3 1822 00208 5165
 
 WOMEN'S 
 WILD OATS 
 
 ESSAYS ON THE RE-FIXING OF 
 MORAL STANDARDS 
 
 BY 
 
 C. GASQUOINE HARTLEY 
 
 Author of "The Truth About Woman," "Motherhood 
 and the Relationships of the Sexes," etc. 
 
 "For her house inclineth unto death, and 
 lier paths unto the dead." PHOV. ii. 18. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Copyright, 1930, by 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPAXT 
 
 A II Rights Reserved
 
 To 
 MY HUSBAND AND MY SON
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 19 
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 52 
 
 THAT WHICH is WANTING 81 
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 113 
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 150 
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 192 
 
 CONCLUSION 223 
 
 APPENDICES 229
 
 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 WOMAN S CARNIVAL 
 
 "To the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet." 
 Prov. xxvii. 7. 
 
 THE sudden collapse of the war left us in 
 a daze. After the years of inhuman strain 
 it was hard to ease off tension to the almost 
 forgotten conditions of peace. I recall that 
 ever to be remembered day, November llth, 
 1918 Victory Day. In the early hours be- 
 fore noon I was in London, and my young son 
 was with me. Everywhere was an atmosphere 
 of anxiety, an unusual stillness. Men in little 
 groups of two and three stood here and there, 
 soldiers in larger numbers loitered or walked 
 slowly along the pavements; girls and women 
 waited at the doors of business houses and 
 shops, where inside nobody seemed attending 
 to the few customers. Everyone was waiting;
 
 8 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 there was an expectancy so great and so stir- 
 ring that ordinary life had stopped. The last 
 hour seemed endless in its slow passing. I do 
 not remember ever to have experienced the 
 same anxious tension, which was felt so 
 strongly by us all that, in a way I cannot ex- 
 plain, we seemed to gain liberation from our- 
 selves, and, losing individuality, were brought 
 to share a universal impulse. The colossal im- 
 portance of that hour made itself felt. 
 
 Then at last the peace guns sounded. We 
 knew the armistice had been signed: Germany 
 had accepted the terms offered by the Allies. 
 The fear of utter misery was lifted: the war 
 was over. The streets filled as if by magic, 
 sellers of newspapers appeared, nobody knew 
 from where, and were besieged. As the news 
 spread, a delirium of enthusiasm caught the 
 people. There never was such a day, and there 
 never can be such a day again. From noon 
 onwards in ever increasing numbers the streets 
 were thronged with people. Strangers who 
 had never set eyes on one another before re- 
 joiced together as sisters and brothers. Heed- 
 less of rain, and mud, and slush, Londoners 
 turned the city into a carnival of joy. Then 
 as the hours advanced the fun grew wilder.
 
 9 
 
 People linked hands and danced, and mad- 
 dest of all indulged in wild "ring of roses" 
 around lamp-posts and in the centers of the 
 great thoroughfares. From the Strand and 
 into the West End and beyond was one packed 
 concourse of people, a never-ending stream 
 spread from pavement to pavement across the 
 way, in processions, in pairs, in groups, in taxi- 
 cabs, on the top of taxi-cabs, in and on and all 
 over motor-omnibuses, hanging to the backs of 
 cabs, on great munition lorries everywhere 
 clustering and hanging like swarming flies. 
 There were soldiers, crowds of Dominion boys, 
 young officers and privates, old men and young 
 men from civil life, and thousands upon thou- 
 sands of women and girls of every age and rep- 
 resentative of every class. 
 
 It was the women that I noticed most: they 
 were wilder than the men, making more noise, 
 cheering, shouting and singing themselves 
 hoarse, dancing and romping themselves tired. 
 Quite undisguisedly the soldiers were led by 
 them. It was Woman's Carnival as well as 
 Victory Night. 
 
 It is very hard to find words to speak of 
 what I felt. The universal gladness was intox- 
 icating, and yet, none the less, as I watched and
 
 10 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 noted, the scene was a spectacle that for me at 
 least, was shot strangely with apprehension, al- 
 most with pain, certainly with anger and re- 
 grets, with aspects unaccountably sad. I wit- 
 nessed many incidents I am tempted to record, 
 but events passed so quickly, and I do not wish 
 to generalize rashly. One thing I noticed was 
 the great number of women and girl smokers. 
 The woman without a cigarette was almost the 
 exception. There was no attempt at conceal- 
 ment. But what impressed me was the way 
 of holding and smoking the cigarette with 
 an awkwardness that proclaimed the novice. 
 Quite plainly the majority of these girls were 
 smoking not at all because they desired to 
 smoke, but for a lark. A little thing, you will 
 say, very harmless, and possibly you are right, 
 and yet it is the straw which reveals the direc- 
 tion of the wind. 
 
 In all the riotous merriment there seemed to 
 lurk the urgency of unsatisfied wants. These 
 instabilities and shadows did not darken the 
 whole prospect, it may be that they intensified 
 the pageant; London was, indeed, very won- 
 derful that evening. Yet all the foolish and 
 ugly incidents, petty and grave alike, of which 
 I could not fail to be aware, came to me with
 
 INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 an effort of challenge as something not to be 
 ignored, but steadily to be inquired into, as an 
 imperative call for effort and courage, a spur 
 once again to take up my pen and write to 
 warn women. 
 
 My thoughts turned back over the last long 
 four-and-a-half years years of struggle, of 
 violent disorders, anxiety and pain. That time 
 was finished. Thanks to our dead! Honor to 
 our great dead! The spectacle before me be- 
 came wider and richer and deeper, more 
 charged with hope and promise . . . 
 
 Bang! Laughter and harsh screaming as a 
 rocket shot up starring the dark evening heav- 
 ens with its clustering balls of colors. In 
 many parts of the city, long obscured, lamps 
 were lighted; row upon row of little electric 
 globes of white and red and blue appeared, and 
 the unaccustomed blaze infected the revelers. 
 It gave a fresh impetus to shouting ; it was like 
 removing the curtain from some great, long- 
 darkened mirror. The fun grew boisterous. 
 At this corner there were cheers for the Prime 
 Minister, at the next for Foch and Haig, and 
 Beatty and the Grand Fleet, and for France 
 and America. Numbers did not know what 
 exactly they cheered ; it did not matter, it gave
 
 12 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 an excuse for noise. Much noise was needed 
 to keep up the revel and convince everyone 
 that everybody was happy. 
 
 Unceasingly the violent merry-making went 
 on. Hoot! and an immense motor-wagon, 
 crowded with singing girls, blowing hooters, 
 wildly waving flags, and followed by a trail of 
 taxi-cabs like a gigantic wobbling tail, each one 
 laden with ten, twenty, and even more soldiers, 
 charged down a side street and urged its right 
 of way brutally through the crowd. 
 
 It seemed to me that the whole spirit and 
 quality of the reveling was summarized. A 
 rabble of distractions sought to sway me hither 
 and thither. Now, I watched a company of 
 girls dancing with young officers to the accom- 
 paniment of a barrel organ, then a group sing- 
 ing, and another group playing some round 
 game that I did not know; now it was some 
 Tommies surrounded by a group of screaming 
 girls. In one group a woman was carrying a 
 baby, and a tiny child dragged at the hand of 
 another girl, crying drearily, and no one no- 
 ticed. Boys were kicking about boardings 
 that had been torn from the statues in Trafal- 
 gar Square. The noise became more and more 
 deafening.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 Did anyone realize at all the colossal impor- 
 tance of that day? This hour of supreme 
 thanksgiving, the most glorious of all days in 
 the history of the world, was passing in a delir- 
 ium of waste. For there was no joy, only a 
 great pretense and noise. 
 
 In this medley the sense of the present 
 tended to disappear. Victory Night, by some 
 fantastic transformation, to me became terrible 
 with menace. All the jostling, excited people, 
 and especially the disheveled women and the 
 crowds of rioting girls, appeared as tormented 
 puppets, moving and capering, not at all from 
 will and desire of their own, but agitated vio- 
 lently and incessantly by some hidden hand, 
 forced into playing parts they did not want to 
 play, saying words they had no wish to speak, 
 cutting antics for which they had no aptitude 
 or liking. Cruelties lurked everywhere, wait- 
 ing in the confused mummery. Reality was 
 being left and with it the practical grasp of 
 those powerful simplicities that alone can guide 
 life through confusion. I felt this with sting- 
 ing certainty. Everyone seemed playing a 
 part, goaded with the urgency of seeking an 
 escape from themselves. 
 
 But must life always go on in the same way?
 
 14 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Surely our great dead point us through all 
 these pretenses into the future? Dead com- 
 pelling hands, insisting with irritable ges- 
 tures that this failure of life should cease, and 
 cease forever. 
 
 A thousand serried problems seemed to be 
 pressing on me at once. My young son was 
 angry at my sadness, but it was the biting con- 
 sciousness of his presence that ruled my mood. 
 This world was his world; this England his 
 England; this London was his London and 
 that of all children. It was for them that the 
 failure mattered. So I thought, tormented, 
 tortured with pain and impatience. 
 
 Leaving the Strand, we turned down one of 
 the narrow streets near to the Savoy Hotel, I 
 forget which one it was, and walked to the Em- 
 bankment. We came out not far from Char- 
 ing Cross Bridge and looked down over the 
 long sweep of the water. The evening sky was 
 a dull gray, almost black, but the rain had 
 ceased to fall, and just then above us there was 
 a break as if the absent moon was working to 
 cut the clouds adrift. A kind of luminous 
 darkness closed around us. It was beautiful. 
 The massed buildings rose a blurred outline be- 
 tween the river and the sky like great beasts
 
 INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 crouching and ready to spring, while through 
 the steel-black circlings of the bridge row after 
 row of lights sparkled and glowed, and blurs of 
 color, amber to warm orange, splashed upon 
 the river. On the other side, behind us, the big 
 hotels all were lighted, and the unaccustomed 
 illumination appeared to give too full a flood 
 of light to be quite real. Ever and anon rock- 
 ets shot up into the gray and fell in burning 
 rain, and every color was reflected in diminish- 
 ing shades, above in that one luminous patch 
 of sky, and below in the pallid, rippled water. 
 Yes, the scene was beautiful, perfect as a 
 dream-city one could desire; all the elements 
 "composed" in the painter's sense, and in arro- 
 gance of soul I felt that the beautiful effect had 
 been arranged for me : that it was like a fault- 
 less piece of scene-painting, only there is no 
 artist who could paint it. 
 
 I watched in silence as my son talked at my 
 side. Here there was almost no noise ; reports 
 of motors and the harsh clang of shouting 
 echoed, but in the distance. After the crowds 
 we had left, the wide roadway appeared desert- 
 ed, and the quiet made it easy for me to urge 
 myself past my despair. One moment at least 
 I had in which I was conscious again of a spirit
 
 16 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 and quality in life; the immense forces work- 
 ing on while the city rioted its victory. But 
 it all goes so slowly not fast enough ! 
 
 The night became darker, the gray rift in the 
 clouds narrowed and closed, a few great drops 
 of rain fell heavily. Around us the air blew 
 chill, the trees, whose points stood out jet black 
 among the sweeping line of the still shrouded 
 Embankment lamps, murmured with innumer- 
 able angry voices as the wind cut through 
 them, the bitter wind that rises before rain. 
 My mood shivered under the loneliness that 
 marks the end of all perfect things. 
 
 Afterwards we walked up Villiers Street to 
 the Strand Station, and witnessed a little 
 longer the riot of pretended joy. Now, the 
 fun had grown more boisterous, or so it 
 appeared to me in contrast with the quiet we 
 had left. A seething mass women and girls 
 and soldiers linked arms in arms charged down 
 the street, blocking the station entrances, 
 shouting, beating rattles and tins for drums, 
 making the most deafening noise. Must we go 
 on past or through them all? Yes, and it was 
 for me a necessary lesson, perhaps, for trying 
 to snatch too much for myself by getting away
 
 17 
 
 and forgetting. I had wanted to shirk, now 
 I was forced back to attention. 
 
 How clearly I recall that crowd! It took 
 much time to get our train, and, as we waited, 
 almost unconsciously I began to take mental 
 notes of what I saw. Soon my interest was 
 fastened. I observed individuals with quick- 
 ened attention from the very sharpness of my 
 disillusionment. Incidents burnt themselves 
 into my memory, not in themselves of great im- 
 portance, but surely significant. I was being 
 dragged back face to face with many questions 
 difficult to solve. What impressed me sharply 
 was the unhappy faces of almost all those 
 wildly excited girls. To my fancy each one 
 was hiding from herself, and hiding also from 
 everyone else. One girl, in particular, I re- 
 member, a lank figure, brightly dressed and 
 her head adorned by a wreathed Union Jack, 
 whirling lean arms in an ecstasy of irritability, 
 her shrill voice mounting from scream note to 
 scream note. A sickness of soul cried from 
 her restless over-taxed body. She was but one 
 unit of a whole rowdy company. Even this 
 night was used by them to grab at something to 
 fool men to smother God in their hearts.
 
 18 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Just a play , a pretense, yes, a pretense of 
 power, especially that; they had no thought 
 beyond excitement, and that to me seemed only 
 the first step. I could not believe that the new 
 freedom, the new England would be made by 
 such women. Their make-believe merriment, 
 all this riotous celebrating of the world's stu- 
 pendous Victory what, after all, was it? 
 And for me the desolate answer "Waste!" rang 
 out from the unceasing noise. 
 
 "Surely this squandering of Woman's gift, 
 this failure of herself must cease now that peace 
 has come!" The cry broke wordless from me. 
 I understood the reality of my fear. I knew 
 the peril to the future. It is the problem of 
 unstable woman, clamorous and devouring, 
 that cries aloud for solution.
 
 First Essay 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 
 
 WHICH TREATS OF WAR WORKERS, AND THE CHANGES THAT 
 HAVE COME IN WOMEN'S IDEALS 
 
 "The turning away of the simple shall slay them, and 
 the prosperity of fools shall destroy them." Prov. 1. 32. 
 
 I HAVE lying upon my study table, on the 
 chairs and even spreading over upon the floor, 
 a heaped-up litter of documents. Board of 
 Trade inquiries, Government reports, news- 
 paper cuttings, recent hooks, articles from the 
 reviews and popular magazines all dealing, 
 in one manner or another, with women's labor 
 and their position as workers in the immediate 
 past and in the future. Woman, eternally 
 surprising, has established her power in new 
 fields. 
 
 During the five war years a revolution has 
 taken place in the industrial position of women.
 
 20 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 But the war was not the cause of the revolu- 
 tion. It only afforded an opportunity for 
 forces to display themselves which already 
 were in action. It hurried women forward, 
 running at top speed, along paths where before 
 their feet had slowly walked. War hastened 
 the action of forces existing already. The 
 wage-earning woman came in with the forties 
 with the factory system, and every year she has 
 increased in numbers, but during the five years 
 of war her ranks have gained an enormous in- 
 flux; moreover, a different class of girls and 
 women have come to seek different kinds of 
 work. And what marks the permanent im- 
 portance of this is that a change of occupations 
 has brought with it a startling change of be- 
 havior and outlook. 
 
 Just as the militarist has regarded war, not 
 as a means of preventing the enslavement of 
 peoples and their subjection to foreign rule, 
 but rather as in itself a source of virtue and 
 blessing, of progress and civilization ; so too the 
 feminist teachers have told us, not that the en- 
 trance of women into munition works was 
 necessary to enable our country to arm for its 
 terrible war, but have hailed the successive 
 appearances of women in factories, foundries,
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 21 
 
 and railway-stations as in itself a great step 
 forward; as a goal long strived for that has 
 been gained. What has been going on is a con- 
 tinuance of the process by which women are led 
 more and more to escape from any specializa- 
 tion of function and are brought into compe- 
 tition with men in every kind of occupation. 
 Now, let us be clear about it: this is a process 
 which makes the excitement and experience and 
 possible good of the individual woman out- 
 weigh in importance the safeguarding of the 
 perpetual stream of man. A confusion of 
 values has led women astray. Being a woman 
 is a handicap. For the true carrying out of the 
 duties of the wife and mother physical and 
 mental quiet and sound nerves are needed. 
 The industrial field has become the ideal place 
 of action for the feminists, who persistently 
 romanticize the independent commercial or in- 
 dustrial career, trampling heedlessly on the 
 wisdom of the past, bent on living their own 
 little lives and all that kind of egoistic futility; 
 holding up as admirable cheap achievements 
 in the hell of modern competitive, beggar- 
 your-fellow-worker, sell-at-a-profit industrial- 
 ism; blackening as sacrifice, as a limiting of 
 character, woman's service to her husband and
 
 22 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 her children, her work in the home and in the 
 nursery. 
 
 I tell you women everywhere among us are 
 being starved of sacrifice and service. Sacri- 
 fice lives in the soul of a woman, and not alone 
 in the separate spirit of the individual woman 
 to whom it is communicated only through a 
 losing of herself, which marks her union with 
 the greatest powers of life. It is, I think, one 
 of the most destroying tragedies of our indus- 
 trial society that women are denied this sus- 
 tenance in a fixed and regulated unison of sac- 
 rifice, are forced away from service to life, 
 excited to do violence to their deepest instinct, 
 by engaging in the deadly and futile rivalry, 
 where the greatest successfulness must bring 
 to them the greatest destruction. 
 
 There has been much happening to bring 
 fear. Something has gone wrong with the wo- 
 men of this land. In saying this, I am not 
 forgetting the splendidness of their work ; what 
 I complain of is that their womanly vision has 
 failed. In France, as is evident to all, the at- 
 titude of women has been very different. The 
 French women also worked hard during the 
 war to save their country, but they did not as 
 our women have done, like war-work for its
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 23 
 
 own sake. They never transferred their af- 
 fections from their homes to the factories of 
 war, they were too certain of themselves, too 
 content with their power as women to do any- 
 thing so foolish. What is the explanation of 
 this profound difference in attitude? Why 
 has the vision of English women failed ? That 
 is the question to which we have to try to find 
 an answer. 
 
 II 
 
 The great part played by women coming 
 forward during the war to take the place of 
 men called to the army is disclosed in a White 
 Paper recently issued by the Board of Trade. 
 Over a million and a half women offered their 
 services, in addition to those already em- 
 ployed. 1 The increase has been the highest 
 in the occupations in which comparatively few 
 women were engaged before the war. In 
 April, 1918, 701,000 women were working on 
 munitions and 774,000 in other industrial gov- 
 ernment employment. A disturbing fact re- 
 vealed (called, I note, in the Report an inter- 
 esting point!} is the number of women who 
 have been engaged in hard, laboring work. 
 
 i The statistics show the situation up to April, 1918.
 
 24 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Before the war when the public discovered 
 women doing very hard work, it excited indig- 
 nation and pity. The women chain-makers of 
 Craddock Heath, to cite one example, were ac- 
 corded general commiseration. But during 
 the war our feelings on the question would seem 
 to have undergone a somewhat sudden trans- 
 formation; a complete turn-round has taken 
 place in our attitude. Heavy work done by 
 women foundry work, for instance, demand- 
 ing great expenditure of physical strength l has 
 excited admiration and become an important 
 factor of the industrial situation. A glamour 
 of patriotic war service, added to the lure of 
 high wages, has been thrown like a cloak of ro- 
 mance over such exhibitions of female power. 
 They became victories of female will over fe- 
 male weakness. 
 
 Certainly in many cases the work done was 
 quite unsuitable for women. The employ- 
 ment of married women during long days of 
 tiring work had inevitable results. Babies 
 were neglected or births were deliberately pre- 
 vented. This spendthrift folly will have to be 
 paid for in the future. 
 
 i The words I have italicized are not mine, but are quoted 
 from the Report,
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 25 
 
 Not that I believe that all apparently hard 
 work to be on an equality of unfitness for wo- 
 men. Country work is generally healthful; 
 though hard work it is restful to the nerves. 
 Every kind of nerve-racking work as in fac- 
 tories, heavy weight-lifting, long standing, and 
 the tending of machinery without any kind of 
 human interest, must be detrimental to women. 
 Certain employments, consecrated by custom 
 as comparatively womanly, yet, in their nerve- 
 exhausting details mean ill-health. Take, for 
 an instance, the average shop-girl, or machine 
 worker, with her whitened face, dragging steps 
 and flattened figure : does she not show plainly 
 that she is anaemic and wanting in vitality? 
 On the other hand, to my eye the lift attend- 
 ants on the tubes, the charming conductresses 
 of the 'buses seem healthy, though their work 
 has been done only recently by women. I 
 would make the influence of an occupation on 
 woman's health considering first and as most 
 important her primary biological function as 
 a potential mother the test of its womanli- 
 ness. But the health of women will never be 
 protected while we are content to accept the 
 valuations and suffer the defilements of this 
 commercial age.
 
 26 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 III 
 
 Only this morning I have been reading the 
 newly issued Report of the War Cabinet Com- 
 mittee on Women in Industry, a large book of 
 340 pages, packed with information, in partic- 
 ular as to "the increased employment of 
 women owing to the development of automatic 
 machinery." What I read fills me with dis- 
 may and indignation. I was not prepared 
 and I thought I was prepared for anything 
 for such blindness of outlook. 
 
 To prove this, let me quote directly from the 
 Report. The Committee urges rightly the 
 importance to the health of the workers of 
 good food, clothing and domestic comfort, and 
 the necessity of good wages to maintain this 
 standard. But why are these improved con- 
 ditions recommended? Listen to what is said : 
 
 Properly nourished women have a much 
 greater reserve of energy than they have 
 usually been credited with, and under suit- 
 able conditions they can properly and ad- 
 vantageously be employed upon more ardu- 
 ous occupation than has been considered de- 
 sirable in the past, even when these involve 
 considerable activity and physical strain. . . .
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 27 
 
 And a little further: 
 
 It is desirable that women's wide employ- 
 ment should be made permanent. 
 
 In another passage the Committee report that 
 on piece work a woman will always beat a man. 
 And again further on: On mass production 
 she will come first every time. . . . Men will 
 never stand the monotony of a fast repetition 
 job like women; they will not stand by a ma- 
 chine pressing all their lives, but a woman 
 will. 1 
 
 Nothing that I can say, or any writer could 
 say, could be more vividly condemning than 
 are these passages. They have rilled me with 
 so deep a protest that really I can hardly trust 
 myself to write any comment. This is the 
 ideal now set before us for the industrial wo- 
 man "to stand by a machine pressing all her 
 life." I ask, Is it for this that the sons of these 
 women have died? Marriage is spoken of as 
 "one of women's industrial drawbacks," "it 
 makes her less ambitious and enterprising." 
 
 i It is wprth noting that, as far as I know, no word of 
 protest has been made by women against these statements. 
 The Report, since I wrote this chapter, has been widely com- 
 mented on in the daily papers, in some of the weeklies, and in 
 all the suffrage papers, but these passages have been passed 
 over. Surely this is very significant.
 
 28 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Now, I do not wish to be unfair. The ques- 
 tions involved are, I know, immense and many- 
 sided. There can be no easy dismissal of this 
 valuable Report in condemnation. Mrs. Sid- 
 ney Webb's minority Report 1 in particular is 
 valuable ; and in many ways the findings of the 
 Committee are excellent. Everyone must 
 agree with the wise recommendations as to the 
 reduction of the hours of work and better con- 
 ditions of labor. They are in advance of any- 
 thing hitherto proposed. The popular for- 
 mula of "equal pay for equal work" or more 
 correctly "equal value," is accepted. If wo- 
 men are to do men's work, obviously they ought 
 to be paid men's wages. Other very com- 
 mendable recommendations concern pensions 
 for widowed, deserted or necessitous mothers 
 (I should add unmarried mothers). State 
 payment is advised for the entire cost of the 
 lying-in-period as the only way to ensure births 
 under satisfactory conditions to the child and 
 the mother. All this is just and good. If the 
 state desires women to remain in industrial oc- 
 cupations, it is some gain that help should be 
 given them, when for a few weeks they go from 
 the factory to do their own work and bear 
 
 i Since published by the Fabian Society as a small book.
 
 children. Yet, after all, is there not something 
 ridiculous, yes, and also disgraceful, in such a 
 compromise. We leave a woman "to stand 
 by a machine pressing all her life" (a work of 
 monotony, so nerve-exhausting and soul-dead- 
 ening that no man will do it) , and then we pay 
 her a small sum to enable her to bear an en- 
 feebled child. Afterwards we send her back 
 to the factory and open State creches and nur- 
 sery-schools to rid her of the responsibilities 
 and joys of bringing up her child. Such mis- 
 erable makeshifts for fitting motherhood could 
 be acceptable only in an industrially ruled so- 
 ciety, where the simple belief would seem to 
 be that a woman can do everything that men 
 won't do and their own work as well. 
 
 IV 
 
 Let us be honest. Do we care for the cher- 
 ishing of children? Do we want to preserve 
 the health and help mothers? Are we really 
 concerned with the prevention of our high in- 
 fantile death-rate, with all the futile suffering 
 without any sense of purpose or compensation 
 that it must entail to children and to mothers? 
 Let us pray to care more passionately, to see a 
 vision of motherhood such as will force us to
 
 30 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 act differently; a vision which, as when the 
 mists clear away among the mountains, will 
 show a wide world lit by the sun. It would 
 not then be difficult for us to know what to do ; 
 we should decide unhesitatingly as to the 
 mother in industry, that she ought not to be 
 there. 
 
 V 
 
 Many facts combine in acclaiming our indif- 
 ference; all of which show our distressing in- 
 ability to take a wide view of social problems 
 with our commercially blinded eyes. We look 
 at everything, even the nation's children, 
 through spectacles of gold. I cannot wonder 
 at our endless sicknesses and crime. 
 
 A small paper-backed book is now lying 
 upon my desk. It is an inquiry most carefully 
 made by the Minister of Reconstruction into 
 the conditions of juvenile employment during 
 the war, and, to me at any rate, it is pitiless in 
 its revelation of our failure in this period of 
 stress in knowing how to live. 
 
 It would be difficult, indeed, to find a more 
 complete condemnation of what we have been 
 allowing to go on in our factories and work- 
 shops. The Report reveals an intolerable neg-
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 31 
 
 lect, a reckless betrayal of young lives that not 
 even the emergency of war can sanction. 1 
 Mark what the report tells us: 
 
 Unless those most competent to judge are 
 mistaken, in the generation which entered 
 industry between 1914 and 1918 vitality has 
 been lowered, morale undermined, and train- 
 ing neglected. . . 
 
