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Book of Life, The

<h2>CHAPTER XLIII THE MONEY SIDE OF MARRIAGE</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of matrimony.) </div> So far we have discussed marriage as if it consisted only of love. But it is manifest that this is not the case. Marriage is every-day companionship, and also it is partnership in a complicated business. In our school of marriage therefore we shall teach the rights and duties of both partners to the contract, and shall face frankly the money side of the enterprise. One of the first facts we must get clear is that the economics of marriage are in most parts of the world still based upon the subjection of woman, and are therefore incompatible with the claims of woman as a partner and comrade. They will never be right until the social revolution has abolished privilege, and the state has granted to every woman a maternity endowment, with a mother's pension for every child during the entire period of the rearing and education of that child. Until this is done, the average woman must look to some man for the support of her child, and that, by the automatic operation of economic force, makes her subject to the whims of the man. What women have to do is to agitate for a revision of the property laws of marriage; and meantime to see that in every marriage there is an extra-legal understanding, which grants to the woman the equality which laws and conventions deny her. When I was a boy my mother had a woman friend who, if she wanted to go downtown, would borrow a quarter from my mother. This woman's husband was earning a generous salary, enough to enable him to buy the best cigars by the box, and to keep a supply of liquors always on hand; but he gave his wife no allowance, and if she wanted pocket money she had to ask him for it, each time a separate favor. Yet this woman was keeping a home, she was doing just as hard work and just as necessary work as the man. Manifestly, this was a preposterous arrangement. If a woman is going to be a home-maker for a husband, it is a simple, common-sense proposition that the salary of the husband shall be divided into three parts—first, the part which goes to the home, the benefit of which is shared in common; second, the part which the husband has for his own use; and third, the part which the wife has for hers. The second and third parts should be equal, and the wife should have hers, not as a favor, but as a right. If the two are making a homestead, or running a farm, or building up a business, then half the proceeds should be the woman's; and it should be legally in her name, and this as a matter of course, as any other business contract. If the woman does not make a home, but merely displays fine clothes at tea parties, that is of course another matter. Just what she is to do is something that had better be determined before marriage; and if a man wants a life-partner, to take an interest in his work, or to have a useful work of her own, he had better choose that kind of woman, and not merely one that has a pretty face and a trim ankle. The business side of marriage is something that has to be talked out from time to time; there have to be meetings of the board of directors, and at these meetings there ought to be courtesy and kindness, but also plain facts and common sense, and no shirking of issues. Love is such a very precious thing that any man or woman ought to be willing to make money sacrifices to preserve it. But on the other hand, it is a fact that there are some people with whom you cannot be generous; the more you give them, the more they take, and with such people the only safe rule is exact justice. Let married couples decide exactly what contribution each makes to the family life, and what share of money and authority each is entitled to. I might spend several chapters discussing the various rocks on which I have seen marriages go to wreck. For example, extravagance and worldly show; clothes for women. In Paris is a "demi-monde," a world of brutal lust combined with riotous luxury. The women of this "half-world" are in touch with the world of art and fashion, and when the rich costumers and woman-decorators want what they call ideas, it is to these lust-women they go. The fashions they design are always depraved, of course; always for the flaunting of sex, never for the suggestion of dignity and grave intelligence. At several seasons of the year these lust-women are decked out and paraded at the race-courses and other gathering places of the rich, and their pictures are published in the papers and spread over all the world. So forthwith it becomes necessary for your wife in Oshkosh or Kalamazoo to throw away all the perfectly good clothes she owns, and get a complete new outfit—because "they" are wearing something different. Of course the costume-makers have seen that it is extremely different, so as to make it impossible for your wife and children to be happy in their last season's clothes. I have a winter overcoat which I bought fourteen years ago, and as it is still as good as new I expect to use it another fourteen years, which will mean that it has cost me a dollar and a half per year. But think what it would have cost me if I had considered it necessary each year to have an overcoat cut as the keepers of French mistresses were cutting theirs! But then, suppose you put it up to your wife and daughters to wear sensible clothes, and they do so, and then they observe that on the street your eyes turn to follow the ladies in the latest disappearing skirt? The point is, you perceive, that you yourself