprive man of certain of his present rights; for the sake of the children, limit the present liberty both of man and woman. ”