 For three years numbers of young persons 
 have been exposed to almost every influence 
 which could impair health, undermine char- 
 acter and unfit them, both in body and mind, 
 for regular industry and intelligent citizen- 
 ship. 
 
 And this passage also : 
 
 From the point of view of the community, 
 the adolescent worker is a potential parent 
 and a potential citizen . . . there is no doubt 
 whatever what course of action should be pre- 
 scribed by consideration for the interests of 
 the nation. It would be to subordinate the 
 employment of young persons for their im- 
 mediate utility to their preparation for more 
 
 i An excellent article on the Report, entitled " Demobiliza- 
 tion of Juvenile Workers," by Miss L. B. Hutchins, appeared 
 in the Contemporary Review, February, 1919.
 
 32 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 effective work as men and women . . . The 
 danger is not that there may, in the present, 
 be too few adolescent laborers, but that there 
 may be too many, and that as a result there 
 may in the future be too few healthy and 
 well trained adult workers and intelligent 
 citizens. 
 
 The profit-seeking employer, the patriotic 
 maker of munitions, considers output : he does 
 not think of the girls' or the boys' future, of the 
 adult employment for which they are being 
 prepared, or not prepared, or if the occupation 
 leads, as so often is the case, to a blank wall. 
 No kind of concern is shown of the degree in 
 which the occupation enlarges the interests of 
 the growing minds, or fritters them away and 
 leaves for a later use nothing but a dead ma- 
 chine, capable only of spasmodic excitement; 
 does not think of the effect of long hours or of 
 large wages and their consequent premature 
 freedom from home restraints on character. 
 
 The last mentioned evil has been greatly ac- 
 centuated by the absence of soldier fathers. 
 The indictable offenses committed by the 
 young have increased markedly during the
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 88 
 
 war, and surely we are responsible for this 
 lapse of children into crime. 
 
 We have permitted heavy and nerve-ex- 
 hausting work to be done in just the years when 
 the adolescent was making the always difficult 
 passage of the boy to the man, of the girl to the 
 woman. And for this reason their suppressed, 
 not-understood, thwarted instincts have broken 
 out in unpleasing and often dangerous ways. 
 Is it any wonder if in such circumstances boys 
 turn to petty robberies and other unsocial acts, 
 while girls display some of the less estimable 
 characteristics of the prostitute? 
 
 Our ideal is to ignore sex in industry; to 
 deny the strong and necessary separations that 
 nature's wisdom places as barriers between boy 
 and girl, between man and woman. We make 
 our sons and daughters compete in education 
 and in industry. No doubt education and in- 
 dustry are ill-fitted for males, but at any rate 
 they were intended for males. Intellectually 
 inferior to the boy or the man, the girl or wo- 
 man is not. She is exasperatingly observant, 
 often understands character with unconsidered 
 quickness, feels spontaneously; but it does not 
 follow that there is any value for her in the col-
 
 34 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 lection of dead facts, stored by abstract-minded 
 professors all the futile things we call educa- 
 tion, which show in every direction the most 
 coarse lack of understanding of the needs of 
 the child and of life. And the girl suffers more 
 than the boy, for the girl-student does as she is 
 told much more conscientiously than boys. 
 Similarly in industry: tapping or pushing at 
 a machine until she taps or pushes on in her 
 dreams ; all the more monotonous kinds of ma- 
 chine-tending will wear feminine nerves, nat- 
 urally more irritable than those of men, more 
 than the same work will wear the male nerves. 
 Not that I believe in subordinating the worker 
 of either sex to the machine. What I want to 
 prevent is the same stupid sacrifice of girls and 
 women in industry as has been permitted in the 
 case of boys and men. There has been in our 
 commercialized society no kind of effective tra- 
 dition for the care and guidance of adolescent 
 workers, and, there is no escaping from the 
 condemning proofs of our neglect: there has 
 been, and, indeed, is still going on, in many 
 directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness 
 in the way we have shirked our duties to the 
 young. As the writer, from whose Report I 
 have quoted, says, with a rather grim irony: "a
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 35 
 
 strain has been put on the character of young 
 persons which might have corrupted the integ- 
 rity of a Washington and have undermined 
 the energy of Samuel Smiles." 
 
 VI 
 
 The war is over, and with it the special and 
 pressing need for women's and girls' work, but 
 the consequences of the war period are far, in- 
 deed, from nearing their end. Following all 
 the industrial confusion of the war, we are now 
 facing the certainty of wide-spread unemploy- 
 ment among women and girls. We have con- 
 demned thousands of them to unemployment 
 with the same thoughtlessness with which they 
 were called into industry ; and in the less skilled 
 ranges of employment, the always existing 
 competition between men and women and boys 
 and girls is certain to be fiercely accentuated. 
 
 It is officially stated that the number of wo- 
 men and girls who took out-of-work donation 
 policies during the period between the Armis- 
 tice and February 14th was 633,318. Of these 
 the large majority 630,874 were civilians, while 
 2444 belonged to the forces. Thousands of 
 women and girls who during the war proved 
 themselves most capable at engineering and
 
 36 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 wood-work are now ruled out of those occupa- 
 tions. There was a girl of twenty, for in- 
 stance, at Loughborough who showed real 
 genius at gauge-making, work that required 
 accuracy to the ten thousandth part of an inch. 
 Although she took to the work only during the 
 war, she became so good that instead of being 
 sent to a factory she was kept to instruct 
 others. This is the type of girl who now has 
 to seek other employment. There can be no 
 question of the difficulties of the situation. 
 
 Many workers are holding out to get the 
 same level of work and pay as they have left. 
 Strongest of all is the aversion shown to do- 
 mestic work: many girls who have been en- 
 gaged on munitions during the war have 
 thrown up their unemployment pay rather 
 than again enter domestic service. Factory 
 work has bitten into girl's lives; they do not 
 want to do any other kind of work. 
 
 Visit one of the Women's Employment Ex- 
 changes, if you would wish to get to know these 
 girls. The Exchange is usually a hall or large 
 room where busy clerks are at work at long 
 tables. At some Exchanges as many as 2000 to 
 2500 women and girls will be on the books. 
 Once a week they receive their out-of-work
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 37 
 
 pay ; every alternate day they have to visit the 
 Exchange to see what jobs are vacant. You 
 may watch them pass in long queues from one 
 table to another. A few of the women will 
 probably carry babies, but the great majority 
 will be young girls, showily dressed. You will 
 hear the discordant murmur of their voices 
 broken often by sharp giggles. The moving 
 lines seem to go on and on unendingly. At one 
 table the girls sign the register, at another they 
 learn of vacancies. Some of the girls fail to go 
 to the second table. An attendant, if you ask 
 the cause, will tell you this is a frequent occur- 
 rence. The girls are punctilious in signing the 
 register, which they must do to obtain the un- 
 employment dole, but they are less particular 
 about finding the work which will bring it to 
 an end. At present they are content with the 
 enjoyments of the streets and picture palaces. 
 I have, on many different occasions, spoken 
 to these workers : one case I may quote as typi- 
 cal of many. She was young, about twenty, I 
 should think, and incredibly self-confident. 
 Before the war she had been a tailor's needle 
 hand earning 16s. a week; for the last two 
 years she was inspecting fuses at a wage of 45s. 
 a week. What was she now going to do?
 
 38 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Neither she nor any of the other women to 
 whom I have spoken seemed to have any clear 
 realization of the fact that the change-over 
 from war to peace industries by munition fac- 
 tories, with the return of many thousands of 
 men, was bound to result in a serious excess 
 supply of woman labor. I remember it was 
 then, while I talked to this girl, that the first 
 great suspicion stole into my heart. We have 
 heard so much of the splendid conduct of the 
 women and the wonderful way in which they 
 have done the work of men, but the facts stand 
 up stark. Women have had a good time. 
 Now, they are going to struggle to keep it. 
 These girls are vastly more rebellious than any 
 women were five years ago. 1 
 
 Look at the girl-workers you may see every- 
 where in such numbers to-day; they are of all 
 ages and they belong to all classes of society. 
 Watch them as they fight for an entrance into 
 motor omnibuses and trams, as they crowd the 
 station platforms. See them parading the 
 
 i Since writing this, the Government, backed by the Labor 
 Party, has passed its Pre-war Practices (Restoration) Bill, 
 which will exclude women from many of the trades which they 
 have entered during the war; trades in which they have done 
 skilled work and received high wages. On August 15th, The 
 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Bill, after a promising early 
 career, went by default.
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 39 
 
 streets in their unemployed hours ; they are the 
 companions of every soldier; they crowd the 
 cinemas, music-halls, and theaters. Who has 
 altered the fashions about every three 
 months? and this has been going on in war 
 time. Why, the munition workers and the 
 forty-shilling-a-week girls. No longer was 
 finery always bought out of men's earnings, 
 but out of their own; put on to give some man 
 a treat or to fire the envy of other girls. The 
 factory girl has taken to silk stockings and fine 
 lingerie and the lady to Balbriggan and calico. 
 The vast change that has come into the daily 
 lives of women, possibly, in no direction is more 
 startling than it has been in this matter of 
 dress. Many shops which are near the fac- 
 tories where munition girls have been em- 
 ployed have organized war-clubs, in which, on 
 payment of a small weekly sum, the girls could 
 buy articles of attire far in advance even of 
 their high wages. Shops festooned with furs 
 of every description, where coats costing ten, 
 twenty, and even thirty and more guineas, were 
 frequently bought; shops whose windows were 
 a clutter of tissue-like crepe-de-chine, under- 
 clothes and blouses; boot-clubs and jewelry- 
 clubs, these last, garish establishments, secure
 
 40 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 in the glamour of irresistible imitations all 
 have urged to extravagance and a madness for 
 ornament. 
 
 The West-end tradesmen and the sharehold- 
 ers of the big drapery shops have been chuck- 
 ling and rubbing their hands. Dividends have 
 sprung up to a figure they have never before 
 reached. Never before has so much money 
 been wasted on adornment. 
 
 Our young women have little thought be- 
 yond the present use of what they buy. But I 
 believe that much of this extravagance the 
 delight in self -gratification which finds other 
 expression in jazzing, in sweet-eating, in card 
 playing, smoking and similar pleasures is not 
 so much the outcome of the thoughtlessness of 
 youth as a way of escape from Self, a misdi- 
 rected effort toward safety, unconscious no 
 doubt, but terribly real. 
 
 Notice these girls. You will see them best 
 in a walk down Oxford street or in Leicester 
 Square, where, snared by each displayed win- 
 dow, they hover and cluster like wasps drawn 
 to a trap of sweet food. All the biggest shops 
 in London are devoted to women's clothes. 
 Do you realize that? And it is not only that 
 they are the biggest, but there are more of
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 41 
 
 them than any other half a dozen trades put to- 
 gether the only exception being the drink 
 trade. During the war their number has mul- 
 tiplied, indeed in some districts shops have 
 sprung up like mushrooms in the night. 
 
 There is a much deeper importance in this 
 question of dress than usually is allowed. Ir- 
 responsible spending does encourage irrespon- 
 sible living. 
 
 Almost everyone has at one time or another 
 thought of some reform they would wish to be 
 made in the society in which they live. Now, 
 if I could have my choice as to any one reform 
 I would choose to be done, it would be to make 
 it illegal for a tradesman to display for sale 
 any kind of wearing apparel, dress goods or 
 articles connected with a woman's toilet, either 
 in shop windows or inside the shops. Nothing 
 must be shown to any customer until it is asked 
 for. I do really believe this simple reform 
 would do more to emancipate women, and, 
 through their emancipation, to liberate men, 
 than any other reform. We pray in our 
 churches "lead us not into temptation," and 
 everywhere we permit in our shops the display 
 of goods to tempt the young and the foolish. 
 
 An orgy of adornment has been claiming a
 
 42 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 veritable sacrifice of comfort and health, pos- 
 sibly even of life. All-night vigils in search 
 of bargains are frequent at the bi-annual sale- 
 festivals. Policemen have to restrain the ar- 
 dent votaries, as they press forward and strug- 
 gle and fight to obtain entrance to certain 
 shops, like caged animals fighting for food. 
 Fashions are followed passionately and with 
 little variety. Dark heads and golden heads 
 have the hair bobbed or dressed in the same 
 way, with the same plastered side-curls, and 
 adorned with hats alarmingly alike, weighted 
 with queer and polychrome ornaments of 
 beads, wool, tassels, and I know not what, 
 while the face beneath shows one color of yel- 
 lowish white, the result of the excessive and un- 
 skillful use of cheap powder. In the snow and 
 slush of the spring, I have seen girls dressed in 
 a way fit only for the hottest indoor room. 
 The gauze silk-stockings offering no protection 
 to the tortured feet even when the boots and 
 shoes were made of more than paper stoutness ; 
 while the fashionable woolen wrap, even the 
 fur collar or coat could not counterbalance the 
 danger to health from blouses, low-necked and 
 fashioned of stuff scarcely thicker than cob- 
 webs. Here and there the many girls, beauti-
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 43 
 
 ful in quiet uniforms, have served to throw into \ 
 sharper contrast the absurdities of the dress of \ 
 their sisters. 
 
 I ask myself how this taste for spending 
 money on dress and ornament a taste very 
 little different from the instinct which causes 
 savages to adorn their half-naked bodies with 
 feathers, beads and shells is to be satisfied 
 when women's wages fall ? There would seem 
 to be nothing too useless or too expensive for 
 girls to buy. Work has failed in teaching 
 them the simple lesson that not only is it wrong 
 to waste money, but it is wrong to waste labor 
 for the gratification of whims. We are hav- 
 ing the need for economy preached and shouted 
 at us from every quarter. Surely it is right 
 to think about this wild spending on adorn- 
 ment, and give at least a few glances to the 
 future. 
 
 What is likely to happen now when the full 
 years of war change to empty years of peace? 
 No longer able to spend in the way to which 
 their high wages have made them accustomed, 
 girls will seek to get presents from men; they 
 will want excitement and the dress and pleas- 
 ures to satisfy that need, also to hold the envy 
 of their friends. This must lead to prostitu-
 
 44 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 tion. The weaker sort of girl will prefer to 
 sell her body rather than go back to a hum- 
 drum life of drudgery in back-kitchens. It is 
 well that we should remember that, if women 
 are to suffer through men's passions, men will 
 suffer no less from women's greed. 
 
 I desire to be quite fair. Almost all girls, 
 I think, are better looking since 1914, more 
 confident, more brightly attractive; sometimes 
 they are deliciously gay, more often cheaply 
 aggressive and noisy. Yet, at other times, 
 they seem deadened and slow in response. 
 None of them are shy. Their eyes say things 
 that are hard to read; they exhibit no end of 
 energy, but there is a curious kind of contra- 
 diction a confusion and difficult defiance, 
 with much nervous weakness. I can find no 
 steadfast happiness. 
 
 I would ask my readers, as often I have 
 asked myself, a question : Have these modern 
 girls not lost much of the tender, waiting, in- 
 definiteness of youth? I have seen so many 
 among them who, to me at least, appear 
 at odds with the world, and their passionate, 
 unbalanced and over-excited natures. Their 
 faces at sixteen, fifteen, and even at fourteen 
 years, already are old, with hard confidence
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 45 
 
 showing in the bold gaze, but no happiness. 
 How many bear an expression of almost tired 
 disappointment, a disappointment, not of the 
 senses, but of the soul. And this expression is 
 so common. To my eyes, girls far more and 
 far oftener look alike now than formerly they 
 did. So often they seem acting, struggling al- 
 most against something in themselves; some- 
 thing they don't understand that draws them 
 into many bewildered actions. Can't you see* 
 they are all so unconsciously dissatisfied, so un- 
 able to possess themselves in peace, that noth- 
 ing they do matters? You will, I am sure, 
 deny this statement. You will tell me again 
 of the splendid work done by these girls and 
 young women, you will speak of their recogni- 
 tion as citizens of the State, of how life has 
 opened to them, and of the new liberty they 
 have gained in so many directions. I do not 
 mind. I care nothing for the liberty in out- 
 side things that leaves the soul in chains. I 
 tell you they are dissatisfied because the soul of 
 woman is crushed, unable to come up from its 
 dark hiding, and breathe the sun and light to 
 see that life is good. Why cannot the old faith 
 come back ? Why cannot it come back ?
 
 46 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 VII 
 
 It is, of course, easy to write of these evils, 
 the difficult thing is to find a remedy. Many 
 attempts are being made; much discussion is 
 taking place about the future position of wo- 
 men in industry ; training is being given to ado- 
 lescent girls; even schools for wives have been 
 formed. The newly established Ministry of 
 Health has wide schemes for maternity and 
 child welfare. Never was so much expended 
 to right things that are wrong. Yet, I cannot 
 think the remedies offered are likely to be sat- 
 isfactory. 
 
 Let me here pause for a moment to compare 
 my view of the true remedy for the present un- 
 satisf actoriness of women's lives, and the conse- 
 quent wastage of baby lives, with those reme- 
 dies now so commonly put forward by the re- 
 formers. I assert that women are trying in 
 vain to transfer their affection from babies to 
 machines, and to take care of their babies, if 
 they have them, in the few hours left over after 
 days seriously devoted to business. I will test 
 the results in a way fairer to my opponents 
 than to myself, comparing the effects of their
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 47 
 
 method at its best with my system in circum- 
 stances little favorable to human life. 
 
 Bradford is a wealthy town: spending somej 
 40,000 annually on the care of infants in a! 
 total population of 300,000. Its institutions 
 and arrangements for this purpose are famous ; 
 its infant department, its graded municipal 
 milk, its free-feeding for expectant mothers 
 all are as nearly perfect as is possible; and the 
 men who have developed and direct its muni- 
 cipal system of protection for infants are well 
 known for their ability and enthusiasm. The 
 birth-rate is as low as Malthusians could desire. 
 But all its care is but an attempt to lessen evils 
 brought about by a wrong system; for the 
 mothers of Bradford are not in their homes, 
 but in woolen factories. 
 
 County Roscommon is a poor district in Ire- 
 land, with a primitive and superstitious popu- 
 lation of agriculturists; the birth-rate is very 
 high, and there is practically no public provi- 
 sion for the safeguarding of infant life. But 
 its backward ignorant mothers tend and feed 
 their babies after the manner of the earliest 
 ages. 
 
 The infant death-rate is 135 in Bradford, \ 
 and 35 in Roscommon.
 
 48 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 You will see what I wish to make plain. 
 Those whom I criticize are dealing with symp- 
 toms instead of working to remove the real 
 cause of the disease. They work hard and 
 achieve little. Of course their efforts are 
 praiseworthy, and, under present conditions, 
 frightfully necessary. But they are just about 
 as lastingly useful as trying to mend a badly 
 broken china cup at home with cheap cement. 
 You know what happens: as soon as you suc- 
 ceed in getting two pieces to stick together an- 
 other piece tumbles away, and, at last, if by ex- 
 cessive patience the work gets done and the cup 
 is mended, the first shock of hot water makes 
 all the pieces again fall apart. It is a solution 
 that gives great opportunity of employment, 
 one indeed that goes on forever; perhaps that 
 is why it fascinates the child-like minds of the 
 feminists. I want something very different. 
 
 I want a tradition of life to hand on to our 
 daughters and to their daughters. We need 
 a strongly deepened sense of womanly respon- 
 sibility, wide-spread and universally accepted; 
 an up-to-date sense, if you like that term. I 
 have no fears of change. I would re-fix our 
 moral standards more fearlessly than many 
 who think me old-fashioned. But what I want
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 49 
 
 to insist upon is this: The standard of con- 
 duct must be fixed for women. Our children 
 want something settled, not everything left un- 
 certain. Our morals (I do not mean our sex- 
 ual morals only, but our whole ethical and 
 social conduct) has become like a skein of wool 
 that has been unraveled by a puppy. We 
 want a firm broad way in which it is good and 
 possible for all of us to walk without hurting 
 one another, not the horrid scramble that to- 
 day we accept as life. 
 
 The modern conception of personal rights is 
 essentially individualistic, and has arisen only 
 under industrial values of life; the result of its 
 further application as a social criterion for wo- 
 men, must logically be exactly what it has been 
 in the experience of the past century: a bitter 
 and brutal struggle for self-aggrandizement, 
 with the failures remorselessly crushed under- 
 foot, and the very idea of a fixed common re- 
 sponsibility and common good for all forgotten 
 or denied. My plea for women is, therefore-, 
 based not upon the notion of equal rights, but 
 rather upon that of equal duties. Moral 
 equality means equality in the will to serve- 
 not self, but all. And the practical correlative 
 of this conception must be a social organization
 
 50 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 which secures equalities of opportunity for 
 service to women and men. The only rights I 
 desire to claim for my sex are those necessary 
 to the discharge of its own duties; the fulfill- 
 ment of the instinctive maternal craving; the 
 realization of the deepest impulses of a wo- 
 man's nature. 
 
 The pitiless war of every individual against 
 his, or her, fellow waged with gold or with 
 steel, can never make life other than mean and 
 empty. Women and men must learn again to 
 regard themselves as part of a mightier whole, 
 one of the human race, and, as we feel in 
 moments of deeper insight, of the universe, 
 which is a unity in spite of all the discords it 
 contains. 
 
 It follows from this, that I am not greatly 
 concerned with what any individual woman, or 
 group of women, can do, or cannot do, should 
 be encouraged to do, or be restrained from 
 doing, in competition with men and with each 
 other, but rather what is most right and worth 
 while for all women, as women-, to do. I do 
 not want freedom for each woman to do what 
 she wants. 
 
 You see, in my view of life, such freedom 
 can lead only to a more degraded slavery.
 
 THE PROSPERITY OF FOOLS 51 
 
 And because I am certain about this, I do not 
 desire success for women in the blind struggle 
 based on the doctrine (so fundamentally un- 
 true in my opinion) of personal rights. A 
 doctrine which results inevitably in separations, 
 in hatreds, in disorders and struggling one with 
 another. Unity of ideals and of conduct be- 
 comes impossible. The general life is driven 
 about in this way or the other, directed by this 
 purpose or by that, but always by individualis- 
 tic principles, and not to serve the good of all, 
 but by each person for his own, or her own, 
 ends. How can order come out of such a way 
 of life? Do you think you are going to im- 
 prove things in the old selfish ways. I tell you 
 the result can be nothing but a further failure 
 of vision. The mountain heights become ob- 
 scured by the mists going up from the damp 
 valleys, and the soul loses its way.
 
 Second Essay 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 
 
 WAR MARRIAGES AND ROMANTIC LOVE, WHICH CONTRASTS 
 THE ENGLISH IDEAL OF PERSONAL HAPPINESS IN MAR- 
 RIAGE WITH THAT HELD BY THE JEWS OF MARRIAGE 
 AS A RACIAL DUTY. 
 
 "Which forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forget- 
 teth the covenant of her God." Prov. ii. 17. 
 
 A FEW weeks ago I read a book about a war- 
 marriage, entitled the "Wife of a Hero"; it 
 was not a good novel, but the situation it pre- 
 sented was of great interest. We witness the 
 manifold conflicts resulting from a marriage 
 entered into in haste and under superficial emo- 
 tions, between a war-hero and the more com- 
 plicated type of modern woman the woman 
 of brains and nerves, fastidious, intellectually 
 passionate and at the same time swayed by a 
 sensuality, which is neither acknowledged nor 
 understood. Hence this woman's marriage 
 
 52
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 53 
 
 with a man, who, sufficiently a hero to die mag- 
 nificently (as a matter of truth he does not die 
 and returns in the end to receive the Victoria 
 Cross, but it was believed he was dead) was 
 quite unfitted to live decently. You see, his 
 ideals did not get any further than his vanity. 
 In his view a woman whether wife or mistress, 
 it did not signify which she was was only a 
 chattel, an object to give enjoyment to him, in 
 fact, a prostitute. He did not know he felt this, 
 could not know it, in fact. It would have 
 needed a revolution of his character to turn his 
 vision to something other than himself. 
 Neither did the wife realize her egoism, an 
 egoism more agreeable certainly than was his, 
 because on a less crude plane, but equally rep- 
 rehensible, as spiritually barren and limited to 
 Self as was that of the man. 
 
 Now, Miss Netta Syrett, the writer of the 
 book, seems to be unaware of such a failure on 
 the woman's part. All the blame is shoveled 
 on to the hero, all the sympathy wrapped like 
 a thick woolen cloud about the heroine. 
 Miss Syrett is a great feminist. As we should 
 expect, the marriage is broken in the Divorce 
 Court. The returned and invalided hero, dec- 
 orated with his Victoria Cross, seeks happiness
 
 54 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 with an earlier love, and a marriage is made of 
 a frankly sensual character. Meanwhile the 
 heroine finds a spiritual mate in the person of 
 an old friend, and a second marriage is made. 
 We are led to believe that all the wrong is set 
 right. Now, I doubt this. I believe the cause 
 which brought the first marriage to such pain- 
 ful disaster was not dependent only on the evi- 
 dent unsuitability of the partners to live with 
 one another; the grossness of the man and the 
 believed refinement of the woman need not 
 necessarily have failed in finding happiness in 
 union. No, the cause of failure was deeper, 
 within themselves, dependent on the blind ego- 
 ism of both the husband and the wife and their 
 wrong understanding of the institution of mar- 
 riage. I do not think that in either case the 
 second marriages were likely to be much hap- 
 pier than the first marriage. 
 
 II 
 
 The love-story of to-day differs in one essen- 
 tial way from the love-story of yesterday. 
 Yesterday's love story always ended with mar- 
 riage bells ; to-day's, which is a far harder love- 
 story to write, begins with them. Earlier
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 55 
 
 authors, in short, shirked the real problem of 
 marriage, they ended where they should have 
 begun. For the main difficulties do not lie in 
 the period of falling in love, in the courtship or 
 the honeymoon, but in the preservation of love 
 after these passionate preliminaries are over. 
 
 Now, I would like to be able to say that the 
 modern love-story affords a sure sign of a 
 change that has taken place in our attitude to- 
 wards marriage. I am not, however, at all cer- 
 tain. We talk a great deal, I fear, that is all. 
 The innumerable tragedies of marriage among 
 us to-day are witness to our failure ; they have a 
 far closer connection than often is recognized 
 with the romantic and vulgar poverty of our 
 point of view. 
 