are partly to blame for the fashions. They appeal to a dirty little imp you have in your own heart, and when the decent women discover that, it makes them blazing hot, and that is one of the ways you may wreck your domestic happiness if you want to. Unless I am greatly mistaken, when the class war is all over we are going to see in our world a sex war; but it is not going to be between the men and the women, it is going to be between the mother women and the mistress women, and the mistress women are going to have their hides stripped off. Men wreck marriage because they are promiscuous; and women wreck it because they are parasites. Woman has been for long centuries an economic inferior, and she has the vices of the subject peoples and tribes. Now there are some who want to keep these vices, while at the same time claiming the new privileges which go with equality. Such a woman picks out a man who is sensitive and chivalrous; who knows that women suffer handicaps, pains of childbirth, physical weakness, and who therefore feels impelled to bear more than his share of the burdens. She makes him her slave; and by and by she gets a child, and then she has him, because he is bowed down with awe and worship, he thinks that such a miracle has never happened in the world before, and he spends the rest of his life waiting on her whims and nursing her vanities. I note that at the recent convention of the Woman's Party they demanded their rights and agreed to surrender their privileges. There you have the final test by which you may know that women really want to be free, and are prepared to take the responsibilities of freedom. <h2>CHAPTER XLIV THE DEFENSE OF MONOGAMY</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses the permanence of love, and why we should endeavor to preserve it.) </div> So far in this discussion we have assumed that love means monogamous love. We did so, for the reason that we could not consider every question at once. But we have promised to deal with all the problems of sex in the light of reason; and so we have now to take up the question, what are the sanctions of monogamy, and why do we refuse sanction to other kinds of love? First, let us set aside several reasons with which we have nothing to do. For example, the reason of tradition. It is a fact that Anglo-Saxon civilization has always refused legal recognition to non-monogamous marriage. But then, Anglo-Saxon civilization has recognized war, and slavery, and speculation, and private property in land, and many other things which we presume to describe as crimes. If tradition cannot justify itself to our reason, we shall choose martyrdom. Second, the religious reason. This is the one that most people give. It is convenient, because it saves the need of thinking. Suffice it here to say that we prefer to think. If we cannot justify monogamy by the facts of life, we shall declare ourselves for polygamy. What are the scientific and rational reasons for monogamy? First among them is venereal disease. This may seem like a vulgar reason, but no one can deny that it is real. There was a time, apparently, when mankind did not suffer from these plagues, and we hope there may be such a time again. I shall not attempt to prescribe the marital customs for the people of that happy age; I suspect that they will be able to take care of themselves. Confining myself to my lifetime and yours, I say that the aim of every sensible man and woman must be to confine sex relations to the smallest possible limits. I know, of course, that there are prophylactics, and the army and navy present statistics to show that they succeed in a great proportion of cases. But if you are one of those persons in whose case they don't succeed, you will find the statistics a cold source of comfort to you. John and Mary go to the altar, or to the justice of the peace, and John says: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow." But the formula is incomplete; it ought to read: "And likewise with the fruits of my wild oats." Marriage is a contract wherein each of the contracting parties agrees to share whatever pathogenic bacteria the other party may have or acquire; surely, therefore, the contract involves a right of each party to have a say as to how many chances of infection the other shall incur. John goes off on a business trip, and is lonesome, and meets an agreeable widow, and figures to himself that there is very little chance that so charming a person can be dangerous. But maybe Mary wouldn't agree with his calculations; maybe Mary would not consider it a part of the marriage bargain that she should take the diseases of the agreeable widow. What commonly happens is that Mary is not consulted; John revises the contract in secret, making it read that Mary shall take a chance at the diseases of the widow. How can any thinking person deny that John has thus committed an act of treason to Mary? I know that there are people who don't mind running such chances; that is one reason why there are venereal diseases. All I can say is that the sex-code set forth in this book is based upon the idea that to deliver mankind from the venereal plague, we wish to confine the sex relationship within the narrowest limits consistent with health, happiness and spiritual development; and that to this end we take the young and teach them chastity, and we marry them early while they are clean, and then we call upon them to make the utmost effort to make a success of that union, and to make it a matter of honor to keep the marital faith. We do this with some hope of effectiveness, because we have made our program