Havelock Ellis

“ If in the home the husband is still to be regarded as the capitalist and the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature. Just as the readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long recognised ideals of marriage. ”

“ In such a case it is well for them to remember that there is no need to become parents and that we live in an age when it is not difficult to avoid becoming a parent. The world is not dying for lack of parents. On the contrary we have far too many of them—ignorant parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents—and those who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as few as they will—and perhaps at the present time the fewer the better—must not refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains as well as its joys. ”

“ THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN
What is the part of woman, one is sometimes asked, in the sex act? Must it be the wife’s concern in the marital embrace to sacrifice her own wishes from a sense of love and duty towards her husband? Or is the wife entitled to an equal mutual interest and joy in this act with her husband? It seems a simple problem. In so fundamental a relationship, which goes back to the beginning of sex in the dawn of life, it might appear that we could leave Nature to decide. ”

“ For my own part, I scarcely consider that either eugenics or birth-control can be regarded as properly a part of religion. Being of virtue and not of grace they belong more naturally to the sphere of morals. But here they certainly need to go far deeper than the mere intelligence of the mind can take them. They cannot become guides to conduct until their injunctions have been printed on the fleshy tablets of our hearts. The demands of the race must speak from within us, in the voice of conscience which we disobey at our peril. ”

“ Everything outside us is only the means for this constructing process, yes, I would even dare to say, also everything inside us; deep within lies the creative force which is able to form what it will, and gives us no rest until, without us or within us, in one or the other way, we have finally given it representation.” The future, with all its possibilities, is still a future infinitely far away, however well it may be to fix our eyes on the constellation towards which our solar system may seem, to be moving across the sky. ”

“ It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy. The things that fill men and women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur them to actions beyond themselves, are the things that are now needed. ”

“ It may seem to some that this new movement of upheaval in the sphere of the Home is merely destructive. Timid souls have felt the like in every period of transition, and with as little reason. Just as we realise that the movement now in progress in the world of Labour for a higher standard of life and for, as it has been termed, a larger “leisure-ration,” represents a wholesome revolt against the crushing conditions of prolonged monotonous work—the most deadening of all work—and a real advance towards those ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so it is with the movement in the Home. ”

“ The high birth-rate has meant a vast slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic competition, militarism, warfare. It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will I require the life of man." ”

“ In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us—the duties in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of others or in both—are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and to it we owe all that we are. There are no maxims, there is only an art and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict. ”

“ These parents do not indeed tyrannise over their children but they do worse; they train their children to be tyrants. Against these two tendencies of our century Ellen Key declares her own Alpha and Omega of the art of education. Try to leave the child in peace; live your own life beautifully, nobly, temperately, and in so living you will sufficiently teach your children to live. It is not my purpose here to consider how far this conception of the duty of parents towards children is justified, and whether or not peace is the best preparation for a world in which struggle dominates. ”

“ Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions. It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied. Nothing, it has been said, is so serious as lust—to use the beautiful term which has been degraded into the expression of the lowest forms of sensual pleasure—and we have now to add that nothing is so full of play as love. ”

“ The greatest task before civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common destruction. It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument. ”

“ It is only slowly and indirectly that we can bring about the revolution which in this direction would renew life. We may prepare the way for it by undermining and destroying those degrading traditional conceptions which have persisted so long that they are instilled into us almost from birth, to work like a virus in the heart, and to become almost a disease of the soul. ”

“ The elaboration of the mechanical side of life by itself may merely serve to speed up the pace of life instead of expanding leisure, to pile up the weary burden of luxury, and still further to dissipate the energy of life in petty or frivolous channels. [6] To bring order into the region of soulless machinery running at random, to raise the super-structure of a genuinely human civilisation, is not a task which either men or women can afford to fling contemptuously to the opposite sex. ”

“ There is not the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had any but a completely negligible influence on population. This is a natural process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate. Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will, tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is Nature, not human effort, which is at work. ”

“ We shall not even, within any measurable period of time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate aspirations. The wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four people in it, yet one of them a murderer. ”