 Our romances are slightly vulgar. Vul- 
 garity is a sign of confusion and weakness of 
 spirit. We still far too much associate ro- 
 mance with courtship and not with marriage; 
 that is one reason English marriages so often 
 are unhappy. "Thank God that our love-time 
 is ended!" cried a north country bride on the 
 day that marriage terminated her long engage- 
 ment. 
 
 Now, I do not know whether this delightful 
 story is true, but it does illustrate the attitude
 
 56 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 of many ordinary couples, whose love adven- 
 ture ends at the very hour it should begin. 
 Every true marriage ought to be a succession 
 of courtships. 
 
 Love is not walking round a rose-garden in 
 the sunshine; it's living together, growing to- 
 gether. And the honeymoon is as trifling as 
 the hors d'oeuvre in comparison with wedded- 
 love, and as unable to satisfy the deep needs of 
 women and men. Falling in love, wooing, and 
 honeymooning are a short and easy episode, 
 but marriage is long and always difficult. 
 And the finding and maintaining happiness is 
 a definite achievement and not an accident, 
 for it is beyond accident. It is the result of a 
 steadfast ideal and a diligent cultivation. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Marriage has not escaped the general dis- 
 turbances of the past five years. The causes 
 are many and obvious. Man is generally 
 guided, not directly by the automatic instincts, 
 working through the lower nerve centers, but 
 rather by ideas acting in the higher nerve cen- 
 ters of his brain. Instincts with him are not 
 instinctive, but are checked and supervised by
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 57 
 
 intelligence. Only when a great shock, a sud- 
 den fear or joy, occurs does the instinctive 
 working replace the consciously planned ac- 
 tion: the man dr the woman find themselves 
 speaking in an unaccustomed voice, saying 
 what they did not know they would say ; doing 
 unaccustomed things, which they had never in- 
 tended to do, sometimes they lose control of 
 their body they rage, their speech descends to 
 inarticulate cries. Then the old system of in- 
 stinctive response to the outer world, which 
 generally is inactive and so imperceptibly be- 
 comes disused, becomes by the sudden genera- 
 tion of excessive emotion stocked with energy, 
 so that it exceeds in power the energy of which 
 the intelligence makes use. Impulses leap into 
 being, and very often there is a sudden re- 
 sponse to adventure and more primitive ac- 
 tions. 
 
 This is what the War did in many depart- 
 ments of life. Normal control, conventional 
 standards, old careful habits of conduct, were 
 broken through at a time of excessive emo- 
 tionalism. The many hasty marriages were a 
 sign of the nervous condition of the times. 
 The customary criticisms of reason were not 
 heard, or not until the emotional storm had
 
 58 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 subsided. This is, of course, a condition not 
 infrequent in marriage; but now it was exag- 
 gerated; such marriages may not, unfortu- 
 nately, bear the scrutiny of minds restored to 
 sobriety. 
 
 We have called these war marriages real 
 romances. But are they? What does the 
 husband know of the girl he has taken to be 
 one with his own flesh? What does she know 
 of him? Never have they had one real talk, 
 never stood the test of a quarrel, never passed 
 unexciting days with one another. 
 
 I want to labor that point. The most fre- 
 quent causes of trouble in marriage are born 
 of the daily fret of common living, of minor 
 habits, of omissions and stupidities. Roman- 
 tics may protest, but what most strains and 
 tears our love are just trifles, so insignificant 
 that rarely is their adverse action even noticed. 
 
 The safe and right consideration in any re- 
 lationship that is to last into marriage is not 
 only are our persons agreeable to each other? 
 But, can we live together and continue to love 
 one another? It needs a lot of grit and a lot 
 of duty to keep in love with daily life. But 
 war turned men into heroes, while women 
 thought the war was going to be so fine they
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 59 
 
 could do anything to help; they wanted their 
 share, each one to have a stake for herself, and 
 the easiest way to gain this was the ownership 
 of a soldier-lover 1 . It prevented the feeling of 
 "heing left out." A new friendliness sprang 
 up between the sexes. Advances were made, 
 perfectly natural, but quite unusual; and the 
 men in khaki and in blue found themselves dil- 
 igently pursued, and it must be owned they 
 liked it. 
 
 Thus many men have taken girls for wives 
 who are everything they don't want their wives 
 to be. There is no fitness of disposition and 
 character, no unity of ideals, no passionate sur- 
 render of the Self in devotion, no fixed purpose 
 of duty, no harmony in tastes or outlook. 
 Such love must come to disaster; it is like a 
 damp squib, it is never properly alight and 
 fades out swiftly in noisy splutters. Then, 
 when the first desire goes, no friend but an 
 enemy is discovered. 
 
 A man falls in love very readily, and girls 
 have used, quite unconsciously sometimes, very 
 consciously in some cases, the man's undisci- 
 plined impulses for his own subjection. I 
 need not recall incidents that all among us 
 must have witnessed. 1 do not wish to pass
 
 60 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 any censure upon women. The sensualist 
 within most of us is stronger than we women 
 admit, and the primitive fact forces us to take 
 risks, sending us headlong into a thousand dan- 
 gers. 
 
 IV 
 
 Can we ever find perfect love? Is it not like 
 exercise of the body? You can develop it to 
 a certain point, but not beyond without danger 
 and very slowly with continued patient work. 
 Do we not need exercise of the soul? I do not 
 know. Often I feel I know nothing. To 
 some men and women it is all simple enough, 
 a woman is just a woman and a man is a man. 
 The trouble begins when any woman becomes 
 the one desired woman and any man the one 
 desired man. 
 
 There is gain and development in this selec- 
 tive tendency of Love and yet, if I am right, 
 there is terrible danger lurking in the applica- 
 tion of this egoistic spiritual view. 
 
 It is, little as we may believe it, this search 
 for personal spiritual happiness that often so 
 greatly endangers marriage. Searching al- 
 ways for this perfect mate, we must find a part- 
 ner corresponding in every respect to our ideal.
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 61 
 
 The man in Mr. Hardy's novel, "The Well Be- 
 loved," spent forty years in trying to do this, 
 and his ultimate failure is typical of the expe- 
 rience of most of us. Fools and blind, we 
 neither understand nor seek the cause of our 
 failure. We are like little lost dogs searching 
 for a master. We seek without ceasing some 
 pilot passion to which we can surrender our 
 heavy burden of freedom. The dry-rot de- 
 struction of this individualistic age has worm- 
 eaten into marriage; we have sought to drown 
 pain and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill 
 emptiness with pleasure, to place the personal 
 good in marriage above the racial duty, to for- 
 get responsibility, to arrogate for the unim- 
 portant Self, and, in so doing, inevitably we 
 have turned away from essential things. 
 Can't you see that we are so terribly tired of 
 this search for something that we never find? 
 Our adventures are the tricks of the child to 
 cloud our eyes to our own emptiness and pain. 
 
 Marriage is not a religion to us: it is a sport. 
 
 I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we 
 
 know better how to engage a servant, how to
 
 62 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 buy a house, how to set up in business how, 
 indeed, to do every unimportant thing in life 
 better than we know how to choose a partner 
 in marriage. We require a character with our 
 cook or our butler, we engage an expert to test 
 the drains of our house, we study and work, 
 and pass examinations to prepare ourselves for 
 business, but in marriage we take no such sen- 
 sible precautions, we even pride ourselves that 
 we do not take them. 
 
 We speak of falling in love and we do fall. 
 There really is something ludicrous in our at- 
 titude. We English are everlasting children 
 in an everlasting nursery ; we so fiercely refuse 
 seriousness towards the fundamental emotions. 
 The conventions are sacred; nothing else mat- 
 ters. We stand for purity, which means with 
 women ignorance, and with men silence and 
 discretion. 
 
 Men and women of our earlier England 
 were more natural. Our novelists then frankly 
 said that every girl looked with special interest 
 on a well-formed man. There was no convic- 
 tion marking this as improper, "the baser side 
 of love." We have grown more and more dis- 
 torted and demagnetized from the natural 
 needs of our nature. We try to cast discredit
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 63 
 
 on our appetites and the body. We have lost 
 the old firm tradition of marriage and its du- 
 ties, and we have succeeded in putting nothing 
 fixed in its place. 
 
 Now, I resent the romantic idea that mar- 
 riage should be a hazardous mystery at least 
 to the woman. The more shrewdly girls can 
 judge men and men can judge girls (not by 
 mere talking and abstract discussion of sex 
 problems, there has been too much of that kind 
 of futility), but the more calmly the young 
 lovers can find agreement with each other, the 
 more simply they can accept the facts of mar- 
 riage, the more chance there will be of perma- 
 nency of affection. 
 
 The conventions of to-day are false, are 
 bound up with concealments or with an equally 
 untruthful openness. It does not, however, 
 follow from this that mere destruction of the 
 conventions will be enough; that everyone's 
 unguided ignorance will lead to success and 
 freedom. The laisscr faire system is as false 
 in the realm of marriage as it is in industry and 
 economics. While equally false, as I have 
 tried to show, is the too spiritual view of mar- 
 riage that love can be found only in perfect 
 harmony of character between the wife and the
 
 64 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 husband, and is independent of duty. It is 
 true that love differs from lust in its deeper 
 insight into the personality, deeper interest in 
 the character, as opposed to the inexpres- 
 sive smooth outline and "unbrained" physical 
 beauty of the body. But character and intel- 
 lect may be studied and loved as self-cen- 
 teredly, as much with a view to the enjoyment 
 of mental excitement, as the body itself. A 
 wider distinction must be drawn before we can 
 find guidance. 
 
 VI 
 
 Let us look now at a different, older and, as 
 I think, much finer ideal of marriage, for by 
 this means we may find out more clearly how 
 very far we have wandered from happiness and 
 freedom in marriage in our search for those 
 very things. 
 
 It is the Jewish ideal of marriage that I wish 
 to bring before you. And I would say first 
 that the remarks I am offering are not gath- 
 ered only from what I have read and been told 
 by others. I have learnt them from my own 
 experience, unconsciously and slowly, and even 
 against my will. My marriage with a Jew has 
 taught me the wide separation between the
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 65 
 
 Jewish ideal of marriage and that which I had 
 accepted : I cannot even try to say how much 
 I have gained and learnt. 
 
 The English ideal of marriage is concerned 
 with rights and the individual, the Jewish ideal 
 is concerned with service and the race. Their 
 theory of marriage is one of religious duty, and 
 has much less to do with the accomplishments 
 of passion; I think that is why Jewish mar- 
 riages are so happy. 
 
 Modern writers on the Jewish point of view 
 (such as Achad-ha-Am and Melamed) are 
 agreed that the morality of the Jews is a collec- 
 tive rather than an individual morality, aiming 
 at race preservation rather than individual de- 
 velopment, practice rather than faith, the con- 
 tinuance and improvement of life rather than 
 spiritual recompense. Consequently, wher- 
 ever Jewish traditions retain their hold, the be- 
 getting and care of children must necessarily 
 occupy the most important portion of life. 
 Thus marriage is regarded as a duty to he un- 
 dertaken by all, not as a pleasure to be in- 
 dulged in or to be left dependent on the indi- 
 vidual will. It is a sacred duty of parents to 
 arrange a marriage for every child; marriage 
 and the life of the home is still deeply religious;
 
 66 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Jewish mothers do not go out to work in fac- 
 tories, they are more concerned with the service 
 of the home than with anything outside of the 
 home. They are very old-fashioned, and they 
 are very happy: they consider barrenness the 
 greatest possible misfortune. 
 
 Do you see the contrast I am trying to estab- 
 lish? The essence of the romantic ideal of 
 marriage is at bottom an insupportable ego- 
 ism the seeking of happiness by the all too 
 insistent Self the forgetting of the ultimate 
 values of life. 
 
 There are other modes of thought for Jewish 
 women. The expression of her own individu- 
 ality is not a matter to which she can attach su- 
 preme importance; rather is she unconsciously 
 finding an escape from this burdening con- 
 sciousness of individuality by ever seeking 
 identification with her husband, with her chil- 
 dren, with her home, with her own people and 
 with God. She possesses the inestimable good 
 of being bound by a great tradition. It is ever 
 thus with those who are conscious of a sufficient 
 inner life: the modern cry for individual free- 
 dom is but one result among many of the pov- 
 erty of our lives. 
 
 The Westernized Jews, it is true, are more
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 67 
 
 or less tainted with the errors of industrial com- 
 munities. It is, of course, where the early 
 marriages of the ghettoes prevail, where the 
 married woman religiously covers her own hair 
 with a wig immediately after marriage, where 
 marriage, as I have said, is regarded as a duty, 
 and love, therefore, is not considered to be of 
 overwhelming importance, that the full differ- 
 ence between Jewish and Gentile traditions is 
 seen. 
 
 This difference is partly due directly to re- 
 ligious influences. Christianity considers mar- 
 riage as a concession to human wickedness and 
 the continuance of the race a doubtful benefit. 
 "A remedy for sin" as the English Prayer 
 Book states with such delightful frankness. 
 When I remember this Christian view of mar- 
 riage, I am not surprised at the corruptions 
 into which we have fallen; it is an atmos- 
 phere rich for the development of industrial 
 values. The Jews have never fallen into this 
 hateful denial of life. Judaism still considers 
 it a command of God to increase and multiply: 
 the unmarried life, not the married life, is re- 
 garded as sinful. The ascetic view of mar- 
 riage, as well as the romantic view that love is 
 everything, are both anti-Jewish.
 
 68 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 The Jews, and, I think, even more strongly 
 the women, can never be individualists. I 
 must again emphasize this fact, for everything 
 else depends upon it. Never can the Jewish 
 wife and mother come to seek personal pleas- 
 ure as the chief aim in marriage, or delight 
 greatly in expressing her own individuality in 
 spiritual union. She is not absorbed by her 
 own joy or engrossed by her own sorrow. She 
 is content to be married, and accepts any disad- 
 vantages that come from that state ; she believes 
 in her husband, in her children, and even if 
 these fail her, she believes in her race, her re- 
 ligion, and the inheritance of her people: this 
 gives her a center of gravity outside of herself. 
 For thousands of years Jewish women have 
 been taught the value of service ; the dedication 
 of the Self to an ideal. At the same time, they 
 have been held firm to the realities of marriage 
 by their worship. These two influences will, I 
 believe, forever make it impossible for Jewish 
 women in any numbers to accept the egoistic 
 view of marriage and the duties of women that 
 has been set up in England, as also in other 
 European lands and in America, indeed wher- 
 ever Self-assertion has been admitted as the 
 ruling principle of life.
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 69 
 
 For these reasons the Jewess, with her spe- 
 cial attitude toward marriage and to life, offers 
 a picture of the deepest significance for the 
 study of all industrial races. That is why I 
 turn to her in the hope of making plain to us 
 Western women our mistakes. She, in my 
 opinion, can show us the path wherein alone in 
 future we can find happiness. 
 
 The Jewish women have inherited the most 
 perfect feminist ideal that as yet the world 
 has known ; an ideal of service within the home 
 of which full life she is the high-priestess; an 
 ideal turning to foolishness the false values of 
 this industrial age. And this ideal of service, 
 shared by all, gives to the most unlearned Jew- 
 ish woman the priceless knowledge of an eter- 
 nal truth : a truth that has to be learnt by each 
 one among us before we can find happiness 
 that only by losing ourselves can we find the 
 Self that is eternal. The Jewish woman learns 
 this truth by living it. 
 
 The deep reasons of life lie beyond the realm 
 of individual advantage. The Jewish spirit, 
 pursuing its ends deliberately and wisely, de- 
 mands of women and of men two different de- 
 votions. It asks of women devotion to men, 
 to their children, to their homes; of men, devo-
 
 70 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 tion to ideals. Jewish women do not wait to 
 ask if men are worthy, their thought is of serv- 
 ice. They understand that in each devotion 
 lies an equal glory, an equal joy, and an equal 
 honor in the sight of God and of man. 
 
 There is so much more I would like to say. 
 I would wish to show you something at least of 
 the success with which religion among the Jews 
 has been turned to domestic uses. No detail of 
 the home life is left unhallowed. Even the 
 poorest Jewish home is saved by its cere- 
 monies from the degrading indifference to de- 
 cency and tenderness, which is the terrible 
 feature of the industrial homes of poverty. 
 The sanctity of the home is an affectionate tra- 
 dition linking the Jews through the ages with 
 a golden chain. The purity of home life has 
 fought and triumphed over all the unsanitary 
 conditions of ghetto life. 
 
 I wish that the limits of my space allowed 
 me to write in detail of these beautiful and 
 happy services. The lighting of the Sabbath 
 candles, the joyous festivals so attractive to our 
 children, all are used to consecrate the daily 
 life. The dietary laws may be said to be a re- 
 ligion of the kitchen. The description of the 
 Virtuous Woman, from the book of Prov-
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 71 
 
 erbs the woman who "looks well to the ways 
 of her household," whose clothing are "strength 
 and majesty," who "laugheth at the time to 
 come" is appropriately read on Friday even- 
 ings by the master of the house to exalt the per- 
 petual provident, charitable and joyous house- 
 mistress. A true Jewish home must always be 
 a beautiful place, because its duties are fixed 
 by tradition and hallowed, by the symbols of 
 God's dealing with His people in the past. 
 
 Abundant evidence is forthcoming of the 
 honor that was always paid by the Jewish hus- 
 band to his wife. His duties toward her are 
 set forth in detail in the usual form of the Ke- 
 tubah. In the body of that instrument he 
 binds himself to work for her, and to honor her, 
 to support and maintain her. The Talmudic 
 sayings on this subject of the honor in which 
 the wife is held and the husband's dependence 
 on her are numerous Let me quote one or two : 
 "Who is rich? He whose wife's actions are 
 comely. Who is happy? He whose wife is 
 modest and gentle." Again: "A man's hap- 
 piness is all of his wife's creation"; and yet 
 again: "God's presence dwells in a pure and 
 loving home." "Be not cruel or discourteous 
 to your wife," said a first century teacher, "if
 
 72 
 
 you thrust her from you with your left hand, 
 draw her back to you with your right hand." 
 Another says : "A man should always be care- 
 ful lest he vex his wife: for as her tears come 
 easily, the vexation put upon her comes near to 
 God." A seventeenth century writer states: 
 ''Never quarrel with your wife"; this is not to 
 be done even "if she asks for too much money." 
 
 Such passages extend in an unbroken series 
 through all medieval Jewish literature. But if 
 the Jewish wife was held in honor by the Jew- 
 ish husband, it was because of the very practi- 
 cal virtues of the Jewish way of living. The 
 home life was everywhere serene and lovely, 
 and if the Jew retained any virtue at all, he 
 displayed it in the home. The father was the 
 religious teacher of his family, and this duty 
 necessarily increased his domesticity. He took 
 greater interest in his children because it was 
 his task to teach them the law, and his devotion 
 to his wife was directly dependent on his serv- 
 ice to the family. One of the Rabbis, on this 
 question of the Jewish husband ill-treating his 
 wife, said in framing his regulations "This is 
 a thing not done in Israel." 
 
 I would ask you to note that the woman does 
 not become a nonentity by reason of her limi-
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 73 
 
 tation to a definite sphere of action within the 
 home. Such a view is entirely absent among 
 the Jews. The rule over the home-life held 
 through the centuries by the Jewish wife is far 
 more real in its results of power than the so- 
 called equality claimed by a modern woman, 
 acting under the influence of industrial ideals. 
 What is significant (and ought to teach us if 
 we can be taught) is the fact that such power is 
 held by women in right of their position as 
 wives and mothers; it is never extended to 
 young girls or to unmarried women on account 
 of their attraction and sexual power over men, 
 in the way to which we have become accus- 
 tomed. That is unknown, at least, in connec- 
 tion with marriage. The Jew understands 
 that there are other ways of loving than falling 
 in love. Power is held universally by the house 
 mistress the mother, whose desires through 
 life are a law unto her husband and her chil- 
 dren. 
 
 All Jewish literature is filled with examples 
 of reverence expressed towards mothers who 
 are "the teachers of all virtue." In the moral 
 law the command to fear the mother that is to 
 treat her with respect, is placed even before the 
 duty of fearing the father (Lev. xix. 3) . En-
 
 74 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 during evidence remains of the spiritual status 
 of mothers. When the Prophet of Exiles 
 wishes to depict God as the Comforter of his 
 people, he says "As one whom his mother com- 
 forteth, so will I comfort you" (Is. Ixvi. 13). 
 When the Psalmist describes his utter woe, he 
 laments, "As one mourning for his mother, I 
 was bowed down with grief." 
 
 Perhaps, now as we see the mother taken as 
 the one sufficient symbol of Jehovah's dealing 
 with his people, the mourning for her presence 
 being the completest expression of grief, we 
 can come to understand something of the Jew- 
 ish ideal of marriage and of the high honor, 
 because of this ideal, in which women were 
 held. 
 
 VII 
 
 It should be plain enough now why English 
 marriages so often are unhappy. The im- 
 mense failure of marriage to-day arises from 
 the confusion of our minds and our chaotic de- 
 sires so that we have no firm ideal, no fixed 
 standard of conduct either for the wife or for 
 the husband. Every couple starts anew and 
 alone, and the way is too difficult for solitary 
 experiments.
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 75 
 
 The existence of many standards, of what 
 ought to be done and what ought not to be 
 done, the liberty permitted to the husband, the 
 liberty permitted to the wife, if the wife shall 
 continue her work or profession or remain at 
 home dependent on the husband's earnings, 
 whether the marriage shall be fruitful or ster- 
 ile these are but a few of the questions left 
 undecided. And thus to leave unguided each 
 wife and each husband, with their own idea of 
 what is good to do and what is evil, makes for 
 narrowness and waste of effort; while further, 
 our inability to set up a standard of right and 
 wrong conduct of ideals to strive after 
 leaves vacant room for false ideals of every 
 kind. These empty places of the mind have 
 been occupied by the ravings of advanced peo- 
 ple. The harm has been incredibly active in 
 the consciousness of the young. We have put 
 before their imagination nothing worthy of 
 contemplation, therefore they easily sink down- 
 ward attracted by what is base. 
 
 Then we suggest economic changes. But 
 the evil is not economic. No evils are funda- 
 mentally economic. The structure of society 
 is the unforeseen result of the conflicting de- 
 sires and capacities of the individuals who com-
 
 76 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 prise the society. A false view of marriage, a 
 false view of the relative values of life and 
 money, of service and liberty, of happiness and 
 duty, is not dependent on economic conditions. 
 Yet, let us not forget that this is the age of the 
 gadding mind and the grabbing hand. We 
 tend to value everything by what it brings in to 
 us, in feelings if not in more tangible results. 
 
 You will see what this must mean. I am 
 brought back to our wrong ideals; I have no 
 new remedy to give; I can only again insist 
 upon this truth: A preoccupation with a de- 
 sire for love does not, and never can, result in 
 happiness. But the personal (or perhaps my 
 meaning will be clearer by saying the egoistic) 
 view of love has assumed such gigantic propor- 
 tion in our minds to-day that we accept these 
 selfish desires as a safe basis for permanent 
 happiness. Marriage lias ceased to be a disci- 
 pline: it has become an experiment. 
 
 The romantic view of love as the basis of 
 marriage is, of course, the essence of the Eng- 
 lish habit of life; as we have seen, it focuses de- 
 sire on personal adventures and personal needs. 
 Romance necessarily leads to license, and not 
 license of the body alone finding expression in 
 more or less gross immoralities, for there is a
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 77 
 
 spiritual license far more dangerous because so 
 much more seductive. Appetite for adven- 
 ture, for an excitement that is mainly mental 
 is a condition that is quite as dangerous to mar- 
 riage and much more common than the un- 
 faithfulness that leads to the divorce courts. 
 
 I would appeal to the young, to each young 
 girl, who to-day is questioning the future. 
 Many of you have passed through a supremely 
 heroic period of your lives; now you are wait- 
 ing. You want to do right, and it is so diffi- 
 cult, for everyone seems to be at a loose end 
 of desire. Perhaps some among you will ask 
 me: "What can I do?" My answer is this: 
 Fix your ideal. Do not make the child's mis- 
 take and think that the desirable thing is to do 
 just what you like. You can never find free- 
 dom or happiness in that way. Hold firm in 
 your hearts that no gain of personal liberty 
 counts as happiness to women. Treasure your 
 womanly qualities your sweetness, your gen- 
 tleness, your shyness, your unlimited capacity 
 for devotion, guard these as your greatest pos- 
 session. Do not acknowledge your poverty 
 by failing to honor yourself. Be the establish- 
 ers of a revived feminist idealism, the founders 
 of a new tradition of womanly service. It is
 
 78 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 for you to fix the type that will one day give 
 woman her real freedom ; one day but not yet. 
 
 In these times of uncertainty there is great 
 danger. Every woman should be asked at the 
 moment to believe in simple things; in her 
 home, her children, her husband, and her coun- 
 try. The only hope is in unity, and for unity 
 you must have discipline, and for discipline, 
 for the present, at least, you must accept 
 authority. Much, incalculably much, depends 
 upon the young. The generation to which I 
 belong is passing, we have to hand on to you 
 who are younger the torch of life. 
 
 With more courage to face truth, you should 
 have a surer ideal than we have found. When 
 this comes, there will be less sentimentality but 
 much deeper feeling about marriage. I have 
 tried to show you a different ideal, and picture 
 for you the Jewish home, where the exalted es- 
 teem in which women are held is the outcome of 
 their attitude to marriage and the Jewish way 
 of life : it is an ideal that depends directly upon 
 duty and a religious view of marriage. 
 
 To-day we need a new consciousness of our 
 social and racial responsibilities, the idea of 
 handing down at least as much as we have re- 
 ceived. Let the young women of England
 
 THE COVENANT OF GOD 79 
 
 learn as a great new faith that the sons and 
 daughters they bear are not their children and 
 the children of their husbands only, but the 
 sons and daughters of England the inheritors 
 of all the fine traditions of our race. Let us 
 spread the new romance of Love's responsibil- 
 ity to Life; let us honor ideals of self-dedica- 
 tion to our husbands, understanding their de- 
 pendence upon us, to our homes, to our sons 
 and our daughters, to our race, its great ones 
 and their deeds; our moral obligations to all 
 children even before they are born. 
 
 It is women, and they alone, who can save 
 marriage; they hold all life in their hands. 
 Never before in the world has the opportunity 
 been so vast; it is a fearful thing to find one- 
 self among realities. To you, who to-day are 
 young, negligence no longer is possible. Lis- 
 ten to what I tell you: those heroes who have 
 died for this England of ours cry to you for 
 children to hold their memories and make their 
 lives everlasting. 
 