consistent with the requirements of nature, the genuine needs of love both physical and spiritual. The second argument for monogamy is the economic one. We have dreamed a social order where every child will be guaranteed maintenance by the state, and where women will be free from dependence on men. What will be the love arrangements of men and women under this new order is another problem which we leave for them to decide, in the certainty that they will know more about it than we do. Meantime, we are for the present under the private property r�gime, and have to love and marry and raise our children accordingly. The children must have homes, and if they are to be normal children, they must have both the male and female influence in their lives; which means that their parents must be friends and partners, not quarreling in secret. This argument, I know, is one of expediency. I have adopted it, after watching a great number of people try other than monogamous sex arrangements, and seeing their chances of happiness and success wrecked by the pressure of economic forces. To rebel against social compulsion may be heroism, and again it may be merely bad judgment. For my part, the world's greatest evil is poverty, the cause of crime, prostitution and war. I concentrate my energies upon the abolishing of that evil, and I let other problems wait. The third reason is that monogamy is economical of human time and thought. The business of finding and wooing a mate takes a lot of energy, and adjustment after marriage takes more. To throw away the results of this labor and do it all over again is certainly not common sense. Of course, if you bake a cake and burn it, you have to get more material and make another try; but that is a different matter from baking a cake with the deliberate intention of throwing it away after a bite or two. The advocates of varietism in love will here declare that we are begging the question. We are assuming that love and the love chase are not worthy in themselves, but merely means to some other end. Can it be that love delights are the keenest and most intense that humans can experience, and that all other purposes of life are contributory to them? Certainly a great deal of art lends support to this idea, and many poets have backed up their words by their deeds. As Coleridge phrased it: <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> <tr><td align="left">"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">Whatever stirs this mortal frame,</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">All are but ministers of Love</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">And feed his sacred flame."</td></tr> </table> This is a question not to be played with. Experimenting in love is costly, and millions have wrecked their lives by it. The sex urge in us is imperious and cruel; it wants nothing less than the whole of us, body, mind and spirit, and ofttimes it behaves like the genii in the bottle—it gets out, and not all the powers in the universe can get it back. I have talked with many men about sex and heard them say that it presents itself to them as an unmitigated torment, something they would give everything they own to be free of. And these, mind you, not men living in monasteries, trying to repress their natural impulses, but men of the world, who have lived freely, seeking pleasure and taking it as it came. The primrose path of dalliance did not lead them to peace, and the pursuit of variety in love brought them only monotony. I stop and think of one after another of these sex-ridden people, and I cannot think of one whom I would envy. I know one who in a frenzy of unhappiness seized a razor and castrated himself. I think of another, a certain classmate in college whom I once stopped in a conversation, remarking: "Did you ever realize what a state you have got your mind into? Everything means sex to you. Every phrase you hear, every idea that is suggested—you try to make some sort of pun, to connect it somehow or other with sex." The man thought and said, "I guess that's true." The idea had never occurred to him before; he had just gone on letting his instincts have their way with him, without ever putting his reason upon the matter. That was a crude kind of sex; but I think of another man, an idealist and champion of human liberty. One of the forms of liberty he maintained was the right to love as many women as he pleased, and although he was a married man, one hardly ever saw him that he was not courting some young girl. As a result, his mental powers declined, and he did little but talk about ideas. I do not know anyone today who respects him—except a few people who live the same sort of life. The thought of him brings to my mind a sentence of Nietzsche—a man who surely stood for freedom of personality: "I pity the lovers who have nothing higher than their love." A question like this can be decided only by the experience of the race. Some will make love the end and aim of life, and others will make it the means to other ends, and we shall see which kind of people achieve the best results, which kind are the most useful, the most dignified, the most original and vital. I have seen a great many young people try the experiment of "free love," and I have seen some get enough of it and quit; I could name among these half a dozen of our younger novelists. I know others who are still in it—and I watch their lives and find them to be restless, jealous, egotistical and idle. My defense of monogamy is based upon the fact that I have never known any happy or successful "free lovers." Of course, I know some