“ We realise that never more than when we observe the distinction which conventional sex-morals so often makes between men and women. Failing to find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all. So man has regarded himself as the sexual animal, and woman as either the passive object of his adoring love or the helpless victim of his degrading lust, in either case as a being who, unlike man, possessed an innocent "purity" by nature, without any need for the trouble of acquiring it. ”

“ The majority are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers, the anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.
We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their children, who still remain children to them even when they are grown up. ”

“ At times one feels hopeless at the thought that civilisation in this supremely intimate field of life has yet achieved so little. For until it is generally possible to acquire erotic personality and to master the art of loving, the development of the individual man or woman is marred, the acquirement of human happiness and harmony remains impossible.
In entering this field, indeed, we not only have to gain true knowledge but to cast off false knowledge, and, above all, to purify our hearts from superstitions which have no connection with any kind of existing knowledge. ”

“ It is quite true that the children may go astray even when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small. ”

“ All the emanations of the human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet none to which they were impelled to give more thought. ”

“ At present the average married woman’s working day is a flagrant contradiction of all trade-union ideals. The poor thing is slaving all the time! What she needs—what she longs for—is just a little break or change now and again, an opportunity to get her mind off her work and its worries. If her husband’s hours are reduced to eight, well that gives her a chance, doesn’t it? The home and the children are, after all, as much his as hers. With his enlarged leisure he will now be able to take a fair share in home duties. ”

“ Thus when a man enters the home as a husband, to seat himself on the antique domestic throne and to play the part assigned to him of old, he is involuntarily, even unconsciously, following an ancient tradition and taking his place in a procession of husbands which began long ages before he was born. It thus comes about that a man, even after he is married, and a husband are two different persons, so that his wife who mainly knows him as a husband may be unable to form any just idea of what he is like as a man. ”

“ It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is bound up with the practice of birth-control. Without birth-control, indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the other side, the un-æsthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with birth-control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the whole of our civilised human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save through the material. ”

“ It may seem that in setting forth the nature of the sexual impulse in the light of modern biology and psychology, I have said but little of purity and less of morality. Yet that is as it should be. We must first be content to see how the machine works and watch the wheels go round. We must understand before we can pretend to control; in the natural world, as Bacon long ago said, we can only command by obeying. Moreover, in this field Nature’s order is far older and more firmly established than our civilised human morality. In our arrogance we often assume that Morality is the master of Nature. ”

“ Moral maxims that were wholesome in feudal days are deadly now. We are in no danger of suffering from too much vitality, from too much energy in the explosive splendour of our social life. We possess, moreover, knowledge in plenty and self-restraint in plenty, even in excess, however wrongly they may sometimes be applied. It is passion, more passion and fuller, that we need. The moralist who bans passion is not of our time ”

“ If we can tolerate the wholesale murder and mutilation of the finest specimens of our race in the adult possession of all their aptitudes we cannot easily find anything to disapprove in the merciful disposal of the poorest specimens before they have even attained conscious possession of their senses. But in any case, and whatever we may ourselves be pleased to think or not to think, it is certain that some of the most highly developed peoples of the world have practised infanticide. It is equally certain that the practise has not proved destructive to the emotions of humanity and affection. ”

“ It is the wife’s consolation that most husbands are not always at home.
“In ministering to the wants of the family, the woman has reduced man to a state of considerable dependency on her in all domestic affairs, just as she is dependent on him for bodily protection. In the course of ages this has gone so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the part of the man, which manifests itself in a somewhat childlike reliance of the husband on the wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is, to all intents and purposes, incapable of maintaining himself without the aid of a woman.” ”

“ This dynamic conception of the sexual impulse, as a force that, under natural conditions, may be trusted to build up a new morality, obviously belongs to an indefinitely remote future. It is a force whose blade is two-edged, for while it strikes at unselfishness it also strikes at selfishness, and at present we cannot easily conceive a time when "there is no self"; we should be more disposed to regard it as a time when there is much humbug. Yet for the individual this conception of the constructive power of love retains much enlightenment and inspiration. ”