 Let us take seriously what the politicians 
 have said without meaning it: let us make an 
 England fit for heroes to be born in, able to 
 mold a character of heroism in each of its 
 children: not, as at present, an England so
 
 80 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 tainted with mean self-assertion that the dedi- 
 cation of a wife to her husband, of a mother to 
 her children, counts as a sacrifice of her person- 
 ality. 1 
 
 i In order to guard myself from possible misunderstanding, 
 I would wish to give the following explanation: the chief sec- 
 tion of this essay on Marriage is devoted to praise of the 
 Jewish ideal of marriage as a religious duty. It does not 
 profess to examine the detailed working out of the ideal in con- 
 nection with the definite regulations of traditional Judaism. 
 That working out is, naturally, to the modern mind more or 
 less faulty. It is as an ideal that I give it: an ideal of service 
 and dedication that I want to be carried into English mar- 
 riage, and to serve the needs of our national life. I would, 
 however, make it clear that the detailed proposals put forward 
 by me in the essays that follow have no connection with Juda- 
 ism: no one of them could possibly be considered to have any 
 such connection, except the proposal for facilitated divorce: 
 but my proposal in that particular connection (as will be seen 
 in the next essay) is hedged by restrictions, suggested by 
 present-day circumstances.
 
 Third Essay 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING: 
 
 A CHAPTER WHICH ADVOCATES 
 FREE DIVORCE 
 
 "That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and 
 that which is wanting cannot be numbered." Ecc. i. 15, 
 
 I AM well aware that there will be many 
 among my readers who, having gone so far in 
 my book and agreed more or less with my point 
 of view, must here fall into disagreement with 
 me. This essay upholding free divorce, and 
 the three that follow, the first one recommend- 
 ing regulation and firm action in suppressing 
 prostitution as the only way to stay the spread 
 of venereal diseases; the second essay on the 
 illegitimately born child, where I differ in one 
 important matter from the accepted view of 
 what is chiefly needed to protect these unhappy 
 children ; and, even more, the proposal 1 make 
 
 81
 
 82 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 in the last essay, where I plead for an open 
 recognition of honorable sexual partnerships 
 outside of marriage this half of my book will 
 be disapproved of, very probably disliked, and 
 my views more or less violently disputed. It 
 will be said that what I advocate now is in di- 
 rect opposition to my ideal of marriage being 
 a religious duty, which demands the consecra- 
 tion of women to the service of the family and 
 the home. This, however, is not so: if I have 
 been understood at all, it should be evident that 
 the opposition is not there. 
 
 I care little for our existing and chaotic 
 forms of morality; what I desire is to create a 
 new reality, the value of which consists in that 
 it provides wider possibilities of decent and 
 honorable conduct. We have to brave moral 
 danger in trying to attain a higher moral real- 
 ity. To me what seems the first necessity is to 
 face things as they are, and not to go on eter- 
 nally pretending that our world is what it is 
 not. 
 
 Our vague-minded lax society has to pull 
 itself together, has to reconsider and adminis- 
 ter and formulate a more helpful system of 
 regulations; has to learn to express again its 
 united will in some better way than "go as you
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 83 
 
 please," or fail. What is wanted is a new hon- 
 esty to create standards of conduct, which will 
 fix the every day indispensable duties, that, 
 after all, make up the total of life. We have 
 but a choice between the danger of falling 
 deeper into confusion and dishonesty or the 
 danger of awakening to a clearer and more dif- 
 ficult consciousness. Now, I do not believe it 
 is moral to regulate life by fear, considering 
 only the desire to remain undisturbed of those 
 who are decayed and petrified. I do not know 
 if I make my meaning clear. As our habit, we 
 ignore or minimize all sex difficulties as much 
 as we can; we hesitate and compromise and 
 bungle over every reform because we are afraid 
 of what may happen if we probe down to the 
 real bottom of what needs to be done. We 
 have neither the courage of our bodies or of our 
 souls. This is why so often our attitude be- 
 comes false and our thoughts entangled, so 
 that our moral life is corrupt with conceal- 
 ments and deceptions. Now, I am not content 
 with the compromise which sanctions every 
 form of sexual sin so long as the conventions 
 are respected and the sin hidden all the rot- 
 tenness going on beneath the respectable struc- 
 ture of our society. I want as far as is possi-
 
 84 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 ble to emancipate our lives from such slavery; 
 to make less easy the hypocrisy which law and 
 custom sanction ; to gain freedom from a sham 
 morality and the pretense of a righteousness 
 that we do not maintain. It is a necessary 
 step, for me at least, on the way to any kind of 
 improvement. More and more I am con- 
 vinced that we shall have to make a violent and 
 very conscious effort to get clear of dishonesty. 
 
 That is why I am advocating, as a first most 
 necessary reform, simpler and more decent fa- 
 cilities of divorce. I plead for a greater 
 breadth of toleration, with a more honest facing 
 of the facts, because I have known in my ex- 
 perience the degradation, the falsity and the 
 absurdities that are going on to-day ; the decep- 
 tions into which everyone is driven who is un- 
 fortunate enough to have to seek relief, under 
 the present disgraceful divorce laws, from a 
 marriage that has failed. There are con- 
 ditions which degrade and embitter and make 
 honorable conduct very difficult. 
 
 A great number of people, regarding mar- 
 riage as a mystical and, therefore, unbreakable 
 sacrament, object to divorce under any circum- 
 stances whatever. This is the case in Catholic 
 countries, such, for instance, as Spain, the land
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 85 
 
 I know and love so well. Such an attitude I 
 can understand and respect, though I do not 
 consider it a practical proposition, and know, 
 moreover, that indissoluble marriage, in some 
 ways, works very harmfully. It prevents 
 hasty marriage. In Spain marriage is re- 
 garded as the gravest and most momentous 
 step in life; but this caution does not alto- 
 gether work out for good in the way one might 
 expect. 
 
 I recall a conversation with a Spanish friend 
 on this question. We were speaking of the 
 great numbers of young Spaniards who did not 
 marry. I asked my friend the reason of this. 
 He answered: "You see we have no divorce 
 in this land as you have in England, that makes 
 us afraid now we have begun to think, we hes- 
 itate and hesitate, then we take a mistress while 
 we are deciding, but it is easier and less bind- 
 ing to live like that, and we keep going on and 
 put off marrying, sometimes put it off until it 
 is too late." In Spain the illegitimate birth- 
 rate is the highest of any country in Europe. 
 
 We must accept, then, that indissoluble mar- 
 riage fails in practice, and the society which 
 enforces it commits self-injury by setting up a 
 standard of conduct impossible to maintain;
 
 86 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 and further, one that acts in deterring the more 
 thoughtful from marriage and leaves the pro- 
 tected institution to the more reckless, who do 
 not consider consequences. 
 
 Now, when once we do accept this, admit the 
 principle of divorce and acknowledge that in 
 certain circumstances the bond of marriage 
 may be severed, at once the aspect of the ques- 
 tion changes: it becomes a matter of practical 
 adjustment, so that what is needed is decision 
 and regulation of the conditions under which 
 divorce should be allowed, so that they may 
 meet best the needs of men and women in the 
 society and, at the time, in which they live. I 
 am very anxious to show the difference between 
 the practical and the conventional attitude to- 
 ward this problem. It is to be wished that 
 this question of divorce could be approached 
 free from the falseness of the old prejudices of 
 religious intolerance and of sentimentality. 
 
 The great and pressing need of reform is 
 being widely discussed at the present time. I 
 note with a mixture of amazement and fear 
 that practically in every argument the opinion 
 universally held appears to be that the relief 
 given should be as limited as possible ; it is still 
 being taken for granted that free divorce in this
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 87 
 
 country is neither attainable nor desirable, and, 
 indeed, that any extension of the grounds of 
 divorce would act against the sanctity of mar- 
 riage. I say I note this attitude with fear, be- 
 cause it seems to me that the triumph of preju- 
 dice and ignorance here is a most serious symp- 
 tom of the degradation of our moral outlook 
 and the poverty of our faith in the institution 
 of marriage. 
 
 "Divorce is relief from misfortune, not a 
 crime," to quote from the admirable statute 
 book of Norway, a saying which should be one 
 of universal application in divorce. And this 
 relief must be granted, not merely as an act of 
 justice to the individual; it is called for equally 
 in the interests of society. 
 
 The moral code of any society ought to meet 
 the needs of its members. But the needs 
 change as time goes on, and moral codes must 
 then also change or they become worn-out and 
 useless. That society which is unwilling to 
 modify its laws to fit new conditions drives its 
 members into defiance of the law and acts di- 
 rectly as a cause of immorality. It were well 
 to remember this as we come to question our 
 laws of divorce. There can be no possible 
 doubt that as the law stands at present it does
 
 88 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 not meet the needs of those people who claim 
 its relief; while further, the most superficial 
 knowledge of the situation proves how harm- 
 fully and immorally the law acts. 
 
 II 
 
 It is, of course, very much better that mar- 
 riage should be as permanent as possible, and 
 any society is obviously justified in bringing 
 any moral pressure to bear to make people 
 realize the seriousness of the relationship and 
 the importance of keeping it permanent when 
 possible. But it is certainly no part of the 
 right or duty of society to use force to compel 
 people to remain in the marriage relationship, 
 when it becomes so repugnant to them that the 
 conditions of the marriage cannot be continued. 
 All that society has the right then to demand 
 is that all the obligations which have been as- 
 sumed shall be honorably fulfilled. But a re- 
 lationship registered in mistake or under delu- 
 sion should be subject to revision, and, with 
 certain safeguards, to dissolution, otherwise 
 the standard of morality is degraded and mar- 
 riage itself is brought to contempt, and can be 
 used, as indeed too often it is, as a cloak of pro- 
 tection for every kind of immorality.
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 89 
 
 But it is just here that the religious objector 
 to divorce-reform steps in. Marriage, he de- 
 clares, is not only a social institution, it is a 
 sacrament of the Church, "Those whom God 
 has joined together no man may put asunder," 
 therefore divorce must be made as difficult as 
 possible. As I have said before, I can respect 
 the view that rejects divorce and regards the 
 marriage bond as indissoluble, but I can have 
 nothing but contempt for this attitude of weak 
 and shuffling compromise. Much has been 
 said on the matter, therefore I say little. I 
 shall not attempt to urge the causes for which 
 divorce should, or should not, be granted; for, 
 as will appear directly, I want a much simpler 
 and more radical reform : also I hold it folly to 
 try to convince the self-blinded. I only ask 
 the reader to make sure that he (or perhaps 
 more probably she) really believes that the 
 partners in the marriages that come to the di- 
 vorce courts were joined by God, and is willing 
 to follow the argument to its logical conclusion. 
 Are they willing, for instance, to say that a 
 woman or a man may not put aside the mar- 
 riage if one of the two is a lunatic, or a hope- 
 less drunkard, or an habitual criminal, or a de- 
 generate, or the victim of a disease which can
 
 90 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 be communicated to the offspring? Are they 
 willing to go with our ecclesiastical advisers, 
 who seek to maintain marriages, which may be 
 the cause of perpetuating disease and crime; 
 the bringing into the world of the children of 
 drunkards, of epileptics, of syphilitics and of 
 lunatics ? 
 
 Stop a moment and think what this must 
 mean to the society in which we live. Can it 
 be considered seriously that the continuance of 
 marriage in such cases as these can by any jug- 
 gling be made right anything except the most 
 blind-eyed folly and sin? 
 
 Ill 
 
 Consider now the position to-day. Amaz- 
 ing marriages have been made under the ur- 
 gency of war conditions, reckless marriages, 
 entered into by those who have known each 
 other for a few days only before marrying for 
 life. A minister of religion stated quite re- 
 cently, "I have had to marry many couples who 
 admitted to me that they knew little about each 
 other. I could do nothing. I was not al- 
 lowed to refuse marriage." 
 
 There is no excuse now for these criminally 
 hasty marriages; that they should have been
 
 made is one of the tragedies caused by war. 
 It would prevent endless unhappiness and 
 many divorces if marriages were to be made 
 conditional, except under very special reasons, 
 on the woman and the man having been en- 
 gaged for a fixed and sufficiently long period. 
 I would recommend this reform to all ecclesias- 
 tical opposers of divorce. Betrothal should be 
 regarded as a much more important ceremony 
 than is common with us : here again is a way in 
 which we might wisely copy older civilizations, 
 whose customs were more strictly planned to 
 help men and women in right living. 
 
 In the first year of the war the number of 
 cases heard in the divorce court rose from 289 
 to ,520, which was the highest figure then on 
 record. Last season the number had sprung 
 up to 775, while on the present term's lists there 
 are nearly 800 cases, showing the exceeding in- 
 crease on the pre-war rate. A large percent- 
 age of the marriages which are dissolved by the 
 court have been contracted since August, 1914. 
 Petition after petition is filed praying for the 
 dissolution of marriages which should never 
 have been made. English law makes mar- 
 riage far too easy. In addition to this alarm- 
 ing increase in divorce, a greater number of
 
 92 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 deeds of separation have been drawn up in the 
 last two years than in any preceding twenty- 
 five; cases of bigamy have also become very 
 frequent, by women as well as by men. 
 
 A stage has now been reached when the cry 
 for reform must be listened to. Something 
 has got to be done. The unhappiness and fail- 
 ure in many marriages looms before us a co- 
 lossal, an unprecedented and menacing fact. 
 Our eyes cannot any longer remain shut to the 
 damning proofs which confront us from so 
 many sides. 
 
 IV 
 
 The question as to how our ridiculous and 
 immoral system of divorce ( I really must use 
 those terms) was ever permitted to come 
 into use may be answered very briefly. The 
 Church ordained that marriage is indissoluble, 
 but, this being found impossible in practice, the 
 State stepped in with a way of escape a kind 
 of emergency exit. But what a makeshift it 
 was! how flagrantly dishonest, how indecent! 
 Adultery must be committed, and, in the case 
 of the woman claiming relief, cruelty or de- 
 sertion must be added to the adultery. To es- 
 cape the degradation of an unworthy partner
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 93 
 
 another partner must first be sought, home-life 
 wrecked by the worst kind of conduct, and mar- 
 riage degraded by an act of infidelity. 
 
 Now, this kind of thing is bad, and no possi- 
 ble shuffling can make it right ; it is, indeed, so 
 offensive to the feelings of most of us that it is 
 very rarely, if ever, that the immoral and 
 harmful way in which it acts is put into plain 
 words. 
 
 The divorce law with its materialistic refusal 
 to accept any grounds for divorce except phys- 
 ical infidelity, physical cruelty or desertion, 
 makes for a low view of marriage. Further, it 
 directly encourages perjury, in fact makes 
 lying essential to obtaining the relief of the 
 law. The law refuses to legalize divorce by 
 the consenting desire of both parties calls 
 such a wise arrangement collusion; yet it can- 
 not prevent what everyone knows is done in the 
 great majority of decently conducted divorce 
 suits, where desertion and infidelity take place 
 by arrangement. The law is very lenient to 
 those who can pay for the best arrangements 
 for circumventing the law's intentions, but even 
 in spite of the recent concessions, is still hard 
 on the ignorant poor and low class. The law 
 is a snob as well as a pedantic, pompous ass.
 
 94 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Some people may be disposed to believe that 
 this very absurdity and unfairness of the law 
 acts to prevent divorce. I tell you it does not ; 
 what it does do is to render decent and honest 
 conduct quite impossible. I know this. I 
 speak because the evil that is going on ought to 
 be known. My own opposition to the law is not 
 so much on account of the difficulty in obtain- 
 ing a divorce for it is not nearly so difficult as 
 most people think; nor do I take exception, as 
 is common with most women, to the unequal 
 moral standard required from men and wo- 
 men; all this, as I have said, can easily be 
 got over if you have money and a sufficiently 
 clever lawyer. No, my passionate opposition 
 is directed against the trickery and dishonesty 
 made necessary by the law. 
 
 Let me prove this statement. To do so I 
 will give brief details of four divorce suits 
 which I think will speak more forcibly than 
 any words of mine; in each case I know the 
 facts I give are true. 
 
 Case 1. A husband and wife, childless, de- 
 sired to part, there was no physical infidelity on 
 either side, but love had died. Both partners 
 desired to remarry. The wife proved deser- 
 tion against the husband (arranged between
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 95 
 
 them beforehand by the help of a lawyer] . 
 She had to write and urgently entreat the man 
 she desired to leave her to return! A decree 
 for the restitution of conjugal rights was 
 granted to her petition. Afterwards the hus- 
 band had to commit adultery; (again arranged 
 by the help of the lawyer.) He took the wo- 
 man he wished to make his second wife for 
 one night to an hotel. The decree nisi was 
 granted. Then there was the six months wait- 
 ing for the decree to be made absolute. The 
 King's Proctor made inquiries, it was found 
 that the wife also desired her freedom; the di- 
 vorce was refused on the ground of collusion. 
 Four people were rendered desperately un- 
 happy, compelled either to part or to live to- 
 gether without marriage. This, as was to be 
 expected, they did, and children were born, of 
 necessity illegitimately. 
 
 Case 2. In this case the husband loved his 
 wife, but she had been unfaithful to him and 
 desired freedom to re-marry her lover. There 
 were no children. Because it was better for 
 her, this wronged husband arranged for his 
 wife to divorce him, prove desertion and adul- 
 tery. There was a slight difficult!/ because 
 it was the wife who had run away from home.
 
 96 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 However, this was easily got over. The wife 
 wrote begging the husband to allow her to 
 come home, representing that he had sent her 
 away. He then had to reply refusing her re- 
 quest, and while desiring nothing on earth so 
 much as her return to him, had to state he 
 would never live with her again. An act of 
 adultery was then necessary, and as this good 
 and chivalrous husband was also an exception- 
 ally moral man, he took his sister to an hotel, 
 and the divorce was granted on this: they, of 
 course, signing their names in the hotel register 
 as Mr. and Mrs. X. 
 
 Case 3. In this case the action of the parties 
 is reversed. The husband had committed 
 adultery and wished his freedom to re-marry, 
 but he held a public position, and to be the 
 guilty party in a divorce suit meant social and 
 financial ruin. The wife was innocent, and 
 still loved her husband, but because she felt it 
 right to free him, an act of adultery for her 
 (not committed) was arranged. Both the de- 
 cree nisi and the decree absolute were granted. 
 Complications arose from the fact that there 
 were two children: as the "innocent" party 
 custody was granted to the father, but he did 
 not want the children. So for the six proba-
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 97 
 
 tionary months between the two decrees the 
 children were placed with friends. After- 
 wards they were given back by the father to the 
 mother. 
 
 When the decree of a divorce has been made 
 absolute, you can fortunately do what you 
 like. During the six months probationary 
 period, however, the "innocent" partner (see 
 Case 1 ) has to be so careful of his or her con- 
 duct, that it is really much more convenient to 
 be the "guilty" partner. I mention this as a 
 further proof of the absurdity of the law, and 
 the immoral way in which it acts. 
 
 Case 4- This case was even more curious 
 than the three I have given. A very bad but 
 beautiful woman had married a man younger 
 than herself, an idealist, chivalrous, and quite 
 unusually moral. After a few years of hell 
 the marriage had to be ended. In kindness, 
 and because she was a woman, the man said 
 she had better divorce him. Desertion was 
 proved, though it had not taken place. Trou- 
 ble arose from the necessary act of adultery, as 
 it was against the principles of the husband 
 even to appear to commit it. The difficulty 
 had, however, to be got over or the divorce 
 given up. It was done in this tea//: the man
 
 98 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 got his married sister to go with her husband to 
 an hotel, personating him and a woman, and 
 signing the hotel book with his name as Mr. 
 
 and Mrs. . Now the strange fact is that 
 
 though there was no kind of similarity of ap- 
 pearance between the brother-in-law and the 
 husband, one being very dark and the other 
 very fair, one being short and the other tall, 
 identity was established and sworn to by the 
 servant in the hotel where the night had been 
 spent. How this was arranged I do not know, 
 but the decree nisi and the decree absolute 
 were granted without any difficulties arising. 
 
 Now, none of these cases are unusual, with 
 the possible exception of No. 4 ; similar divorce 
 suits are heard each session, only that the way 
 in which the details have been arranged is care- 
 fully hidden, to prevent the losing of the case 
 on a charge of collusion. The one absolute 
 barrier in this land to the breaking of a mar- 
 riage is that both parties want it to be broken. 
 
 It is obvious, surely, without any further ar- 
 gument, that laws making perjury necessary, 
 which demand the committing of acts of, often 
 pretended, infidelity, are immoral; nor is their 
 immorality lessened by the fact that through 
 the rather heavy costs of these "arranged
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 99 
 
 suits," 1 only the richer and more fortunate 
 classes, as a rule, are able to bring them. 
 
 I ask if this state of things is to be allowed 
 to go on : are decent people to be driven by the 
 law to make use of such vile trickery? I say 
 "decent people" advisedly, for those who bring 
 this kind of suit are decent, wishing to act hon- 
 orably and kindly, and carrying out the always 
 difficult severing of the marriage bond with as 
 little pain as possible. There are, I know, 
 other divorce suits in which vindictiveness and 
 jealousy and anger are the ruling motives, but 
 undefended and "arranged" suits, more or less 
 on the lines of those I have given, are becoming 
 more and more frequent. Each law session 
 their number is increasing. Personally, I re- 
 gard this as an extraordinarily healthy sign. 
 
 I hope I have now sufficiently proved that 
 our unclean divorce laws can do nothing to pre- 
 serve the sanctity of marriage. If we know 
 the facts, to go on pretending that we believe 
 this is to mark ourselves as hypocrites. We 
 
 i Since writing this essay the admirably courageous and 
 honest letter of Commander Josiah Wedpcwood has appeared, 
 in which he gives the details of his own divorce suit.
 
 100 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 need to get rid of a system that is as immoral 
 in theory as it is evil in practice. 
 
 But, unfortunately, the probability of the 
 law being reformed does not depend on the 
 need for reform. How many people are af- 
 fected ? What votes will the advocating of the 
 reform gain? Grievances that will not gather 
 noisy crowds will continue unheeded. Mod- 
 ern parliaments are like badly brought up 
 children; they can be bribed with promises of 
 votes or frightened with fear of disorder, more 
 easily than led by reason. 
 
 VI 
 
 As soon as we begin to consider the reform 
 of the law, we come at once to such a tangle of 
 questions that I have the greatest difficulty in 
 finding the right end to unwind the skein. 
 For the trouble with this matter of our divorce 
 laws, as with most other reforms, is to decide 
 just what ought to be done, how far are we pre- 
 pared to go? where must the marriage bond be 
 held tight? where may it be loosened? These 
 are but examples of the questions that have to 
 be answered. Hence the wrangling and the 
 failure in establishing any kind of united will,
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 101 
 
 which prevents anything at all being done. 
 No one, for instance, can decide the causes for 
 which it would be right to extend the grounds 
 of divorce. Almost every individual inter- 
 ested, and every group of individuals, appears 
 to have a different opinion and offers opposing 
 suggestions. And the issues are further con- 
 fused because any change that concerns mar- 
 riage touches us all so intimately, so that the at- 
 titude that we take up must be strongly af- 
 fected by our deepest emotions, which against 
 our knowledge are directed by our unconscious 
 wills. This explains much apparently unwise 
 conduct, as well as persistent opposition to re- 
 form on the part of many humane people, that 
 otherwise would be difficult to understand. 
 There is much too great a timidity shown even 
 by those who recognize most the evil done by 
 our existing laws and work for their reform. 
 They fear to ask too much, always the sure way 
 to get nothing done. 
 
 This question of the causes for which divorce 
 should be allowed is one that is very unlikely to 
 be settled. I doubt if it can be settled wisely. 
 In my opinion, an enlightened reform of our 
 law must go much further than the providing 
 of ways of escape from marriage. Such exits
 
 102 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 tend to destroy the happy working of marriage 
 and open a direct way to abuses ; also they are 
 unable to meet the needs of all classes, no mat- 
 ter how wide and numerous they are, while di- 
 rectly they are numerous they become ridicu- 
 lous. They can never form the ultimate solu- 
 tion of what ought to be done. They tend to 
 make marriage contemptible, and there are 
 real grounds in the objections raised against 
 them. There must be no special exits; the 
 door of marriage must be left open to go out of 
 as it is open to enter. 
 
 Nor do I believe there need be cause for fear 
 in this idea of divorce by mutual consent. It 
 is not nearly so easy to break a marriage that 
 has lasted for any time as is usually thought by 
 those who have never tried to do it. The habit 
 of living together forges bonds you do not feel 
 until you try to break them. The intimacy of 
 marriage creates a thousand and one little 
 every-day interests and ties, habits, preoccupa- 
 tions and memories in common ; when they are 
 torn it is like tearing thousands of little nerves 
 that are far more painful than the one big hurt 
 that caused them to be broken. That is why 
 most marriages are dissolved through anger, in 
 jealous passion, and because lovers are found
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 103 
 
 out. It needs immense courage to sever a 
 marriage if you have time to think what you 
 are doing. 
 
 VII 
 
 About no subject, perhaps, are prejudices 
 so rampant as they are about this question of 
 changing the marriage laws. I am, however, 
 very certain that I am right here. Nothing 
 but good would follow from this introduction 
 of plain simple honesty. There would be 
 fewer divorces, and not more, if our laws were 
 freed from their obsession with sexual offenses, 
 and divorce was made a question of quiet and 
 careful consideration, and mutual thought and 
 decision. 
 
 There ought certainly to be a period of wait- 
 ing after the application for divorce, which 
 should be signed by both the partners of the 
 marriage. I would suggest that the first ap- 
 plication should be made to lapse of itself un- 
 less a further application for its enforcement 
 was made after a period of say, two years. 
 Many people will go on with what they have 
 begun, even if they don't want to do so, because 
 they are not brave enough publicly to say they 
 have made a mistake. After the second appli-
 
 104 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 cation a further period of waiting, not less than 
 a year, might be required before the decree for 
 dissolution of the marriage was made absolute. 
 