noble and sincere people who do not believe in the marriage contract, and refuse to be bound by law; but these people are as monogamous as I am, even more tightly bound by honor than if they were duly married. It seems to be in the very nature of true and sincere love to imagine permanence, to desire it and to pledge it. If you aren't that much in love, you aren't really in love at all, and you had better content yourself with strolling together and chatting together and dining together and playing music together. So many pleasant ways there are in which men and women can enjoy each other's company without entering upon the sacred intimacy of sex! You can learn to take sex lightly, of course, but if you do so, you reduce by so much the chances that true and deep love will ever come to you; for true and deep love requires some patience, some reverence, some tending at a shrine. The animals mate quickly and get it over with; but the great discoveries about love, and the possibilities of the human soul in love, have come because men and women have been willing to make sacrifices for it, to take it seriously—and more especially to take seriously the beloved person, the rights and needs and virtues of that person. From the lives of such we learn that love is nature's device for taking us out of ourselves, and making us truly social creatures. Early in my life as a writer I undertook to answer Gertrude Atherton, in her glorification of the sex-corruptions of capitalist society. She indicted American literature for its "bourgeois" qualities—among these the fact that American authors had a prejudice in favor of living with their own wives. Mrs. Atherton set forth the joys of sex promiscuity as they are understood by European artists, and I ventured in replying to remark that "one woman can be more to a man than a dozen can possibly be." That sounds like a paradox, but it is really a profound truth, and the person who does not understand it has missed the best there is in the sex relation. There is a limit to the things of the body, but to those of the mind and spirit there is no limit, and so there is no reason why true love should ever fall prey to boredom and satiety. <h2>CHAPTER XLV THE PROBLEM OF JEALOUSY</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses the question, to what extent one person may hold another to the pledge of love.) </div> Once upon a time I knew an Anarchist shoemaker, the same who had me sent to jail for playing tennis on Sunday, as I have narrated in "The Brass Check." I remember arguing with him concerning his ideas of sex, which were of the freest. I can hear the very tones of his voice as he put the great unanswerable question: "What are you going to do about the problem of jealousy?" And I had no response at hand; for jealousy is truly a most cruel and devastating and unlovely emotion; and yet, how can you escape it, if you are going to preserve monogamy? The Anarchist shoemaker's solution was to break down all the prejudices against sexual promiscuity. Free and unlimited license was every person's right, and for any other person to interfere was enslavement, for any other person to criticize was superstition. But the power of superstition is strong in the world, and the shoemaker found men resentful of his teachings, and disposed to confiscate the rights of their wives and daughters. Hence the shoemaker's disapproval of jealousy. Other men, less purely physiological in their attitude to sex, have wrestled with this same problem of jealousy. H. G. Wells has a novel, "In the Days of the Comet," in which he portrays two men, both nobly and truly in love with the same woman. One in a passion of jealousy is about to murder the other, when a great social transformation is magically brought about, and the would-be murderer wakes up to universal love, and the two men nobly and lovingly share the same woman. Shelley also dreamed this dream, inviting two women to share him. I have known others who tried it, but never permanently. I do not say that it never has succeeded, or that it never can succeed. In this book I am renouncing the future—I am trying to give practical advice to people, for the conduct of their lives here and now, and my advice on this point is that polygamous and polyandrous experiments in modern capitalist society cost more than they are worth. I once knew a certain high school teacher, who believed religiously in every kind of freedom. When she married, she and her husband, an artist, made a vow against jealousy; but as it worked out, this vow meant that the wife had a steady job and took care of the husband, while he loafed and loved other women. When finally she grew tired of it, he accused her of being jealous; also, she had brought it down to the matter of money! I know another woman, an Anarchist, widely known as a lecturer on sex freedom. She laid down the general principle of unlimited personal freedom for all, and she tried to live up to her faith. She entered into a "free union" with a certain man, and when she discovered that he was making love to another woman, in the presence of a friend of mine she threw a vase of flowers at his head. You see, her general principles had clashed with another general principle, to the effect that a person who feels deep and strong love inevitably desires that love to endure, and cannot but suffer to see it preyed upon and destroyed. Let us first consider the question, just what are the true and proper implications of monogamous love? The Roman Catholic church advocates "monogamy," and understands thereby that a man and woman pledge themselves "till death do