 I cannot understand how any honest mind 
 can fail to see the advantages of this or some 
 similar plan of divorce by mutual desire and 
 arrangement, over the present law which forces 
 the committal of perjury and requires adul- 
 tery; nor can I find any reason why freedom 
 should not be granted, when the marriage is 
 childless and both partners, after sufficient de- 
 liberation, desire its dissolution. Probably it 
 would be wiser, as a further necessary safe- 
 guard against too hasty parting, to require the 
 marriage to have lasted for five years, before 
 application for its dissolution could be made. 
 I think, however, in urgent cases, and wher- 
 ever it could be shown that the marriage had 
 been entered into under a mistake and had been 
 continuously unhappy, it should be possible to 
 remit this requirement. 
 
 The case where one partner only of the mar- 
 riage desires its dissolution is much more dif- 
 ficult, and cannot, I think, be settled with the 
 same justice. I would, however, point out 
 that the same situation is common before mar- 
 riage, when an engagement is broken by one
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 105 
 
 or other of the lovers, though, of course, the 
 pain and injury (if such words can be used in 
 this connection) must be much greater after 
 marriage. The law allows in these cases com- 
 pensation to be claimed by the injured partner 
 for the harm suffered, and, though no one can 
 uphold these breach of promise cases (which 
 have increased so unfortunately in the war- 
 period) it should be possible to avoid a similar 
 sordidness. The establishment of right to 
 compensation is not a new thing in divorce; 
 used in the way I suggest it would serve as a 
 safeguard against a too hasty escape from 
 marriage, as well as being an act of justice for 
 the partner who wished for the divorce to com- 
 pensate, as fully as his or her means or working 
 capacity permitted, the one who desired the 
 continuance of the marriage. 
 
 The amount of compensation offered, as well 
 as the amount claimed, if there was not an 
 agreement between the partners, should be 
 stated when application for the divorce is 
 made; and this question should be settled be- 
 fore any further proceedings are allowed. 
 The required periods of waiting would, of 
 course, be enforced. 
 
 It may be interesting to my readers to learn
 
 106 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 that this principle of compensation, given by 
 the partner who claims divorce to the one who 
 does not desire it, is one that is common among 
 many primitive peoples, especially wherever 
 customs of maternal descent prevail. 1 It is 
 practiced, to give one instance, by the Khasis, 
 a maternal people of the hill tribes of East 
 India ; it affords an example of how much more 
 wisely, because more simply, these matters are 
 sometimes arranged, before civilization de- 
 stroys our common sense. 
 
 VIII 
 
 So far, I have ignored the real difficulty of 
 divorce the child or children. At once the 
 situation alters; when children are born both 
 the practical needs and moral values are differ- 
 ent. A marriage that becomes creative can- 
 not be broken without grave disaster; for all 
 creative things are eternal. What, then, must 
 be done? Frankly, I know of no one workable 
 plan, and I can suggest nothing except that in 
 all cases the welfare of the children should be 
 taken as the standard to which the desire of the 
 parents should be subordinate. 
 
 i See for other examples " The Position of Woman in Prim- 
 itive Society."
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 107 
 
 You see, if we accept this standard of the 
 child's good as the one thing of importance, we 
 shall have great changes to make in our thought 
 and in our action. I must follow this a little, 
 though it takes me away from the main line of 
 my argument, but I want to make quite plain 
 the failure in our attitude. Perhaps on no 
 other aspect of this question is greater non- 
 sense talked than on this one of the effect of di- 
 vorce on children. It is said so universally 
 that it is better for the marriage to be broken 
 than for children to live in a home in which the 
 parents have ceased to love each other. I am 
 not sure that this is true, the child's values are 
 often very different from our adult values. 
 Only just now I am reading "Joan and 
 Peter," by Mr. Wells, and I am amazed at the 
 levity with which he makes his characters treat 
 this serious subject. You will remember the 
 situation, almost at the opening of the book. 
 Dolly, Peter's mother and the adopted-mother 
 of Joan, has discovered that Arthur, her hus- 
 band, has been unfaithful to their marriage. 
 She is considering whether she will remain or 
 will go to Africa with her cousin, Oswald Sy- 
 denham, who has for long loved her. These 
 are the passages of which I wish to speak:
 
 108 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 "Then, least personal and selfish thought of all, 
 was the question of Joan and Peter. What 
 would happen to them?" Dolly goes over the 
 details of the situation, her certainty that Ar- 
 thur would allow her the custody of the chil- 
 dren, then the passage ends with this remark- 
 able statement: Oswald would be as good a 
 father as Arthur. The children weighed on 
 neither side. A little later Oswald speaks on 
 the same matter of the children's future. 
 Dolly has asked him, "But what of Peter and 
 Joan?" He answers, Leave them to nurses 
 for a year or so, and then bring them out to the 
 sun. 
 
 Now, to some people that sort of talk sounds 
 all very well on paper, but as Mr. Wells 
 and everyone ought to know, it is damnably 
 different in practice. Shaw, Wells, Cannan, 
 Beresford, and other writers have, in my opin- 
 ion, done immense evil. They will present 
 situations and treat them intellectually, with- 
 out any honest facing of the facts. Children 
 cannot be left for a few years and then picked 
 up again like a bag or a trunk. The change 
 of a father or a mother is a tremendous fact 
 to a child, quite independent of whether the 
 new parent is better or worse than the parent
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 109 
 
 who has left. We know, as yet, very little of 
 the results probable upon such a change, but 
 we do know that confusion and jealousy are 
 very likely to be stirred in the childish soul, and 
 that these may work tremendous and lasting 
 harm. 
 
 It has seemed worth while to bring this for- 
 ward to show a little more clearly the complica- 
 tions which are set like a thick hedge around 
 this problem. There is no easy way out, and 
 the protection of the child's interests mean 
 much more than provision for its bringing up 
 and the satisfying of its physical needs. Only 
 the parents who are sure that they are not 
 claiming their individual right to freedom at 
 the expense of the stronger home rights of their 
 child or children can be held blameless in dis- 
 solving their marriage. We talk a great deal 
 to-day about children and their welfare, but 
 very few of us realize at all practically the 
 change of attitude, the restrictions of the adult 
 liberty and sacrifice that are likely to be neces- 
 sary, if, under all circumstances, our theories 
 are to be expressed in our daily conduct. 
 
 And this brings us straight back to the ques- 
 tion we are considering at the very point at 
 which we left it. For, if we place first the
 
 110 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 child's rights, we see at once that our existing 
 divorce law does already in this matter fail, and 
 fail very seriously. 1 A parent, either the fath- 
 er or the mother, may by neglect and many un- 
 kindnesses do far more injury to a child than 
 by an act of unfaithfulness. I need not wait 
 to prove this perfectly obvious fact. It seems 
 to me, however, that these home-destroying 
 acts, the result of any sort of daily indecency of 
 living, which brings suffering, with lasting in- 
 jury, to little children, are the one condition 
 that makes divorce necessary and also right in 
 a marriage where there are children. 
 
 I admit the difficulties of framing a law suffi- 
 ciently elastic to meet this need. I do not, 
 however, see that it would be impossible. The 
 one who claimed the divorce the father or the 
 mother or both if the dissolution of the mar- 
 riage was desired by both parents, could be de- 
 sired to state in the application for the divorce 
 full answers to the following questions: 
 
 ( 1 ) The reason or reasons on which the divorce 
 
 was sought. 
 
 (2) The arrangements one or both parents 
 
 propose to make for the after care of the 
 child or children. 
 
 i In this connection see the admirable essay on Divorce by- 
 Mr. H. G. Wells, in " An Englishman Looks at the World."
 
 THAT WHICH IS WANTING 111 
 
 (3) The guarantees offered that these ar- 
 
 rangements would be honorably fulfilled. 
 
 (4) Proof to be given by one or both parents 
 
 that the continuance of the marriage 
 would be harmful to the welfare of the 
 children. 
 
 Perhaps you will object that such a law 
 would limit too much the liberty of the parents. 
 I acknowledge this, and I think such limitation 
 is right. You see, I do not believe in the kind 
 of liberty that makes it easy for anyone to do 
 wrong to helpless children. 
 
 Science has now shown us how terribly the 
 future of the child depends on its early rela- 
 tionships in the home : its relation to its mother, 
 its relation to its father, to its brothers and sis- 
 ters. These early home relationships assume 
 a much deeper aspect, and are, indeed, the most 
 important influence in the life of every human 
 being. Parenthood is far more nearly eternal 
 than we knew. It is this tremendous fact, 
 from which there can be no kind of escape, that 
 ought to decide our attitude and direct us in 
 framing an honest and clean divorce law. 
 This protection of those who cannot protect 
 themselves is the one essential and right con- 
 sideration. The law must take action to guard
 
 112 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 all children that the failure or folly of their 
 parents do not fall too heavily upon them. 
 
 There is little more that I need to say. A 
 hard and fast divorce law cannot, I am sure, 
 meet the needs of the young people of the new 
 generation; moreover, it cannot but act to de- 
 grade marriage. Marriage is too difficult 
 the needs of children, as well as the needs of 
 men and women are too complicated for the old 
 standards of punishments. Divorce as it ex- 
 ists at present is a revenge, it ought to be a help 
 to honorable conduct; it depends now upon a 
 committal of perjury and adultery, it ought to 
 depend on honesty and on a right fulfilling of 
 responsibilities.
 
 Fourth Essay 
 'GIVE, GIVE!" 
 
 SOME REMARKS ON PROSTITUTION, AND AN INQUIRY AS TO 
 THE BEST MEANS OF PREVENTING THE SPREAD OF 
 VENEREAL DISEASES. 
 
 "The horse-leach hath two daughters, crying, Give, 
 Give!" Pro. xxx. 15. 
 
 MANY observers point out an increase in loose 
 conduct during the war. In that period there 
 were established large camps of soldiers in 
 lonely places, who were freed from the neigh- 
 bor's eye : women also were withdrawn in large 
 numbers from the influences of the home. The 
 war lessened restraints and increased tempta- 
 tion. 
 
 I will refer to two out of many newspaper 
 cuttings which dwell on the consequent evils: 
 
 WOMEN, WAR, AND MORALS 
 
 Mr. Justice Darling's View 
 
 Mr. Justice Darling, in a case at the Old 
 Bailey yesterday, said the harm the war had 
 
 113
 
 114 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 done to the morals of the people of this country 
 was far beyond the material damage. 
 
 In nothing had it done more harm than in 
 the relaxation on the part of the women of this 
 country. This had now reached a point that 
 it could be seen in a walk along the street. 
 Women differed by the width of Heaven from 
 what their mothers were. 
 
 This is quite the hardest thing that has been 
 said about women, the hardest comparison that 
 could be made; but unhappily it cannot be de- 
 nied. And a second paragraph, taken from 
 the Daily Telegraph, carries us a stage fur- 
 ther, from cause to effect. The looseness of 
 morals has increased alarmingly the spread of 
 venereal diseases. 
 
 "Giving evidence before the National Birth 
 Rate Commission in London, Dr. E. B. Tur- 
 ner, after advocating early marriage and urg- 
 ing the necessity for a higher moral standard, 
 without which venereal diseases would never 
 be kept down, made this statement: 
 
 These diseases were now being spread not 
 only by professional prostitutes. People ha"d 
 gone wrong through the wave of sentimental 
 patriotism which had swept over the country. 
 Out of 112 soldiers taken to the Rochester
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 115 
 
 Road Institution, only fourteen had contracted 
 disease from professionals. The others had 
 contracted it from flappers." 
 
 The condition of the streets is such that it is 
 not safe to let any young man or boy walk 
 about, not so much because of prostitutes, men 
 may learn to avoid them, but because of 
 dressed-up, flighty girls, who have earned big 
 wages during the past four years, and now are 
 feeling the want of money to spend upon dress 
 and pleasure. Almost for the first time girls 
 have had money, and it has enabled them to do 
 what they want; they have learned more than 
 their mothers know and, therefore, they despise 
 their mothers' ideas of what is fitting and nat- 
 ural. Modern girls are out to get all they 
 can, and by any means. It is, I know, easy to 
 exaggerate the situation. I have, however, 
 taken pains to gain all possible information on 
 the subject. I find it the opinion of those who 
 are best qualified to know that the most alarm- 
 ing feature of the problem now is the greatly 
 increased danger of spreading the diseases, 
 caused by the shifting of infection from the 
 professional prostitute to young girls out for 
 larks and presents. I was told by one worker 
 in the Police Court Mission, for instance, of a
 
 club for girls, aged from fourteen to twenty- 
 six years, among whom there was probably not 
 a single pure girl. A woman rescue worker 
 said that "South London was swamped by 
 these larking girls," so many cases come up 
 that "no one knows what to do with them." In 
 the Police courts, while the number of women 
 charged had lessened considerably, the number 
 of girls charged has increased three-fold. 
 Many of these girls are very young; some of 
 them hardly more than children. In almost all 
 cases the charge made is the same disorderly 
 conduct with soldiers. Of the number of girls 
 convicted and sent to prison or to rescue homes, 
 at least three parts are found to be infected, the 
 greater number with gonorrhoea, but some with 
 syphilis. 
 
 Now, it is no part of my purpose to blame 
 women. The great majority of these girls are 
 ill-trained, and have been worked beyond care 
 for decency. The question is, what it is best to 
 do. The answer is not easy. For while every- 
 one is agreed about the need for action, disa- 
 greement as to what form the action shall take 
 hinders the adoption of any wider course of 
 prevention. Here again there is no unity of 
 purpose, no humility to accept what is right.
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 117 
 
 II 
 
 For mys'elf, I shall try to avoid a purely 
 moral and idealistic treatment of the subject. 
 At the same time, before explaining what prac- 
 tical measures should, in my opinion, be taken 
 to lessen the evils, I should like to refer briefly, 
 and I know inadequately, to the deeper causes, 
 which are rooted in our attitude of life, as well 
 as dependent on our hidden desires. Man, 
 and of course I include woman, as a whole is 
 estimated at too low a value. It is a paradox- 
 ical consequence that the parts of man, I mean 
 his separate organs, rise in value. His brain, 
 his sex, his stomach each strives for mastery in 
 attention ; a faithless age has manias of sexual- 
 ity, of intellect, of gastronomy. 1 These ma- 
 nias are the result of low values really placed 
 on man himself. How do we discover that low 
 value; It is not so much a matter of opinion; 
 far more important than the opinion of the 
 public is the wide-spread, always-acting, fun- 
 damental public feeling, expressed in the at- 
 mosphere of our society. Every smallest de- 
 tail of life, our aims and hourly habits, every- 
 thing that makes up the secret imaginations 
 
 i See Ed. Carpenter, "Civilization: Its Cause and Cure."
 
 118 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 and the un-willed purposes of life all have 
 a part to play in deciding what our estima- 
 tions of life will be, the things we shall seek 
 as desirable, what avoid as unpleasant. If our 
 estimations and hidden desires in actual fact 
 rise in goodness, if we find better aims to sat- 
 isfy our lives than the excitements of sexual 
 satisfaction, then this department of morality 
 will rise. 
 
 The question is one of great complexity, and 
 the surest means of improvement are very diffi- 
 cult to decide; not to be settled in a spirit of 
 Sunday-school optimism. The bad boy does 
 not always come to harm, or the good boy gain 
 the reward that he ought to have. It is not so 
 simple as that. Even if all vulgar and evil de- 
 sires could by some magician's wand be trans- 
 formed into their opposites, so that all of us 
 bubbled and seethed with virtues, I do not be- 
 lieve we could count on the results. Our very 
 virtues might hasten us to perdition : both high- 
 er and lower aims, if ill-adjusted to form a com- 
 plete life, may lead astray. The savage in us 
 all has to be reckoned with as the angel, and 
 the dreamer who ever looks to heaven often 
 stumbles over a tiny stone. Thus a helpless 
 romanticizing, a too ideal as well as a too low
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 119 
 
 view of love, may lead easily to a self -deceiving 
 resort to prostitution. 
 
 All forcing of goodness, in my opinion, is 
 dangerous. Often the cause of virtue is in- 
 jured, like the cause of religion, not only when 
 virtue is allied with routine, dullness and nar- 
 rowness, but also when appeal is made to as- 
 pirations, which the young rarely feel sponta- 
 neously, aspirations ill-adapted and too high 
 for their immature characters and the needs at 
 the stage of virtue that has been reached. Cer- 
 tainly they appear to respond, fall in with our 
 plans of salvation and often accept them with 
 seeming joy; I venture, however, to think that 
 very often this external attitude does not in 
 any way correspond with the internal one, that 
 very often there has been disturbance and 
 shock, to be followed later by increased need 
 for excitement, with an impulse to more peril- 
 ous adventure to cover the unconscious feeling 
 of frustration and disappointment; while an- 
 other result is a sense of unreality, a state al- 
 ways unfavorable to moral health. 
 
 If morality is seen as something overbeauti- 
 ful for daily use, even more than as something 
 dull, inactive, over-prudent; if vice, on the 
 other hand, is conceived as easy, brilliant, gay,
 
 120 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 gallantly reckless, in opposition to the too ethe- 
 real or merely stupid and prosaic aspects of life 
 (though in reality seldom do the dissipated and 
 those who prey on the vices of mankind pos- 
 sess any brilliance or originality) , then beauty 
 and virtue will aid vice, through the stimulus 
 of contradiction it will provide. Vice will gain 
 by the brilliance, wit and beauty, which the ar- 
 tists and creators of the world ought to be in- 
 duced, were the world's cause properly cared 
 for, to connect with virtue. 
 
 The popular view of our common motives 
 still inclines to reduce everything to a single 
 impulse the young are moved exclusively by 
 self-interest and the search for pleasure. But 
 surely this view is false. Hazlitt, the English 
 essayist most interested in psychology, in his 
 essay on "Mind and Motive," correctly ob- 
 serves that, "love of strong excitement both in 
 thought and action" has much more influence 
 on our ideas, passions and pursuits than mere 
 desire for the agreeable. Curiosity itself, also 
 the love of truth, "our teasing ourselves to rec- 
 ollect the names of persons and places we have 
 forgotten, the love of riddles and of abstruse 
 philosophy," he holds these to be illustrations 
 of "the love of intellectual excitement," and,
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 121 
 
 with respect to this curiosity, he holds that our 
 vices are more due to it than to sexual gratifi- 
 cations, saying with regard to vicious habits, 
 "curiosity makes more votaries than inclina- 
 tion." 
 
 We find, then, that the difficult problem we 
 are considering, like other social problems, has 
 a material aspect, that is a medical aspect, an 
 intellectual aspect, and a spiritual aspect con- 
 cerning the aims of life: and of these the last is 
 the most fundamental; it is obviously also the 
 most difficult. To attack the situation fully it 
 would be necessary to change most of our con- 
 temporary life. We are, however, bound to 
 realize that, if we are to succeed, our attention 
 must shift from saving the fallen, to removing 
 the hindrances and the temptations that are the 
 causes of falling. In other words, we have to 
 provide a society in which the young will find 
 virtue and goodness as serviceable to their 
 needs and as attractive as vice and doing evil. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If we turn now to the practical consideration 
 of the problem before us, we find the situation, 
 difficult as it is, is not without hope. We have
 
 to face as the result of the war a task greatly 
 enlarged and growing in difficulties, but if we do 
 so face it and the very increase in the danger 
 is urging us like spurs in the flesh of a tired 
 horse we have an exceptionally favorable op- 
 portunity for correction and amendment. For 
 one thing, we have become more used to being 
 interfered with, also, I think we have come to 
 understand in a new and more profound way 
 that each man "is his brother's keeper." 
 Again the real difficulty arises now, not so 
 much from our want of good will, as from our 
 failure to act unitedly, and formulate and carry 
 out a wide-reaching program of reform. 
 
 If for the sake of clarity, we try by classify- 
 ing motives to form a rough grouping, we find 
 that, as with most political subjects, there are 
 three opinions with regard to proposals for 
 State interference to stay the peril and prevent 
 the spread of venereal disease. 
 
 The first school favors extreme State inter- 
 ference. Persons suspected of disseminating 
 disease (or "denounced by one of the opposite 
 sex" as having done so) are liable to be ar- 
 rested, medically examined, and, if necessary, 
 detained for re-examination and for treatment 
 until cured: habitual prostitutes can be sen-
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 123 
 
 tenced to imprisonment. Possibly State-in- 
 spected brothels will be established; all street 
 solicitation treated as an offense. Compulsory 
 medical certificates of freedom from infectious 
 venereal diseases will be made a legal prerequi- 
 site of marriage; all wishing to be married, 
 when found infected, to be registered and 
 treated until certified free from infection. 
 State provision of hygienic preventative and 
 curative means are to be given free to those in 
 danger from infection as well as to all suffering 
 from venereal diseases. Finally, severe police 
 action is urged against agents, landlords, pub- 
 licans, restaurant and hotel-keepers, theater, 
 music-hall and cinema owners, fortune-tell- 
 ers and everyone directly or indirectly prof- 
 iteering by prostitution. This is not a descrip- 
 tion of any one national treatment, or proposed 
 treatment of the problem, but rather a com- 
 posite hotch-potch, intended to include the 
 main features of the new r and old schemes 
 based on State interference and regulation of 
 vice. 
 
 The opposite school of thought produces an 
 opposite scheme; one that I may, perhaps, call 
 an ethical Sunday-school plan of salvation by 
 means of guidance and gentle persuasions.
 
 They would educate people in the fact that all 
 promiscuous intercourse is likely to be danger- 
 ous, and recommend only an alteration of the 
 laws of marriage and divorce to meet cases of 
 marital infection and to protect children who 
 are infected by negligence. Such a course of 
 mild action is widely supported by bishops and 
 by "sheltered" women, who reveal to us curi- 
 ously the psychology of the class, which, 
 throughout the Victorian period, practiced 
 idealism on the easiest methods. 
 
 The practical objections usually advanced 
 to "the interference school" are that laws of 
 regulation create an illusory sense of security 
 which encourages vice and increases the spread 
 of disease. No inspection, however widely and 
 well regulated, can guarantee that it will detect 
 all infected persons, but the idea will prevail 
 that all infected at any time are "locked up." 
 A still stronger objection as urged by women, 
 arises from the fact that the law will not be 
 equal in its treatment of the two sexes : the man 
 on the spree after his day's work will seek his 
 pleasure without danger of the law's hand, 
 while a woman, in a similar position, in work 
 and not asking for money, will be liable to ar- 
 rest for soliciting, and detention and imprison-
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 125 
 
 ment, if affected. I shall have more to say 
 soon on this question; here I will remark only 
 that in bringing forward these objections I am 
 not stating opinions of my own, but trying to 
 be fair to objections, which, I know, are strong 
 in the minds of the majority of women. But 
 I diverge a little in these comments from my 
 present work of classifying schemes. 
 
 The third type of treatment pursues, of 
 course, a moderate, middle course. Registra- 
 tion and treatment of disease should not be 
 compulsory, because, as opinion at present is, 
 this course will lead merely to concealment on 
 the part of the sufferers, whereas medical treat- 
 ment at the earliest possible hour is what is 
 aimed at; but free treatment and provision of 
 curative safeguards should be provided to all 
 who apply for them, and always with secrecy. 
 (There is much opposing opinion as to which 
 of these two preventative plans providing of 
 disinfectants to be used before or of remedies 
 to be used as soon as possible after the act is 
 the more effective.) No wide-spread schemes 
 for examination and detention are recom- 
 mended, rather are they discouraged; nor is 
 there any firm regulation for ending street so- 
 liciting. Certificates of health should not be
 
 126 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 made a legal pre-requisite to marriage, but the 
 existence of venereal disease should annul mar- 
 riage without expense, making the law appli- 
 cable to the poor as well as to the rich. Also, 
 medical men should be specially authorized, 
 without risk of libel, slander or other legal at- 
 tack, to inform parents or guardians or others 
 directly interested, that anyone contemplating 
 marriage, a man or a woman is in an infec- 
 tious state. 
 
 It may be pointed out here that military 
 authorities seem to lay stress on one thing that 
 some people will say has nothing to do with the 
 subject the provision of proper means of 
 recreation. Personally, I would emphasize 
 this aspect of the question to which I have but 
 just now referred. If the amusement is to 
 fulfill the purpose required, and be really a 
 strong counter attraction from vice, it must be 
 the kind of recreation desired and liked by the 
 young people for whom it is provided, not 
 merely the recreation that is considered good 
 for them by the adults who provide it. This 
 opens up, of course, a whole welter of ques- 
 tions. I am not advocating bad and low class 
 entertainments; I hate them and think their 
 suggestive influence a curse among us. Yet,
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 127 
 
 I do fear the adverse action, of any kind of 
 amusement that takes the form of an unliked 
 and moral-forcing hot-house. 
 
 The fluttering about, the glitter and glare of 
 dissipation, is always, I think, at first the fierce 
 striving of a sickly life towards the only attrac- 
 tive and visible light. Certainly the providing 
 of wholesome amusement is necessary, but, in 
 relation to all the change that is really called 
 for, this is just about as important as the giv- 
 ing of packets of sweets. What is wanted is a 
 wiser understanding of the many and conflict- 
 ing needs of the young ; the provision of the op- 
 portunities and outlets which their bodies' and 
 souls' growth demand; needs which must be 
 gratified, or the body, driven by dissatisfaction 
 and curiosity, seeks the gratification that has 
 been taken away from the creative soul. 
 
 IV 
 
 But to return to plans of action for fighting 
 this scourge. The fight has to be made, and 
 to be begun at once. It is stated that there 
 were, at the beginning of the year, in the 
 neighborhood of 20,000 infected men receiving 
 treatment in our Army and Navy Hospitals.
 
 128 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 According to the estimate of the Royal Com- 
 mission on Venereal Diseases published in 1916 
 there were, at that time, something like 3,000,- 
 
 000 syphilitic persons in the Kingdom, 450,000 
 in London alone. Since 1916 the number 
 must have greatly increased. Many diseases 
 are more immediately fatal to mankind than 
 are these diseases, but none are so disastrous in 
 their effects. To take but two examples of 
 their destructive incidence; it is known that to 
 them more than half of both the blindness and 
 the lunacy in this country is directly due. But 
 
 1 need not trouble you with facts and figures 
 that to-day are known to almost everyone. 
 
 What is needed now is a world-wide, organ- 
 ized plan of defense, modified possibly to meet 
 the special requirements of different countries, 
 but, as far as is possible, the same for the whole 
 world. A first step has been taken, at the 
 meeting of the Red Cross Societies of the 
 world, which was held at Cannes, in April, 
 1919. No man can tell how far-reaching its 
 work will prove: an International Health Bu- 
 reau was instituted and arrangements made for 
 a further great conference to be held at Geneva 
 after the signing of peace. 
 