us part," and if either of them cancels this arrangement it is adultery and mortal sin. I hope that none of my readers understands by "monogamy" any such system of spiritual strangulation. My own idea is rather what some churchman has sarcastically described by the term "progressive polygamy." I believe that a man and woman should pledge their faith in love, and should keep that faith, and endeavor with all their best energies to make a success of it; they should strive each to understand the other's needs, and unselfishly to fulfill them, within the limits of fair play. But if, after such an effort has been truly made, it becomes clear that the union does not mean health and happiness for one of the parties, that party has a right to withdraw from it, and for any government or church or other power to deny that right is both folly and cruelty. Now, on the basis of this definition of monogamy—or, if you prefer, of progressive polygamy—we are in position to say what we think about jealousy. If two people pledge their faith, and one breaks it, and the other complains, we do not call that jealousy, but just common decency. Neither do we call it jealousy if one expects the other to avoid the appearance of guilt; for love is a serious thing, not to be played with, and I think that a person who truly loves will do everything possible to make clear to the beloved that he is keeping and means to keep the plighted faith. You may say that I am using words arbitrarily, in endeavoring thus to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable jealousy, and calling the former by some other name. It does not make much difference about words, provided I make clear my meaning. I could point out a whole string of words which have good meanings and bad meanings, and cannot be discussed without preliminary explanations and distinctions; religion, for example, and morality, and aristocracy, and justice, to name only a few. Most people's thinking about marriage and love has been made like soup in a cheap restaurant, by dumping in all kinds of scraps and notions from such opposite poles of human thought as Christian monkery and Renaissance license, absurdly called "romance." So before you can do any thinking about a problem like jealousy, you have to agree to use the word to mean something definite, whether good or bad. We shall take jealousy as a "bad" word, and use it to mean the setting up, by a man or woman, of some claim to the love of another person, which claim cannot be justified in the court of reason and fair play. This includes, in the first place, all claims based upon a courtship, not ratified by marriage. It is to the interest of society and the race that men and women should be free to investigate persons of the other sex, and to experiment with the affections before pledges of marriage are made. If sensible customs of love and just laws of marriage were made, there would be no excuse for a woman's giving herself to a man before marriage; she should be taught not to do it, and then if she does it, the risk is her own, and the disgusting perversion of venality and greed known as the "breach of promise suit" should be unknown in our law. The young should be taught that it is the other person's right to change his mind and withdraw at any time before marriage; whatever pains and pangs this may cause must be borne in silence. The second kind of jealousy is that which seeks to keep in the marriage bond a person who is not happy in it and has asked to be released. The law sanctions this kind of cowardly selfishness, which manifests itself every day on the front pages of our newspapers—a spectacle of monstrous and loathsome passions unleashed and even glorified. Husbands set the bloodhounds of the law after wives who have fled with some other man, and send the man to a cell, and drag the woman back to a loveless home. Wives engage private detectives, and trail their husbands to some "love nest," and then ensue long public wrangles, with washing of filthy linen, and the matter is settled by a "separation." The virtuous wife, who may have driven the man away by neglect or vanity or stupidity, is granted a share of his earnings for the balance of her life; and two more people are added to the millions who are denied sexual happiness under the law, and are thereby impelled to live as law violators. For this there is only one remedy conceivable. We have banned cannibalism and slavery and piracy and duelling, and we must ban one more ancient and cruel form of human oppression, the effort to hold people in the bonds of sex by any other power save that of love. I am aware that the reactionaries who read this book will take this sentence out of its context and quote it to prove that I am a "free lover." I shall be sorry to have that done, but even so, I was not willing to live in slavery myself, and I am not willing to advocate it for others. I am aware that there are degenerate and defective individuals, and that we have to make special provision for them, as I shall presently set forth; but the average, normal human being must be free to decide what is love for him, and what is happiness for him. Every person in the world will have to deny himself the right to demand love where love is not freely given, and all lovers in the world will have to hold themselves ready to let the loved one go if and when the loved one demands it. I am aware that this is a hard saying, and a hard duty, but it is one that life lays upon us, and one that there is no escaping. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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