 I would like to wait and write of the Cannes
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 129 
 
 Conference, which to me was an event more 
 serious even than the other world conference, 
 where some were thoughtlessly and selfishly 
 juggling with human affairs. Here was no 
 pretending, no hiding of motives, just a facing 
 of the real situation. The great events of life 
 are almost always quiet. I picture the great 
 ball-room, 1 where usually jazzes and one-steps 
 were indulged in by the officers of the Allied 
 Armies and bright girl W.A.A.C.S. and 
 W.R.E.N.S., occupied now with grave men; 
 a group of some of the greatest scientists ever 
 assembled together. United they seek for the 
 first time how best an end may be made to this 
 tragic scourge of our civilization; ~ their fervent 
 purpose should light a flame to blaze in action 
 in every civilized country. 
 
 It would be impossible to over-emphasize the 
 importance of the findings of this Conference. 
 We women are glad to know that the Commit- 
 
 i The Conference was held in the ball-room of the Club of 
 the Allied Officers at Cannes. 
 
 - In this connection, it should be noted that there was a 
 time when syphilis was unknown in our civilization. It cannot 
 be traced with any certainty in Kurope before the fifteenth 
 century, although its origin is involved in some controversy. 
 The attempt to suppress venereal diseases by proper treatment 
 is of little more than twelve years duration. Three men 
 Wassermann, Ehrlich, and Xoguchi have supplied the knowl- 
 edge whereby the evil may be attacked. See " Motherhood and 
 the Relationship of the Sexes," p. 283, ct seq.
 
 130 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 tee reported unanimously against State regu- 
 lation of vice and State toleration of prostitu- 
 tion. At the same time, the repression of all 
 street-soliciting was advocated, as well as con- 
 trol of restaurants, hotels or other places with 
 reference to their use for promoting prostitu- 
 tion. The Committee further favored the de- 
 tention and, where necessary, the isolation of 
 all persons known to be, or suspected of being 
 infected, and advocated the adoption of the re- 
 port system in regard to early preventive treat- 
 ment. The importance of early marriage was 
 urged. Other measures recommended were 
 the custodial care of the feeble-minded, and 
 State control of the use of alcohol. 
 
 So many people, and especially, I think, wo- 
 men are led astray by sex sentiment as soon as 
 they approach these problems. I do not be- 
 lieve that this can be avoided, but we may guard 
 against it. Thus, those who hesitate, and there 
 are many who do hesitate, in adopting the pro- 
 posals of the Cannes Committee, which are 
 aimed, either directly or indirectly, against 
 prostitutes, should take care to consider all the 
 facts. Of late there has been exhibited in this 
 country a rather bewildering sentimentality 
 about this matter. The experience of the
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 131 
 
 American Army authorities should teach us a 
 much-needed lesson. The American program 
 to maintain the sexual health of the men went 
 much further than any English proposal, 
 straight and without sentiment to the main 
 cause of the disease, in a way that should shame 
 our vacillating methods. 
 
 "The repression of prostitution was declared 
 to be a public health measure, and all public 
 health departments were required to cooperate 
 actively with the proper law authorities in min- 
 imizing its practice." When the American 
 armies entered France, the same end, of keep- 
 ing the men from "coming in contact with the 
 prostitutes, either public or clandestine," was 
 always kept in view. The difficulties were im- 
 mense. At that time (from August to the 
 early part of November, 1917) the troops were 
 stationed in certain French towns, where the 
 houses of prostitution were running wide open 
 and were frequented by large numbers of men. 
 On November 15th all these houses were placed 
 out of bounds. The table on the following 
 page shows what happened. 
 
 Take also these figures: in one body of 7,401 
 troops belonging to various branches of the 
 service, with an average of seven weeks in
 
 132 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 France, only 56 prophylactic treatments were 
 given, and only one case of venereal disease de- 
 veloped; again, during two months in France, 
 one infantry regiment of 3,267 men had a rec- 
 
 Month 
 
 No. of 
 
 No. of 
 
 Disease 
 
 Rate 
 
 
 Troops. 
 
 Prophylaxis. 
 
 Cases. 
 
 p. 1000. 
 
 CO 
 
 co C 
 
 August - 
 
 4,571 
 
 1,669 
 
 72 
 
 16 
 
 SH 
 
 September 
 
 9,471 
 
 3,392 
 
 124 
 
 13 
 
 E 
 
 October - 
 
 3,966 
 
 2,074 
 
 67 
 
 16 
 
 3 co 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 g'3 
 
 
 
 o - 
 
 November 
 
 7,017 
 
 885 
 
 81 
 
 10 
 
 co O 
 
 3-D 
 
 December 
 
 4,281 
 
 539 
 
 44 
 
 10 
 
 flu 
 
 January - 
 
 3,777 
 
 523 
 
 8 
 
 2 
 
 ord of only eleven prophylactic treatments, 
 and no case of disease. But perhaps the most 
 effective example of the efforts made by the 
 American authorities to repress prostitution in 
 France occurred at Blois. American troops 
 arrived at the town in January, 1918. The 
 brothels were at once placed out of bounds, but, 
 shortly afterward, and, owing to protestations 
 on the part of the French authorities, 1 the order 
 was relaxed, in so far as one of the brothels 
 was taken over for the use of the American sol- 
 diers. Not for long was this tolerated. On 
 March 21, this brothel also was put out of 
 bounds. Strict repressive measures against 
 
 i " The Fight against Venereal Disease," by Raymond B. 
 Hodick, The New Republic, Nov. 30, 1918.
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 133 
 
 prostitution and street-walking were put in 
 force; and repeated arrests by the military 
 police both of prostitutes and suspected pros- 
 titutes, succeeded in almost ridding the town of 
 this menace. 
 
 The result was very interesting. I will 
 quote directly from the article from which 
 these facts are taken: 
 
 Although politicians and the owners of 
 cafes and brothels continued to protest, the 
 decent elements of the community gradually 
 changed from an attitude of skepticism, even 
 of hostility and resentment, to one of appre- 
 ciation, commendation and cooperation. An 
 official report from the Surgeon-General's 
 office on conditions in the town declared: 
 
 "It is evident that placing the houses at 
 Blois out of bounds has had a wonderful ef- 
 fect, not only in lowering the venereal rate, 
 but in improving the morality of the soldiers 
 and also of the civil population" 
 Of course, these few figures and scattered 
 facts cannot tell the whole story ; they do, how- 
 ever, indicate with sufficient clearness what 
 may be done by firm and fearless action.
 
 134 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 V 
 
 Let me try to make the position clearer by 
 means of another and quite different illustra- 
 tion. The results of restrictions on the drink 
 trade in England during the war showed that 
 legislative interference with strict rules can do 
 much more than many of us believed. 1 Wipe 
 off all that is doubtful in the results, all eva- 
 sions of the law, all that was due to the absence 
 of a large number of healthy men, yet the State 
 interference prohibition of treating, great 
 shortening of hours, provision of weakened 
 beer these undoubtedly have acted so as to re- 
 duce drunkenness. 
 
 Surely this must serve as a great proof that 
 the removal of temptation is the one effective 
 remedy to help men and women and to prevent 
 sin. A man who got into trouble with a wo- 
 man not very long ago, gave as a defense in 
 police court: "You can say 'No' to one wo- 
 man, but when they are round you all the time 
 you can't." 
 
 i My own opinions have been greatly influenced by what 
 has been done in England with regard to drink, and in the 
 American Army in maintaining the health of the Army by 
 restricting prostitution, which explains a change in my atti- 
 tude, since writing the chapter on " Prostitution " in The 
 Truth about Woman.
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 135 
 
 The three objections specially urged by wo- 
 men against laws directed against prostitution 
 and prohibiting solicitation are : 
 
 (1) That such laws cannot prevent all solici- 
 
 tation. This may be granted, but it does 
 not prove that they may not greatly les- 
 sen the evil of solicitation. It may be 
 granted, in the same way, that no State 
 prohibition can prevent all secret drink- 
 ing. But this is no reason for or against 
 prohibition; the question is what it does 
 do, not what it does not do. 
 
 (2) That such laws act unequally for the two 
 
 sexes, that is, that a man is never, or al- 
 most never, made specially liable for so- 
 liciting and worrying women. This ob- 
 jection is really quite absurd, and it is 
 only on account of the frequency with 
 which it is urged by women that I refer 
 to it again. For the life of me, I cannot 
 see how any woman reconciles it with her 
 conscience to bring forward such a silly 
 evasion. A woman can always give a 
 man in charge who annoys and insults 
 her; moreover, in the vast majority of 
 cases she could without effort protect her- 
 self from any such annoyance. Laugh-
 
 136 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 ter is a weapon that will dishearten the 
 most persistent man-follower. Besides, 
 as every one of us knows, solicitation is 
 the woman's act, and not the man's in 
 ninety-nine out of a hundred of these 
 cases. The man may be ready, possibly 
 he may seek, but he seeks only where he 
 knows the one sought will invite. This 
 objection cannot then, in honesty, stand. 
 (3) That such laws encourage blackmailing by 
 the police ; also that the police may arrest 
 poor, hard-working and defenseless girls, 
 out for a legitimate lark and charge them 
 by error or vindictively. The fear of 
 blackmailing by the police is, I think, the 
 one valid objection. Possibly it can be 
 met by a much wider use of women po- 
 lice; the second objection of the poor de- 
 fenseless girl, wrongly charged, leaves 
 me quite unmoved. Again the remedy 
 is in the girl's own hands. But, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, the police are so afraid of 
 making a mistake that, almost in every 
 case where there is a doubt, they do not 
 charge. 
 
 Those again I must add especially wo- 
 men opposed to State interference in these
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 137 
 
 matters must ask themselves on what grounds 
 their opposition is based: should we not con- 
 sider the health of society in the present and 
 the future well-being of the race as more 
 important than our personal distaste and intel- 
 lectual dislike of interference? Even liberty 
 must not take up a disproportionate amount of 
 space in our view. My own belief in the effi- 
 cacy of making right doing as simple as is pos- 
 sible by lessening temptation, is based on what 
 life has taught me, that the fundamental char- 
 acter of people is not greatly alterable, but that 
 the alteration of their circumstances will cer- 
 tainly influence the effect and working of their 
 capacities and instincts. The buttercup which 
 is tall with a flower at the end of a high firm 
 stalk and leaves with slender spike fingers, if it 
 grows in an open meadow, becomes a stunted 
 flower on a short stem, and its leaves form 
 squat webs, in order to force its growth on a 
 close-cropped lawn. The experience of the 
 American Army shows us that to cut off oppor- 
 tunity and suggestion of temptation, the incen- 
 tives to libidinous imagination, is to alter char- 
 acter more than everyone recognizes. When I 
 think of this achievement, gained in so short a 
 time and with so simple means, I confess I lose
 
 138 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 patience with the opposition raised by the wo- 
 men of this country against every attempt 
 at legislative interference with prostitution. 
 Nothing can be done thoroughly because of this 
 hindering folly. There really is no limit to 
 women's sentimental egoism and their blindness 
 in turning from facts. 
 
 We pray in our churches "lead us not into 
 temptation," but we leave our streets crowded 
 with temptations. Surely this is stupid negli- 
 gence and worse. Remove the temptations, 
 and as a nation we shall be delivered from evil. 
 
 VI 
 
 Now, a friend who has read this chapter up 
 to this point, objects that I am laying too great 
 stress on one aspect of the problem, bringing 
 forward with undue insistence the importance 
 of restricting prostitution the removal of the 
 woman tempter as the only practical way to 
 prevent the spread of sexual diseases. She 
 does not, I think, like my dismissal of conscious 
 moral striving from a principal place in 
 my scheme of reformation. That, at least, 
 I gather from what she has said to me.
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 139 
 
 Stronger, however, than this feeling, is, I am 
 sure, an unconscious, or at any rate an unac- 
 knowledged, irritation at what she feels to be a 
 failure on my part to blame men; I say too lit- 
 tle about their weakness and their lust. 
 
 I grant this. In the first place I am con- 
 vinced of the folly of preaching to anyone. 
 Then, as I am always asserting, I believe in the 
 continuous responsibility of woman, and, there- 
 fore, if I am to be honest, I must accept here as 
 in all relations between the sexes, the validity 
 of the man's plea that rings yes, and will con- 
 tinue to ring through the centuries: "The 
 woman tempted me." We are dealing with 
 forces that I do not believe can be set aside, 
 forces active long before human relations were 
 established, which press on women back and 
 back through the ages. Woman possesses the 
 sacred right of protecting man, it is a duty im- 
 posed upon her by nature, and one that she can- 
 not safely escape. Let me assert that this is 
 no sentimental statement. The essential fact 
 in every relationship of the sexes is the wo- 
 man's power over the man, and it is the misuse 
 of that power that leads to all prostitution.
 
 140 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 VII 
 
 I want now, in a final section of this chap- 
 ter, to consider, as fully as the limits of my 
 space will allow, the outside facts of prostitu- 
 tion that is, the popular view on the subject. 
 
 Externally, prostitution exhibits two fac- 
 tors: lust in men and a dependent condition 
 among women, which makes them surrender 
 themselves as victims to this lust. This is the 
 accepted, sentimental, and picturesque descrip- 
 tion: a sort of compound of sinfulness and 
 pathos, making a draught, if the truth is faced, 
 not always altogether unpleasing to women, a 
 fact which surely accounts for the excitement 
 and veiled pleasurable curiosity with which the 
 subject usually is approached. For the lust, 
 men are held responsible, and the chaste char- 
 acters of women are held up in contrast. Now, 
 it is this view of the matter which affords prosti- 
 tution one of its most certain opportunities of 
 permanency: also it gives women, when they 
 attack it, all the pleasing satisfaction of virtue 
 that is realized without effort. At the same 
 time, it explains why they object to repressive 
 measures that are framed to end it. 
 
 During the agitation, for instance, for the re-
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 141 
 
 peal of the 40 D Act, women and women-like 
 men wallowed in righteousness. Never did I 
 hear more nonsense talked than at the meetings 
 I attended on this subject. Women's instinc- 
 tive attitude had a unique chance of displaying 
 itself, and one wondered at the combined pru- 
 dery and sentiment with which the subject was 
 approached, while the most offensive part of 
 their conventionalism was the sex-obsession, 
 which was clotted, like cream turned sour, on 
 all their judgments. 
 
 Consider again the controversy that has 
 raged with regard to the providing of prophy- 
 lactic outfits to our men in the Army and Navy. 
 One would think this was a simple matter. 
 Precautions taken before, or within a short 
 time after contact, enormously lessen the dan- 
 gers of infection. 1 And yet prophylaxis is 
 objected to on the grounds that it is immoral: 
 that it invites to sexual indulgence by provid- 
 ing immunity from infection. It is also held 
 to give rise to a false security. 
 
 i On this question the testimony of the American Army is 
 urgent. They say, " Prophylaxis is under favorable circum- 
 stances secondary only in effectiveness to actual prevention 
 of exposure . . . When every other means have been used to 
 make contact difficult if not impossible, prophylaxis, while 
 not one hundred per cent, efficient, is invaluable as a last 
 resort, and has contributed a large share towards maintaining 
 in our Army the lowest venereal disease rate ever before 
 known." Article before cited.
 
 142 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Really, it is difficult to have patience. Huge 
 sums are being spent in treating these diseases 
 after they have been contracted, but we must 
 not give our young men the means whereby 
 they may be prevented from being contracted. 
 Such miserable prejudice would be funny, un- 
 less one remembers the unconscious cause 
 which gives it so burning a strength. 
 
 Some months ago, during the war, I at- 
 tended a conference to protest against the giv- 
 ing of prophylactic outfits to the overseas 
 troops. It was called and conducted by ladies, 
 the incarnation of all the virtues, effervescing 
 in the most appalling sentimentality I have 
 ever come across, even at meetings of women 
 met to discuss the morals of men. Intermin- 
 able floods of gush! They talked of nothing 
 but purity, its beauty, its healthfulness, its 
 moral uplifting to the soul of the young man 
 its Devil knows what. Venereal diseases 
 were nature's punishment for impurity ; to pro- 
 vide prophylaxis was to insult the pure youth, 
 to hurry on to sin the youth who was not pure. 
 Such was the pleasing doctrine slowly and sol- 
 idly defended, while the real problem of how 
 to prevent the spread of venereal diseases es- 
 pecially how to stop the birth of infected chil-
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 143 
 
 dren, was lost in white clouds of virtue. And 
 many of these women themselves were moth- 
 ers ! When I remonstrated, attempted to show 
 that the one fact to go for was the prevention 
 of infection as in that way only could the spread 
 of the plague be stayed and the innocent saved 
 from suffering with the sinner, I was charged, 
 denounced, and cut to pieces. I am sure that 
 every one of those good women pitied me as a 
 matter of fact, one speaker said frankly that 
 she was very sorry for my son; plainly they 
 were very doubtful of my virtue. Since that 
 day I have noted that very few invitations to 
 attend Women's Conferences have been sent to 
 me. 
 
 This shelving of the real facts, of course, is 
 unconscious on the part of women. The lust 
 of men as the true cause of evil is the one popu- 
 lar and accepted view of the situation, and from 
 this it follows that the prostitute is the man's 
 victim, and as such must be protected. This is 
 highly pleasing; a view depending, as it does, 
 on the moral superiority of women, which 
 stands them as Amazons of purity on the glori- 
 ous mountain heights of virtue, from where 
 they must send down climbing ropes and lad- 
 ders, in the form of moral warnings and care-
 
 144 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 fully edited sexual instruction, possibly made 
 pleasing by cinemas and theater illustrations, 
 to pull men up out of the deep valleys of vice. 
 Yet this view is singularly untrue; for if we 
 inquire into this question of men's lust, it is ob- 
 vious that not they, but women, are the more 
 responsible. How often it is woman who 
 awakens this male lust, fans it to flame, feeds 
 it to keep it at fever heat. Woman indeed 
 must so act, since nature urges behind ; but the 
 prostitute uses this power without rest, she 
 lives, not indeed sacrificed by men's lust, but 
 kept alive by it. Always there is the invita- 
 tion "Come and find me." To be provoca- 
 tive is the one fixed simple rule of her life. 
 Men's lust is a necessity to her very existence. 
 Starving nations do not so eagerly await the 
 coming of the food-laden ships which will keep 
 them alive as the prostitute watches for the 
 rising of the male desire. The dismay when it 
 is reluctant to quicken is as sincere as it is dis- 
 quieting to acknowledge. In the final result 
 the woman may be the victim, but at the start 
 she is the controller of the assault. She directs 
 a continuous attack ; her relation to men is com- 
 parable to that of a magnet to a heap of iron 
 filings.
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 145 
 
 Most men, it is true, are not only tolerant of 
 women's wiles; they like them. But most men 
 succumb, I believe, against their will, and often 
 against their inclination to this tyranny of lust. 
 Men's chivalry as well as their pride has woven 
 a cloak of silence around this question ; this si- 
 lence has protected women even the worst. 
 
 There is such a thing as too much temptation 
 for a man; temptation that a woman has no 
 right to give unless she knows a man loves her 
 and is ready to marry her. It is damnably 
 hard on men. 
 
 The truth in these matters is not often 
 spoken. In spite of the emancipation upon 
 which they pride themselves, in spite even of 
 much precocious experience, almost all women 
 lead a shielded life; vast tracts of experience 
 are usually outside their knowledge or their 
 power of comprehension. This explains, I 
 think, their belief in the old fiction that the se- 
 duction of men by women does not take place, 
 but all men know it goes on unceasingly. Wo- 
 men have been shielded by men to an extent 
 which few of them acknowledge. This is one 
 reason why the best of them find it so difficult 
 now to face the woman's responsibility in these 
 problems of sex frankly and simply.
 
 146 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 At one time this failure in feminine honesty 
 on the part of so many advanced women made 
 me angry as it appeared to me to be a conscious 
 shirking. I know now I was wrong; this at- 
 titude is an unconscious one and this makes it 
 much more dangerous. I fear nothing can 
 change it, at least, for a very long time. As 
 women's spiritual temperature rises, their hon- 
 esty tends to fall, so much sometimes as to 
 freeze their intelligence. 
 
 Women, even the fairest and most advanced, 
 are willing to accept little shame for a deprav- 
 ity which their sex shares equally with the unes- 
 capable and surrendering enemy man. Per- 
 haps the position is unavoidable. I am not cer- 
 tain, and it is very difficult to find the truth. 
 But no man, I think, could satisfy completely 
 in woman the craving for dominion, which the 
 delusive humility of his desire awakens. Then 
 when a woman commits the error from a wo- 
 manly point of view of hunting down her man 
 in haste for gain, instead of drawing and bind- 
 ing him slowly and unconsciously by love, she 
 awakens the same instinct for dominion in the 
 man. It is the lust to devour, to crush, quick- 
 ened into being by suggestion. It explains, 
 perhaps, the cruelty of all wild-love.
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 147 
 
 The position now in relation to the problem 
 we are considering, and keeping in view these 
 facts of the relationship of the woman and the 
 man, should be clearer: the spread of venereal 
 disease must be attacked by restricting the 
 trade of the prostitute. Action must begin 
 there. Acknowledging frankly women's power 
 over men and the magnitude of the temptation 
 they exercise, we must accept the best means to 
 control it. America has proved what can be 
 done. We want strong restrictive laws to pre- 
 vent street soliciting and make possible the de- 
 tention of every infected person. 
 
 Why can't we face the situation now when 
 we are trying to tidy up our social life. 
 Health, that was necessary in war time, is 
 surely equally important in peace? Even the 
 prostitute, the professional and the amateur, 
 will benefit: restrict the opportunities of this 
 easy way of getting money and presents from 
 men and other ways of living and obtaining 
 presents must be resorted to. Thus there will 
 be a finer chance of reformation than ever there 
 was before. To urge moral reforms, to talk 
 sloppy nonsense about liberty, about the poor 
 prostitute, police interference, and all that 
 humbug; to seek cover under "the unequal ac-
 
 148 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 tion of the laws between men and women," or 
 any other form of excuse, is willfully to falsify 
 the position. For myself, I assert without a 
 shadow of hesitation, that I would quite gladly 
 be wrongfully accused of street soliciting, sub- 
 mit to medical examination, be mistakenly de- 
 tained in prison or any other indignity, if by so 
 doing I knew I lessened by ever so little the 
 chance of a syphilitic child being born. 
 
 Is the evil to remain uncorrected from one 
 generation to another? That is the question. 
 Uncorrected evil multiplies itself, and the sum 
 is a huge national disaster. I wish passion- 
 ately that I had greater powers to make you see 
 what to me is so plain. The mistake has been 
 the muddle-headed thinking that sets apart 
 these diseases from all other sicknesses of our 
 bodies, obscuring the plain and comparatively 
 simple question of cure with the entirely op- 
 posed problem of punishment ; a confusion and 
 losing of the way that leads inevitably into a 
 forest-tangle of difficulty and unanswerable 
 questions. And this heritage of wrong-think- 
 ing has compassed our feet, binding them and 
 throwing us down, as soon as we try to move 
 on, always hindering reform from generation 
 to generation, and, until that entanglement
 
 "GIVE, GIVE!" 149 
 
 is broken through, by bringing into it the 
 light of honest thinking, the evil will go on, un- 
 checked by our futile tearings here and there 
 at withered branches. The supporting stem 
 will continue to flourish and the devastating 
 diseases will be spread. 
 
 (See Sir G. Archdall Reid's letter in Appendix.)
 
 Fifth Essay 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 
 
 A PLEA FOR PROTECTION FOR THE ILLEGITIMATELY BORN 
 CHILD. 
 
 "I have called and ye refused; I have stretched out my 
 hand and no man regarded." Pro. i. 24. 
 
 CIRCUMSTANCES, at different times, have made 
 me think and care very deeply about the injus- 
 tice suffered by children born outside the pro- 
 tection of legal marriage ; it was, indeed, when 
 I was still young young in experience and 
 very ignorant of life; long before I began to 
 write, at the time when I was headmistress of 
 a private school for girls, that the question first 
 forced itself into my consciousness. 
 
 It was in this way. I was told suddenly that 
 the parents of two sisters who had entered my 
 school as boarders were living together without 
 being married. I was requested to send the 
 children away. I can recall the scene through 
 the length of the years; the excitement of the 
 
 150
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 151 
 
 parent who was my informer ; the kind of curi- 
 ous enjoyment she displayed in telling me the 
 story, an enjoyment which surprised me so 
 much and angered me at the time, but which, of 
 course, is so easy to account for. I did not un- 
 derstand then those "ever-moving and so to 
 speak immortal wishes of our Unconscious," * 
 residing in us all, ready to break loose and force 
 some expression in our daily lives. 
 
 I am glad to know that young and ignorant 
 as I was my quick instinctive dislike to this 
 moral mud-raking helped and saved me. I 
 would not send the two children away, and 
 refused to take any notice whatever of their 
 illegal birth. 
 
 1 can hear still the sharp, surprised notes of 
 Mrs. X's unpleasant voice as she turned to me 
 and asked: "Now, Miss Gasquoine Hartley, 
 what are you going to do?" How great was 
 her amazement when I answered "Nothing 1" 
 She urged the necessity for action on account 
 of my position and for the welfare of the 
 school; pleaded the possible hurt done to her 
 own children and all the other pupils. "You 
 must be sensible," she insisted, "and send these 
 bastards away. Of course, it is very sad for 
 
 i Freud.
 
 152 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 them, and one would not like to have to do it, 
 but the sins of the parents," etc., etc. . . . You 
 know the kind of beastly hypocritical talk. I 
 need not continue. 
 
 Although I had no vivid realization at that 
 time of the injustice of this view, anger sprang 
 up hot within me. I was rude. I told Mrs. X 
 that she might take her daughters away from 
 my school ; that I was willing for her to tell her 
 beastly story to the parents of all my other 
 pupils ; that then they, if they wished to do so, 
 might remove their daughters, as for me, I 
 would continue my school with two pupils the 
 children she had told me were bastards. 
 
 I rather fancy, so ignorant was I then, that 
 this was the first time I had heard that word 
 "bastard," at any rate I felt the word emotion- 
 ally, in a sharp and different way, when I heard 
 it applied to little children, whom I knew and 
 loved, was caring for and teaching. In this 
 way, the greatest good was done me. I was 
 made to feel. And when, in the later years of 
 my life, I was brought by circumstances to con- 
 sider the fate of the illegitimately born child, I 
 was prepared already to understand the unpro- 
 tected helplessness of these unfortunate little 
 ones. I fully realized the cruel uncertainty
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 153 
 
 that dogs like a foul shadow their young foot- 
 steps, the shame of their unhonored birth, which 
 separates them from other children (and a 
 child suffers so terribly from being separated, 
 dislikes so passionately being different from 
 its companions), shame that may always be 
 brought suddenly as a hindrance against them, 
 so that, even under the most favorable circum- 
 stances, they live in danger; grow up sensitive 
 and passionately possessive, because so many 
 things all other children have by right, relations 
 who really are relations, a father and the right 
 to use his name, a birth-certificate that does not 
 record their parents' sin, are demanded from 
 them in vain, so that at every turn they must 
 fear the sword of contempt, against which they 
 have no shield. 
 
 II 
 
 In many ways the position of the illegiti- 
 mately born child, always sufficiently bad, has 
 been rendered worse under war conditions. 
 For one thing, their number has increased; the 
 illegitimate birth-rate has steadily gone up in 
 the war years and now is the highest on rec- 
 ord. 1 And although it is easily possible to ex- 
 
 i The illegitimate percentage of total births for the first 
 half of 1918 was 6 per cent., in 1914 it was 4.24 per cent.
 
 154 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 aggerate the action of sexual irregularities, 
 manifestly there can be no doubt that this 
 war has acted directly as, indeed, war always 
 does in increasing illegitimate births. Indi- 
 rectly also the effect, after a war of such mag- 
 nitude as this one has been, must be even 
 greater in the immediate future in consequence 
 of the resultant inequality of the sexes. All 
 other factors determinant of illegitimacy are 
 really dependent on the ratio of the number of 
 unmarried males capable of paternity to the 
 number of unmarried women capable of mater- 
 nity in the community at a given time. When- 
 ever the circle of nubile women surrounding the 
 virile male becomes larger, there will be a cor- 
 responding increase in the number of illegiti- 
 mately born children. 1 
 
 A further difficulty, very pressing at the 
 present time, arises from the fact that the sup- 
 ply of reliable foster-mothers has diminished 
 everywhere, especially in London and the large 
 cities. Even where women suitable for this 
 purpose are still attainable, the weekly sum 
 asked for the child's keep is so high that in 
 spite of increased wages and the raising from 
 5/- to 10/- of the maximum amount allowed 
 
 i See article by Havelock Ellis. The New Statesman, May 
 25th, 1918. Also Prinzing, whom Ellis quotes.
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 155 
 
 against the father under an affiliation order, 
 few mothers can afford to pay it and live de- 
 cently themselves. The bitter cry of the 
 driven mother frequently is, "Help me to get 
 rid of my baby." 
 
 We have demanded too much from the un- 
 married mother. As a rule she is very young. 
 She is faced with an almost impossible task, 
 and often she is weak in character, incapable, 
 without guidance of so difficult a duty as the 
 up-bringing of the little creature she has helped 
 so greatly to wrong by its very birth. 
 
 Ill 
 
 For let no one make a mistake. There is a 
 sin of illegitimacy, which, indeed, I would em- 
 phasize as strongly as I am able. Irresponsi- 
 ble parenthood must always be immoral, and 
 the mother's sin is greater than is that of the 
 father. I must insist upon this, though I 
 realize how unpopular such a view will be to 
 many women. But the mother, through her 
 closer connection with the child, must bear the 
 deeper responsibility for its birth, a responsi- 
 bility that can be traced back and back to the 
 very lowest forms of life. The insect mother
 
 156 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 does not fail to place her offspring the chil- 
 dren she will never see in a position chosen 
 most carefully to ensure their future protec- 
 tion, and to achieve this good frequently she 
 sacrifices her life. Shall the human mother, 
 then, be held guiltless when she shows no fore- 
 thought for the future of her child? 
 
 IV 
 
 The English law has always looked with 
 great disfavor on the illegitimately born child. 
 A bastard is filius nullius, "nobody's child." 
 He cannot be legitimized even on the sub- 
 sequent marriage of his parents. In Scot- 
 land this injustice is not found. There (as 
 also in every other civilized land except our 
 own) the child becomes legitimized by the sim- 
 ple natural process of the father marrying the 
 mother. Can the cruelty of our English law 
 have any positive value? It is difficult to think 
 so. At common law the illegitimate can have 
 no guardian, he has no relations and no rights 
 of inheritance ; he is given unprotected into the 
 custody of his mother, and until the age of four- 
 teen is wholly in her power. 
 
 Here we have a clear duty, and another case
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 157 
 
 of the urgent need of a readjustment of our 
 moral attitude, of a change in our laws and in 
 our judgments strictly parallel to several we 
 have considered. Once more I am convinced 
 of the poverty, and selfishness, and the immor- 
 ality of our views. Nor do I find great im- 
 provement to-day over yesterday. There is 
 much talk and some tinkering, but though our 
 judgments are less harsh, still we are choked 
 with the weeds of false sentiment and feminine 
 egoism. We fail to attack straight and think 
 boldly. 
 
 The sin of illegal parenthood is really a col- 
 lective concern: to turn our backs on the pit- 
 iable plight of these children, to refuse to fulfill 
 our duties toward them, is to leave them en- 
 tirely to those who are often least fitted to help 
 them, and also to open up direct ways to every 
 kind of wickedness. And it follows, almost 
 necessarily, if we accept this view of our collec- 
 tive responsibility, that the greatest danger in 
 the present position arises out of our selfish 
 plan of leaving these children unprotected in 
 the hands of their mothers, giving them no 
 other legal relations, making no fixed provision 
 for their guardianship, allowing each mother to 
 do as she likes; to establish paternity or leave
 
 158 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 the child unfathered, to keep the child with her 
 or give it into the care of strangers, to make 
 any kind of arrangements, good, bad, or none 
 at all, for its education and upbringing. And 
 what makes it the more intolerable is the indif- 
 ference of almost all of us to what is done, or is 
 not done, by the mother. The subject is diffi- 
 cult and unpleasant : illegitimacy is wicked and, 
 therefore, must not be talked about. If any 
 case comes to our notice, we hush it up. We 
 are too selfish and lazy to attack the deep causes 
 of the evil to remove temptation; instead, we 
 directly encourage evil; we place the illegiti- 
 mately born child in a position of such disad- 
 vantage that its future existence is jeop- 
 ardized. 
 
 V 
 
 You will probably say that I am focusing 
 all attention on the illegitimate mother, and am 
 not considering the responsibility of the illegiti- 
 mate father. I grant this, and I am doing it 
 with fixed intention. I want to consider the 
 problem of illegitimacy from this definite, 1 and 
 
 i In an article which appeared in Maternity and Child 
 Welfare, in 1918, I first brought this question forward: the 
 article was in answer to a discussion which had previously 
 taken place in that useful and excellent little journal on the 
 Unmarried Mother and her Child. I shall use some portion
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 159 
 
 as I am aware, restricted point of view, care- 
 fully and very thoroughly to look at it from 
 this one side only, in order to show others, if I 
 can, what I have found to be true: the urgent 
 need there is to take the illegitimately born 
 child from its mother's authority. I would 
 refer my readers to my other books and writ- 
 ings, where again and again I set forth, as 
 urgently as I know how, the drastic changes I 
 would advocate in our bastardy and affiliation 
 laws, in order to bind the illegitimate father to 
 his duty and thus prevent profligacy being as 
 easy as to-day it is. I do not want to go over 
 this ground again. But mark this : the stigma 
 attaching to the fatherhood of all illegitimate 
 children is, at present, the strongest direct cause 
 of neglect of his duties by the man; his failure 
 to stand by the mother and pay for the support 
 of the child. He may be willing to do his duty 
 in both these ways, but not if it involves the 
 abandonment of his entire career. With pub- 
 lic opinion so determined, immoral, irresponsi- 
 ble conduct is almost inevitable. But this 
 opens up, of course, a whole series of different 
 questions, which, for the reasons I have just 
 set forth, I do not try to answer, rather pur- 
 
 of what I then said in this essay, because I think my argu- 
 ments would b weakened if I tried k> re-write them.
 
 160 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 posely neglecting the second illegitimate par- 
 ent, the father, so as better to focus attention 
 on the evils arising from the existing unpro- 
 tected relations between the mother and the 
 child. 
 
 And I would urge further, with all the 
 power that I have, the need for considering 
 this aspect of the problem, for it is one that is 
 very much neglected. I know it is very un- 
 popular with the majority of those who care 
 most earnestly about the unmarried mother. 
 
 It is to be wished that this question also could 
 be approached free from all falseness of mod- 
 ern feminist sentimentality. The great hin- 
 drance to straight thinking is the same here as 
 in so many other of the moral problems we have 
 been considering: that desire for personal pos- 
 sessions, which so often is a treachery against 
 the universal good. I care for nothing really 
 except the saving of the child, and I cannot re- 
 gard the child as the possession of the mother. 
 So many women seem to take for themselves 
 the right to claim power over a child by virtue 
 of the suffering through which they passed to 
 bring it into the world; although surely this 
 should be denied when conception takes place 
 carelessly and without any kind of forethought
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 161 
 
 for the birth that may follow. I will not, how- 
 ever, wait to say more, my position will, I hope, 
 become plainer as I proceed. It is an assertion 
 of the child's right to special protection and 
 care in order that it may be saved from the 
 cruel injustice of having to pay the penalty of 
 its mother's carelessness and lack of maternal 
 responsibility. 1 
 
 VI 
 
 Since the law of 1834 a woman has been le- 
 gally liable to maintain her natural child until 
 it reaches the age of sixteen. She is allowed 
 to establish paternity, and, if she can do this, 
 to obtain a maintenance order against the 
 father, the maximum amount now allowed 
 being 10/- a week, which sum is to be paid until 
 the child reaches the age of sixteen. ISut the 
 mother is not compelled to take this course, in- 
 deed, she is hindered from doing so in every 
 possible way, both by the many absurd difficul- 
 ties of the law and the expense of the summons. 
 And this is the cause of clear injustice to the 
 child, whose right to a father and to support 
 from him ought not to be dependent on the 
 caprice of the mother, whose desire is often to 
 
 i T do not include the father here, because under the English 
 law the mother is the only parent.
 
 162 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 protect the man rather than to do justice to the 
 child. For this reason the establishment of 
 paternity should be compulsory on the mother 
 or her relations as it now is in Norway. Every 
 child has a right to a father as well as to a 
 mother. 
 
 The ante-natal conditions of these babies are 
 obviously of the very worst. All those months 
 when a woman most requires special rest, spe- 
 cial quiet, and, in particular, special mental re- 
 pose, will be spent in anxiety and fear. In too 
 many cases the girl has to keep herself, and it 
 is mighty difficult to get a job without a char- 
 acter. And, here, let me point out to those 
 who believe vaguely that a "love-child" is a 
 finer type than other children, that this is true 
 only in so far as the atmosphere in which the 
 mother spends her pregnancy is one of love 
 and undisturbed calm. Do let us face the facts 
 of the situation. 
 
 Often the baby is born wherever the driven 
 mother can find shelter, the baby's interests in 
 the matter being certainly of no account then 
 or later. In the eyes of the law the child is 
 without rights and belongs to no one. In the 
 eyes of our Christian society he is a "branded 
 outcast," in the eyes of his mother too often he
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 163 
 
 is but a mark of her shame: conditions of injus- 
 tice to the child that must too often result in the 
 growing up of a poor type of child. 
 
 It has been found that illegitimates at birth 
 are quite as hardy as legitimate children; they 
 would even seem to be born stronger, since they 
 die, unlike the legitimate, more frequently in 
 the second month than the first ; and more fre- 
 quently in the third than in the second month. 
 The deferred and insufficient regulation of the 
 child's diet, the frequent failure on the part of 
 the father to provide the means of support, the 
 not uncommon indifference on the part of the 
 mother towards her child's welfare, and the ne- 
 cessity of placing the child in cheap care, are 
 the chief causes of the high mortality rates 
 among illegitimate children. 
 
 Even in the few fortunate cases where the 
 maximum alimony is claimed and granted to 
 the mother, there is no certainty that the 
 weekly payments will be continued and regu- 
 larly paid throughout the child's growing years, 
 and though there is improvement in this direc- 
 tion since the Affiliation Orders Act, 1914, and 
 the appointment of a Collecting Officer, there 
 is still far too easy opportunity for the escape 
 of a shirking father. The law takes no cog-
 
 164 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 nizance of the fact that in the majority of cases 
 it is an absolute impossibility for the mothers, 
 even with the best will in the world, unassisted, 
 to place their children in proper conditions for 
 their up-bringing. At present, with no au- 
 thorized person to supervise the mother and 
 check her absolute control, to see how she 
 spends the alimony, where she places the child, 
 what education it has, what prospects of grow- 
 ing into an effective adult; too often the child 
 never reaches maturity and its case is often 
 worse if it does survive ; its home changed from 
 one place to another, sometimes with the 
 mother, sometimes boarded out with irresponsi- 
 ble people, or adopted with a premium, it is 
 liable to gross neglect and the most far-reach- 
 ing and incurable perversions of character. 
 
 We have reached this truth then. The ur- 
 gent duty that rests with the law and with us 
 all is the duty of taking action to prevent as far 
 as it is possible, and in every way that we can, 
 the penalty of its illegitimate birth being paid 
 by the child. 
 
 VII 
 
 Now, this is not going to be done as easily as 
 it may seem; and before it can be done, in my
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 165 
 
 opinion, we shall have to clear our minds from 
 a serious error, to which we cling with feminist 
 tentacles in order to indulge the sentiment so 
 passionately clung to by women-reformers of 
 the mother's right to her child. 
 
 You will have noted how strongly I have in- 
 sisted on illegitimacy being the sin of the par- 
 ents of the mother even more than of the 
 father >and have refused to use the word in 
 connection with the child. I have done this, as 
 must already be plain, for a clear reason. I 
 wished to mark the separation of the child from 
 its parents' sin. I did not do it from a per- 
 verse refusal to accept what is usually ac- 
 cepted. Clearly it is absurd to brand the child 
 "illegitimate," since it can never be the fault of 
 any child that its parents brought it into the 
 world. Let us talk, if you like, of illegitimate 
 mothers, also of illegitimate fathers, but never 
 again of the illegitimate child. The penalty of 
 the parents' sin must not be paid by the child. 
 I cannot emphasize this too often or too 
 strongly. 
 
 The child must be saved by special protec- 
 tion. 
 
 Now, it seems to be taken for granted by all 
 modem reformers that the best way to do this
 
 166 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 and to serve the interests of the child is to make 
 even closer than it is at present the connection 
 of the mother and the child, keeping them more 
 certainly together, except in the few cases when 
 such a course is clearly absolutely impossible, 
 and under all circumstances regarding the sep- 
 aration of any mother from her baby as "an 
 exceptional and deplorable necessity." 1 
 
 What I have said already will make it 
 abundantly evident that I cannot accept this 
 view. I feel convinced that it is founded on 
 a feeling of sentiment for the mother rather 
 than on a desire for justice to the child. This 
 tendency to confuse two separate issues has 
 been marked in all the numerous recent discus- 
 sions of the unmarried mother. I have heard 
 the strongest indignation expressed by femin- 
 ist speakers whose sentiment bubbles from 
 them like a pan of porridge boiling over. 
 "The child should be brought up in the atmos- 
 phere of the mother's love" ; "Mother and child 
 should not be separated," this is the opinion 
 repeated again and again, and always without 
 qualification as to the character of the mother. 
 Even those few workers who realize the situa- 
 tion much more as it presents itself to me, from 
 
 i See Pamphlet issued by the National Council for the Un- 
 married Mother and her Child, page 3.
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 167 
 
 the standpoint of the child's welfare, and there- 
 fore advocate the placing of all illegitimately 
 born children under "authorized protective 
 oversight," yet cling to the sentiment that it is 
 "best for the child to remain with its mother." 
 They apprehend the difficulty of the mother's 
 character or rather want of character but 
 they do not take the necessary bold step out of 
 this net of sentiment, and face the truth that, 
 in many cases, the first and great enemy from 
 whom those ill-used little ones have to be pro- 
 tected is their mother. 
 
 Unmarried mothers are overwhelmingly 
 preponderant among the frivolous and weak- 
 willed. This will be an unpopular statement 
 to feminist sentiment: few women are honest in 
 facing this question, though probably they do 
 not know that they are dishonest. We women 
 need to be more careful in accepting the over- 
 hasty view that these illegitimate mothers in 
 any large numbers are good girls who have been 
 led astray by men. This view, once held by me 
 in common with most women, I have been com- 
 pelled to give up. Seduction cannot, I am 
 sure, be accepted without very great caution as 
 a common cause for illegitimate births. My 
 experience has taught me that nervous insta-
 
 bility, the result often of monotonous or too ex- 
 hausting work, leading quickly to a desire for 
 excitement and effort to escape dullness, as 
 also love of finery and joy in receiving pres- 
 ents, are the principal motives that lead girls 
 into illegal relations. And what I want to 
 make plain is this: a characterless girl, irre- 
 sponsible, without care for the future, drifting, 
 snatching at pleasure, taking the easiest course 
 this is the girl who bears a child illegitimately 
 and this is the girl incapable of becoming a 
 good mother. 
 
 This characterless irresponsibility of the av- 
 erage unmarried mother is known to every 
 social worker. The difficulty is dwelt upon in 
 the reports of rescue homes and police-workers. 
 I have read many separate articles which refer 
 to it. "Temperamental instability," as it is 
 fittingly called, inevitably makes capable moth- 
 erhood impossible. True, these unmarried 
 mothers may, and frequently do, "pour out a 
 wealth of pent-up affection on the child," but 
 often she will do this for half-an-hour and neg- 
 lect it for days afterwards. Those who talk 
 here of the "mother's right to her child" are 
 being misled by sentiment. Women of the 
 prostitute type, whose love and tears are on the
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 169 
 
 surface, must not be j udged too tenderly as ca- 
 pable of great improvement. The child may 
 "steady the mother for a time," 1 but the moth- 
 er will probably by her carelessness, bad exam- 
 ple, helplessness and inefficiency unsteady the 
 child for life. 
 
 And it is this that matters. Yes, matters to 
 you, my readers, and to me and to us all. The 
 child illegitimately born is to become a future 
 citizen ; and it is not good for society to permit 
 its mother to endanger its future. We the 
 other members of Society must object to such 
 a possibility, we cannot allow it to be tolerated 
 on any grounds of sentiment. We object 
 from humane care for the child, but also from 
 patriotism and enlightened self-interest; for 
 the consequences of the mother's unguided 
 mistakes in training must fall on someone, and 
 in this country they fall chiefly on the rate- 
 payers. 
 
 I shall not wait to give you the many and 
 overwhelming facts and figures that I could 
 bring forward in support of these statements. 
 To-day all the pitiful statistics of illegitimate 
 births are widely known; at least they are 
 
 i These and similar statements are brought forward as 
 reason for keeping mother and child together. I need 
 scarcely say they leave me unmoved.
 
 known intellectually, though I doubt their 
 being known emotionally, which is quite an- 
 other matter and whips our indifference into 
 action. Only the workers in the darkest places 
 of our great cities know how large illegitimacy 
 looms as a* factor in the social disintegration 
 that leads to the prison, to the mad-house, to 
 the hospitals, to the casual wards, and to the 
 streets. Only the eye of the scientist can vi- 
 sion in the relation of the unhonored child to its 
 mother the seed of that evil which one day shall 
 become the dishonor of the dishonorable man. 1 
 
 VIII 
 
 I can foresee an objection that will be made: 
 it will be urged that much of what I say of the 
 unfitness of the average unmarried mother to 
 train her child is equally applicable to the aver- 
 age married mother. True: I agree. There 
 is, however, this all important difference. The 
 child of the married woman is not placed, either 
 by circumstances or by the law, in the power of 
 its mother. It has a second parent : even if the 
 father is dead and its mother is the only parent, 
 the home is watched by grandmother, by grand- 
 
 i See an excellent article on " The Love Child in Germany 
 and Austria," English Review, June, 1912.
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 171 
 
 father perhaps by four grandparents, by 
 sharp-eyed aunts and encouraging uncles; 
 probably there are brothers and sisters, cousins, 
 great-aunts and great-cousins. There will also 
 be a more or less extensive circle of criticizing 
 friends. Thus the baby is surrounded from its 
 birth by watchers a veritable host of unpaid 
 inspectors. Now, you see my point and un- 
 derstand the immense difference. It is the ter- 
 rible loneliness of the child born illegitimately, 
 outside the safe publicity of marriage, without 
 relations, belonging by right to nobody, that 
 makes the power given by law to its mother so 
 dangerous. 
 
 That is why I would plead, with every power 
 that I have, that we leave sentiment behind us 
 as we approach this question. We are a hope- 
 lessly sentimental nation, and we cling to plati- 
 tudes as a half naked beggar will cling to his 
 tattered shirt. We collect moral antiquities. 
 Inherited and worn-out ideas, psychological 
 fossils, moral survivals, these must be treasured 
 only in romance; they must be deleted from 
 life. Every moral rule, every sentiment, as 
 also every institution, must be tested, from per- 
 iod to period, to see if it works still in a practi- 
 cal and healthful direction to help the individ-
 
 172 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 ual to do right and for the betterment of the 
 race. 
 
 IX 
 
 We English are sentimental. 
 
 Perhaps it is worth while to wait a moment 
 to ask the cause of this deeply-acting English 
 sentimentality. It rests on two qualities, our 
 moderation and our exclusiveness. But the 
 precise causes of these qualities are not so cer- 
 tain ; the English are romantic, but our moder- 
 ation prevents us being too impulsively roman- 
 tic; on the other hand, our homely feeling for 
 reality does not lead us to investigate reality 
 too deeply. We dislike the sordid and the 
 "not nice." We are imaginative and passion- 
 ate, but our imaginations and passions are care- 
 fully balanced by reasons and calm reflections. 
 We are kindly, but not to the extent of saint- 
 like self -sacrifice ; also we are selfish, but again 
 not to the extent of brutal egoism. Our exclu- 
 siveness makes "Birds of a feather flock to- 
 gether" and at the same time fosters our ignor- 
 ance of, and indifference to, the existence of 
 any other species of bird. Thus the good know 
 nothing of the bad ; the people who drink, play 
 bridge, dance and have a fashionably good time,
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 173 
 
 for instance, have hardly heard of the meeting- 
 frequenting, soul-worrying reformers who live 
 in Garden Suburbs. Thus in England there is 
 very little to disturb a comfortable feeling ; pro- 
 tected by our moderation and exclusiveness, 
 there is no force inside from ourselves, or out- 
 side from observers, to make us revise our posi- 
 tion, consider the right or the wrong of our 
 moral attitude, to give up our illusions of com- 
 fort. That is one reason why we so often 
 stand aside from the ugly reality of things as 
 they are, "hold high the banner of the ideal," 
 which is the untruthful way in which we allude 
 to things as we want them to be. 
 
 X 
 
 Now, all this leads up very directly to the 
 special aspect of the problem we are consider- 
 ing. We have to realize just what are the re- 
 sults likelv to follow from the close relation- 
 
 m 
 
 ship of mother and child in the case of the ille- 
 gitimately born. Personally, I am certain 
 that in most cases the situation is one of quite 
 appalling dangers. 
 
 I cannot feel sure that even the most helpful 
 supervision of the mother, if she and her child
 
 174 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 enter a hostel, or other institution, can, in the 
 majority of cases, save some hurt, if her char- 
 acter is unsteady, being given by her to the 
 child. We are only just now coming at all to 
 understand how immensely fateful to the whole 
 later development are the first few years of in- 
 fant life, and further, how everything is col- 
 ored it would be truer to say "decided" by 
 the character and actions of the mother; how 
 any hurt done, or mistake made then, can never 
 be undone. Even an unwise expression of too 
 fond and emotional affection may act to cause 
 ruin in the after years. All who have even a 
 slight acquaintance with the enlightening work 
 of Freud, will know the folly of "trying to save 
 the illegitimate mother through the agency of 
 the child." 
 
 Let me state the case quite plainly: There 
 are different types among these unmarried 
 mothers, just as there are among married moth- 
 ers, some would be wise mothers did we give 
 them the necessary help and opportunity, but 
 many would not be wise mothers under any cir- 
 cumstances or with any amount of help, be- 
 cause they are weak in character and are inca- 
 pable of child-training. Now, the problem of 
 saving the child is quite a different one in these
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 175 
 
 opposite cases: in the one instance everything 
 ought to be done to keep the child with its 
 mother, in the other the one safeguard is to keep 
 the child wholly out of the mother's power. 
 
 I state sadly, but without hesitation, and 
 from my own experience, that in innumerable 
 cases the salvation of the child depends more 
 than anything else on its complete separation 
 from the mother. I cannot countenance senti- 
 ment that blinds our intelligence. How can it 
 be wise to recommend in cases where the char- 
 acter of the mother "seems to warrant a sepa- 
 ration," that "periodic visiting by the mother 
 needs to be fostered." Again, what must hap- 
 pen if the baby is in the care of the trained 
 nurse by day, but at night is given up to the un- 
 trained and often untrainable mother, who goes 
 out to work but returns to the hostel to sleep?" 2 
 
 You will tell me the mother wants to have 
 the child. That is right and good from one 
 point of view that of the mother; but from the 
 other the point of view of the child it cannot 
 work out well. The child switches hither and 
 thither between various treatments and quite 
 
 1 Article on "The Illegitimate Child," Maternity and Child 
 Welfare, September, 1917. One of the articles 1 was asked 
 to answer. 
 
 2 This is the plan advocated by the National Council for 
 Unmarried Mothers.
 
 176 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 opposite influences. And with the child's ter- 
 rible candor it shows the hurt it is suffering and 
 says always, in effect, though not in words, "I 
 wish you would all agree as to how you want me 
 to grow up." 
 
 I may state the question in this way: Do 
 we want the child to grow up like its mother or 
 do we want to save it from being like her? 
 
 To answer this simple question will help us 
 more than at first we may see. Frankly, our 
 confusion here in fixing what we want is the 
 cause which, in my opinion, more than anything 
 else must bring failure to what is being done, 
 and being proposed to be done, to help the ille- 
 gitimately born child. Our sentiment causes 
 us to confuse what is good for the mother with 
 what is good for the child, and, because of this, 
 we are failing to grapple with the most warring 
 element in the whole difficult problem of saving 
 the child; we shall have to face and deal suc- 
 cessfully with this certain fact of the very com- 
 mon unfitness of the unmarried mother, before 
 we can do the one simple and right thing and 
 prevent the child from having to pay the pen- 
 alty of its parents' illegitimate act. We are 
 brought back always to this: the saving of the 
 child as the one plain duty before us.
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 177 
 
 XI 
 
 In a previous section I dealt with the harm- 
 ful way in which circumstances and the law, 
 acting together, place the child born out of 
 wedlock wholly and terribly in the mother's 
 power. But there is a further aspect of the sit- 
 uation now to be considered. I wish to show 
 how destructively that power may act, stimu- 
 latexl in some cases by an unwise affection as 
 well as in others where no mother-love seems 
 present, and act for years to hurt and even de- 
 stroy the child. To establish this and make the 
 facts plainer, I will now tell in detail a few 
 cases of illegitimate motherhood from my own 
 knowledge. You will see then exactly what I 
 mean and how dangerous to the child is the 
 power held by these unwatched mothers; the 
 facts of the case will, I hope, speak to you 
 more emotionally, and therefore more forcibly, 
 than any further statement of my own opinion. 
 
 Case 1. A baby girl was born to a young 
 mother of unstable though not altogether bad 
 character. The father teas a gentleman : he did 
 not seduce the girl. lie paid the expenses of 
 the confinement and afterwards, and with the 
 mother's consent, placed the little one with
 
 178 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 good country people, paying for her support. 
 For more than a year and a half the baby lived 
 with its foster mother and grew up a very 
 healthy and joyous little girl. The real mother 
 visited the child and showed most emotional 
 love for her. One day, without reason and 
 without warning, she took the child away. The 
 foster-mother appealed to the father; he did all 
 in his power to have the child returned, and 
 finally, when the mother refused, said he would 
 make no further contribution for the support 
 of the child. He knew the mother was unfit to 
 bring up the child, but he could do nothing to 
 prevent her action. The mother took the child 
 to another town. What she did with the little 
 one is not fully known, but when, after nine 
 months, the foster-mother traced her, she was 
 in a most pitiable condition of dirt and neglect, 
 and, what was much worse, she was terribly 
 frightened. Quite plainly she had been beaten 
 and ill-used. The mother was not poor, so that 
 cannot be made an excuse. 
 
 The foster-mother offered now to adopt the 
 child and bring it up as her own. Her offer 
 was accepted by the mother, but with the pro- 
 vision, which unfortunately was granted, that 
 she should still come to see the child. Her
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 179 
 
 visits always affected the child unfavorably. 
 
 During the next three years the little girl 
 found renewed health and peace in her happy 
 adopted home. Then her enemy her mother 
 again took her away. For a year she kept 
 this delicate, nervous and well-brought-up child 
 with her in London under very adverse circum- 
 stances. Then she went off, leaving her daugh- 
 ter,, now five years old, with no proper person 
 to care for her and quite without means of sup- 
 port. 
 
 Case 2. A girl of loose character, but not a 
 regular prostitute, found herself pregnant. 
 She did not know certainly who among her 
 lovers was the father, but she decided on one 
 man, who she knew was not the father. He 
 was rich and kind, or rather as she told me "he 
 was a softy." Accordingly she told him the 
 baby was his. He arranged for the confine- 
 ment, afterwards he took the baby and the 
 mother to live in the home of his mother. They 
 were kindly treated in every way, and the baby 
 flourished. But the mother was bored by 
 goodness: one day she went off: she did not 
 take the baby. Unfortunately she left a let- 
 ter not I fear from conscience, but from mis- 
 chief and a desire to insult goodness telling
 
 180 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 the man she had tricked him and he was not the 
 father of the child. The man was angry, dis- 
 liking the knowledge of his having been duped; 
 his mother was still more angry. Once more 
 the child was the sufferer. It was sent away 
 from the happy and rich home to an institution. 
 
 Case 3. A working-class girl, belonging to 
 a respectable country family, gave birth to a 
 baby girl. The father was a soldier, but the 
 girl did not know his name or where he was. 
 During her confinement and afterward she re- 
 mained at home with her mother and brother. 
 The baby was ailing and became ill. The 
 brother told his sister, the mother, that she must 
 take it to the Infirmary in the neighboring 
 town. She objected on the ground that she 
 would have to go in with the baby. However, 
 the brother insisted and arranged to meet her 
 and the baby at the Infirmary gates the follow- 
 ing evening. His sister was there, but not the 
 baby. She told him that a friend was going 
 to take care of the baby for her. The baby was 
 never heard of again. 
 
 Case 4- This time the mother was highly 
 born and educated, but she belonged naturally 
 to the promiscuous type of lover: she ought to
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 181 
 
 have been a prostitute. She had many lovers 
 and was strongly sexual, not passionate so 
 much as voluptuous. By one of her lovers, 
 and by mistake, a child was conceived, and 
 though attempts were made to get rid of the 
 mistake, a boy was born, fairly healthy. The 
 father, a modern tired profligate, refused to ac- 
 cept the responsibilities of his fatherhood, 
 though he did not deny the child was his, and 
 continued as one of the lovers of its mother. 
 The mother showed no sign of maternal love; 
 the little one was much neglected and probably 
 would have died, but, when about two months 
 old, he was taken from the mother and cared 
 for and most tenderly loved by one of the wo- 
 man's other lovers. He left her as her indif- 
 ference to her child killed his affection, but he 
 took her child to bring up as his own son. 
 
 Case f). A record of this very revolting case 
 appeared recently in the daily papers under the 
 heading "8000 Rabifs End. 3 ' I copy the 
 story as it was told in the "Daily Mail": the 
 date I do not remember. 
 
 "The love affair of a middle-aged painter, 
 Charles Godin, with his model Georgette Belli, 
 aged 16, has led to a remarkable charge
 
 182 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 of murder. Georgette became a mother, and 
 when the painter died a few months later he left 
 the child 8000. 
 
 "The girl married a young man named 
 Emile Gourdon, and the baby was placed in the 
 care of a grandmother. Later, when the 
 young mother wished to get back her child, the 
 grandmother refused to. give it up on the 
 ground that the young couple meant to destroy 
 it in order to inherit the money, and produced 
 letters and telegrams in support of her suspi- 
 cion. Georgette, however, got an order from 
 a court for the surrender of the baby, and went 
 to live at Marseilles with her husband. 
 
 "One day, while walking on the jetty, the 
 woman appeared to stumble and the child fell 
 into the sea and was drowned. The couple 
 have been arrested, the woman, it is alleged, 
 having pretended to faint in order to make 
 away with her child." 
 
 Now, I know that these five cases I have re- 
 counted are not exceptional, though some of 
 their sordid details may be specially disagree- 
 able. Give but a moment's attention to the 
 facts that stand out, and at once you will grasp 
 what is wrong. We are demanding too much 
 from these unmarried mothers, and, by leaving
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 183 
 
 the full power of parenthood in their weak 
 hands, are jeopardizing the child's safety; we 
 are also encouraging conditions harmful to so- 
 ciety. It is like leaving a loaded gun in the 
 hands of a little child. These cases speak for 
 themselves. In No. 3 and No. 5 the child was 
 killed by the direct act of the mother; in the 
 former case there was some excuse from the 
 harsh rule that the sick baby of an unmarried 
 mother cannot be received into a hospital unless 
 the mother goes in with it (the reason of this, 
 of course, being that the mother will use this 
 means of ridding herself of the baby) and will 
 never come to reclaim it; but in the horrible 
 case of No. 5 there is no ray of excuse. This 
 case is especially interesting because it makes 
 so abundantly plain the terrible need there is 
 for the immediate establishment of safe legal 
 adoption. In cases No. 2 and No. 4 we have 
 the curious situation, by no means so uncom- 
 mon as many might think, of the wrong man 
 acting the part of father to an illegitimately 
 born child; in the one case this was done 
 through the trickery of the mother and was but 
 temporary, the child suffering, while in the 
 other case, more interesting and less common, 
 vicarious fatherhood was voluntarily adopted.
 
 184 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 I would ask you to note that in none of the five 
 cases was bad motherhood caused by poverty 
 and homelessness. So frequently it is said: 
 "Give these mothers a chance, and their mother- 
 love will blossom like the rose" or some simi- 
 lar and unproved tosh. It is not true. The 
 good mother may be a bad mother by adverse 
 circumstances, this I acknowledge readily, but 
 that the most favorable circumstances can make 
 the bad mother into a good mother, I emphat- 
 ically deny. This is why it is so unsafe and so 
 wrong of society to leave the child unprotected 
 and unwatched, for the mother to do with it 
 what she likes. 
 
 The first case, because it shows so clearly the 
 adverse action of the mother's influence is, in 
 my opinion, most instructive among the five 
 cases I have given. Such changeableness on 
 the mother's part, and interference with the 
 child is just what is likely, and most often does 
 take place, and will go on taking place, until 
 the law protects these children by effective 
 guardianship. I would specially point out 
 that this mother was not in the least indif- 
 ferent to her baby. If you had talked to 
 her, probably your sentiment would have 
 burned and glowed about the hardness of her
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 185 
 
 case in being separated from her baby, and you 
 would have said wonderful platitudes about the 
 beauty of a mother's love. And yet the shame- 
 ful hurt she did to her child can never be un- 
 done. Her undisciplined love was the cause of 
 the child's undoing. 
 
 I have now, I hope, made it sufficiently plain 
 why the illegitimately born child should no 
 longer be considered as belonging to the 
 mother, but should be recognized as a member 
 of society, and, as such, entitled to protection, 
 so that it may suffer as little, and not as much, 
 as is possible from the disadvantages of its ille- 
 gal birth. This is plain justice. Yet before 
 it can be done we shall need an immediate and 
 great reform of our bad and antiquated bas- 
 tardy and affiliation laws. We shall need also 
 a change of heart. 
 
 XII 
 
 I shall be asked what changes I would sug- 
 gest. The answer is not easy : it is not so much 
 a question of altering this regulation or that, of 
 removing hindrances and giving increased help; 
 that is good, but more is needed: we want a 
 change of the entire system: the firm under-
 
 186 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 standing that the clear aim before us is to place 
 the child, as nearly as this can be done, in the 
 same position of advantage as it would have 
 had if it had not been illegally born. If there 
 must be punishments, let them fall on the par- 
 ents, never on the child. 
 
 Now, how can this best be done? In the 
 space I can devote here, it is possible only to 
 throw out a few suggestions. 
 
 First, 'and I think exceedingly important, 
 the law should take account of the attitude of 
 the father. In all cases where the paternity of 
 the child is acknowledged openly by the man 
 and with the mother, and guarantees are given 
 that the duties of both parents will be faith- 
 fully fulfilled, the child should be legitimized, 
 receive the name of the father, be qualified to 
 inherit from him, and in every way given the 
 same rights as the legitimate child, even if the 
 parents are unable or do not wish to marry. 
 This opportunity of right conduct once given 
 to men by the law, I believe that many, who are 
 fathers illegitimately, would voluntarily take 
 this course and gladly acknowledge and fulfill 
 the responsibilities of their fatherhood. 
 
 In all other cases, in which paternity is not 
 voluntarily acknowledged, I take the most im-
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 187 
 
 portant duty of the law to be the official ap- 
 pointment of guardians. I believe nothing 
 else is so urgently needed to protect these fath- 
 erless little ones. Such guardianship 1 could 
 be provided without great difficulty or expense 
 if each illegitimately born child, not openly ac- 
 knowledged and willingly provided for by its 
 father, was made a ward of the Court of Sum- 
 mary Jurisdiction in the district in which it 
 lived and thus placed under authoritative su- 
 pervision. The child would, by the authority 
 of the Court, be boarded out (1) with the 
 mother in all cases where her health, character 
 and previous records were such as to make this 
 arrangement the best for the child, (2} in hos- 
 tels, cither with the mother or without her, (3) 
 with paid foster-parents, (4) with adopted 
 parents. In every case regular visitation of 
 the child would be necessary, and the child 
 must not be removed from one home to another 
 or any change made with regard to it without 
 the authority of the Court, which shall have 
 power (1} to appoint guardians, either in addi- 
 tion to, or substitution for the mother of the 
 child; (?) to approve any scheme for the edu- 
 
 i Some years ago the city of Leipsic started an admirable 
 scheme by which illegitimately born children automatically 
 became the wards of officially appointed guardians.
 
 188 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 cation or training of the child, and at all times 
 and in all ways to exercise authority in every 
 matter pertaining to the child's welfare. 1 
 
 I would wish for a further restriction, which, 
 however hardly it may seem to bear on the 
 mother, is, in my opinion, most necessary for 
 safeguarding the child. It is this: // the 
 child by the decision of the Court is boarded out 
 with foster parents, permanently adopted or 
 placed in a home apart from the mother, no in- 
 terference or even visiting by the mother shall 
 be permitted except at the discretion of the 
 Court. 
 
 I would suggest that in every town or rural 
 district guardians should be appointed (prefer- 
 ably a man and a woman) either paid or volun- 
 tary, but officially appointed : all that is needed 
 is an extension of the duties of the Collecting 
 Officer, appointed under the Affiliation Orders 
 Act of 1914. This officer already takes out of 
 the mother's hands the work of collecting the 
 weekly payments granted under a maintenance 
 order, and he also has certain powers of enforc- 
 ing payments from a defaulting father. But 
 
 i An excellent scheme has been drawn up and issued as a 
 pamphlet by " The National Society for the Prevention of 
 Cruelty to Children" Occasional Papers V. Illegitimate 
 Children,
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 189 
 
 at present his taking action is dependent on the 
 desire of the mother. His duties ought in all 
 cases to be compulsory. They would be (1) 
 to help the mother before and after the birth of 
 the child; (2) to seek out the father and urge a 
 voluntary acknowledgment of his paternity, 
 and, when this cannot be gained, to see that the 
 law is rightly administered so that full alimony 
 may be obtained; (3) to watch over the inter- 
 ests of the child and see that the decisions of the 
 Court are carried out without interference from 
 the mother. 
 
 The kind of help given would have to be 
 varied and must be made suitable to each indi- 
 vidual case, but every child would be a ward of 
 the guardians in the district in which it lived, 
 and would be regularly visited. I would sug- 
 gest further that there should be placed over 
 these visiting-guardians a Government-ap- 
 pointed, permanent, highly salaried official a 
 kind of over-guardian-parent or Consultant, 
 who would supervise the work of the ordinary 
 guardians in difficult cases, and advise as to 
 the best means of administering the law. 
 This high official ought, in my opinion, to be 
 a woman. 
 
 Such a scheme as I have outlined (briefly
 
 190 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 and, I know, inadequately) would achieve the 
 three-fold purpose of (1) safeguarding the 
 child, (2) guiding and helping the mother, (3) 
 fastening responsibility on the father. If 
 wisely administered by guardians, acting with 
 sympathy and understanding, it could hardly 
 fail to achieve the desired result of protecting 
 the child. Every illegitimately born child 
 would be placed in a position of safety. 
 
 As a preliminary step, and pending legisla- 
 tion, it would be an excellent plan if groups of 
 interested people, or societies, were to form 
 local representative committees to appoint vol- 
 untary Visiting-guardians. By this means the 
 plan could be tried, and some kind of respon- 
 sible and authoritative guardianship at once 
 undertaken. We ought to do this now, for 
 death and suffering to the little children are 
 going on while we delay. 
 
 There is no more for me to say. 
 
 The saving of these little ones is a plain duty 
 upon me and upon you, my readers. Let us 
 clear hardness from our minds and sentiment 
 from our hearts; both will equally lead us 
 astray. The child is the real care of the State 
 and of us all; it is the child who is dependent; 
 the child who has been sinned against ; the child
 
 IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE? 191 
 
 we have to protect. Save these babies from 
 death and from life that is worse than death; 
 give these children a right start in life. Let 
 no illegitimately born child be able to say in 
 after years, "I have called and ye refused; I 
 have stretched out my hand and no man re- 
 garded."
 
 Sixth Essay 
 FORESEEING EVIL 1 
 
 BEING CONCERNED WITH PASSIONATE FRIENDSHIPS, AND 
 HOW RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT MAY BE ESTABLISHED IN 
 SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE. 
 
 "A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself, 
 but the simple pass on and are punished." Pro. xxxvii. 
 12. 
 
 ALL over the world women are restless; per- 
 haps, in no direction is this shown more alarm- 
 ingly than in the attitude of many modern girls 
 toward marriage and motherhood. There is 
 dissatisfaction brewing in sexual matters as 
 well as in every other department of life, and 
 
 i Some parts of this essay appeared, in 1913, in the Eng- 
 lish Review. The article created some interest at that time, 
 especially in America, where it was published (with two 
 other articles from the English Review) in a little book, 
 " Women and Morality." My opinions have changed little 
 since I wrote it. In my last book, "Motherhood and the Re- 
 lationships of the Sexes," I again treat the subject in a 
 chapter entitled Sexual Relationships outside of Marriage. 
 I am now strengthened in my certainty that responsibility 
 must be fixed and regulated in all sexual relationships if 
 moral health is to be restored. 
 
 192
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 193 
 
 only the hypocrites cry "Peace" when there is 
 no peace. 
 
 I have said so much about this restlessness of 
 women that I do not want to labor the ques- 
 tion, rather I wish to consider what to me seem 
 the results as they are finding expression in the 
 relations of women and men. It is, of course, 
 a subject much too difficult to allow arbitrary 
 judgments, all I can do is to jot down a few 
 remarks, rough notes, as it were, on what I 
 have seen and thought. 
 
 And first, I would ask the reader to remem- 
 ber those many sex-conventions that in the 
 past have gathered around women's lives. I 
 need not enumerate them, they are known to 
 you all, but what I want to emphasize is that, 
 though so many of them have been removed 
 their influence persists. Always the customs 
 and beliefs of a past social life live on beneath 
 the surface of society; in a thousand ways we 
 do not recognize, they press upon the individ- 
 ual soul. We cannot without strong effort 
 escape from the chains of our inheritance. In 
 the nations of the West, where the bride- 
 groom's joy with his bride is never spoken of 
 except as a subject fit for jests, where celibacy 
 has been extolled and marriage treated as "a
 
 194 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 remedy for sin," where barrenness instead of 
 being regarded as the greatest possible evil is 
 artificially produced, where the natural joys of 
 the body the sex- joys and the joy of wine 
 and food have been confused with disgraceful 
 things it is there that a perpetual conflict 
 lurks at the very heart of life; hidden it be- 
 comes more active for evil. 
 
 Always times of upheaval and change afford 
 opportunities for escape in violent expression, 
 and while we bewail the disorder and confu- 
 sion, the many sexual crimes that are over- 
 whelming us, we ought to take warning at our 
 folly in having set up for ourselves the new 
 fashionable god of "escape from sex." 
 
 Women are the worst sinners. At every 
 opportunity the women of my generation have 
 been insisting on "the monstrous exaggera- 
 tions of the claims of sex," breaking away vio- 
 lently from the older obsessing preoccupation 
 with their position as women, but only to take 
 up new evasions fresh miserable attempts at 
 escape. What began as a war of ideals be- 
 came before long a chaos. It has had the ef- 
 fect not at all of minimizing the power of sex, 
 but just as far as the deeper needs and instincts 
 have been denied, has there been a deliberate
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 195 
 
 turning on the part of the young to the reliefs 
 of sex-excitements. The servitude of sex is 
 one of the essential riddles of life. Personally 
 I do not feel there is any simple solution. 
 The conflict, broadly speaking, lies in this : our 
 sex needs have changed very little through the 
 ages, now we are faced with the task of adapt- 
 ing them to the society in which we find our- 
 selves placed, of conforming with the rules laid 
 down, accepting all the pressing claims of civ- 
 ilized life, conditions, not clearly thought out 
 and established to help us and make moral con- 
 duct easier, but dependent much more on 
 property, social rank, and ignorance, all com- 
 bining to make any kind of healthy sex expres- 
 sion more difficult, which explains our duplic- 
 ity and so often prevents the acceptance in 
 practice of the code of conduct upheld by most 
 of us as right. I think it is a particularly in- 
 tolerable state of affairs. It is not pleasant to 
 find oneself out as a moral hypocrite. 
 
 The primitive savage within us all always 
 will make any kind of excuse to break out in its 
 own primitive savage way. We are just too 
 civilized to face this, and, I think, there can be 
 little doubt that our conduct has been hindered 
 by many of the modern intellectual suppres-
 
 196 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 sions. The convention that passions and emo- 
 tions are absent, when in reality they are pres- 
 ent, to-day has broken down as, indeed, it al- 
 ways must break down everywhere, leading in 
 thousands of cases individual young women 
 and men to disaster, making us all more fur- 
 tive, more pitiful slaves of the force whose 
 power we are not yet sufficiently brave to ac- 
 knowledge. 
 
 Much of our civilization has revealed itself 
 as a monstrous sham, more dangerously inde- 
 cent because of its pretense at decency. It is 
 something like those poisoned tropical forests, 
 fever-infested, which were in the land of my 
 birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid 
 flowers, high palms, towering trees of fern, all 
 garlanded with creepers and lovely wild 
 growth, glades of fair shadow inviting to 
 rest, yet poisonous so that to sleep there was 
 death. 
 
 II 
 
 We have yet to find our way in sexual 
 things. The revealing knowledge that Freud 
 and his followers have given to the world 
 shows us something of our groping darkness; 
 there is much we have to relearn, to accept
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 197 
 
 many things in ourselves and others that we 
 have denied. We must give up our cherished 
 pretense of the sexual life being easy and inno- 
 cent, we must open doors into the secret de- 
 fenses we have set around ourselves. None of 
 us know much, but at least we must begin to 
 tell the truth about the little we do know. 
 
 Now, this self-honesty may sound a simple 
 thing. It is not. Few of us even know how 
 hard it will be. It will call for the greatest 
 possible courage to tear away the new, as well 
 as the old, bandages with which we have blink- 
 ered our eyes, walking in shadow so complete 
 that some of us have lost the very power of 
 sight, like the strange fishes that live in the 
 gloom of the Kentucky caves. Honesty will 
 demand a real conversion, a change in our atti- 
 tude to ourselves and to one another. We 
 shall have, indeed, to reassure ourselves of the 
 sincerity of our intentions, to begin as the first 
 necessary step to accept ourselves as we are 
 and to give up what we desire to pretend we 
 are, to learn to be truthful to ourselves about 
 ourselves. 
 
 Better to know ourselves as sinners, than to 
 be virtuous in falsehood. We must grow up 
 emotionally; want things to seem what they
 
 198 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 are, not what we want them to be. After- 
 wards we can perhaps go on to help others. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There is a further danger to which I must 
 refer, for it is one that, in my opinion, is very 
 active for disaster. I find a tendency among 
 most grown-ups, especially among teachers 
 and advanced parents, who ought to know bet- 
 ter, to place too firm a reliance on moral teach- 
 ing and sexual enlightenment as a means of 
 saving our daughters and our sons from mak- 
 ing the same mistakes in their lives that we our- 
 selves have made. Like those drowning in 
 deep waters where they cannot swim, we have 
 clutched at any plank of hope. You see, so 
 many of the old planks religion, social bar- 
 riers, chaperons, home restrictions, and so 
 many more, on which our parents used to rely, 
 have failed us, broken in our hands by the vig- 
 orous destroying of the young generation, and, 
 therefore we have clutched with frantic fingers 
 at this new fair-looking life raft, in pursuit of 
 the one aim to protect our children. Myself, 
 I have done this. It is with uttermost sadness 
 I have to acknowledge now that I do not be-
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 199 
 
 lieve we can help the young very far or deeply 
 by all our teaching. Not only do they want 
 their own experience, not ours, but it is right 
 for them to have it. The urge of adolescence 
 carries them away out of our detaining hands. 
 
 But that is not to say we are to push them 
 into dangers. I believe we make the way too 
 hard for the young with much of our nonsense 
 about liberty and not interfering. You know 
 what happens in a garden where the gardener 
 does interfere with his hoe? I have been 
 forced back, often reluctantly, into accepting 
 the necessity of boundaries. I want right con- 
 duct to be defined, and defined widely with 
 possible paths, so that the young may have a 
 chance of finding their way. 
 
 We have, I am sure, to set up new conven- 
 tions, establish fresh sanctions and accept pro- 
 hibitions, to rebuild our broken ramparts and 
 render safe and pleasant the city within. Do 
 we fail to do this, we leave the young to stum- 
 ble among the ruins we have made. And do 
 not let us be hypocrites and profess surprise 
 when they fall. The knowledge we are forc- 
 ing on them, often against their desire, will not 
 save them. With all our efforts we can but 
 teach them intellectually ; a form of knowledge,
 
 200 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 which shatters like thin glass, with a very slight 
 blow, when it comes in contact with the emo- 
 tions. Thus I am driven back to the truth, 
 established already in an earlier essay, that the 
 one sure way to deliver the young from evil is 
 to lessen their temptations. 
 
 You see hidden sin is always more attractive 
 than open sin; for one thing, it is easier to be- 
 gin, and the beginning of sin is usually drift- 
 ing; secrecy also supplies adventure, and the 
 excitement that is desired by the young so pas- 
 sionately in the dullness of life. 
 
 IV 
 
 There never was an age when so many 
 diverse types of young women flourished, 
 sometimes they are rather puzzling to the mid- 
 dle-aged observer. 1 With so many of them 
 there is a kind of forced levity, a self-conscious- 
 ness that prevents them from being either sim- 
 ple or serious. All the clever ones seem to 
 think that by talking in generalizations, you 
 can avert the plain issues of life. Their con- 
 versation is full of meaningless remarks, such 
 as "the bondage of sex," "the superstition of 
 
 i A clever novel, "Three Women," by Miss Netta Syrett, 
 gives an illuminating picture of modern womanhood.
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 201 
 
 chastity," "freedom in the marriage bond," 
 "the sacrifice of women," "stifling convention," 
 and so on, which they go on repeating because 
 that is the terminology of their set. They 
 have no conception of realities at all, only of 
 abstract situations. Impossible to tell what 
 are their pseudo-emotions; a sort of sterile in- 
 tellectualism, shown in their shirking of sex 
 responsibility. They wish to ignore the real 
 difficulty of marriage; they accept love, but 
 only with conditions. The one thing they face 
 practically is work, and the two activities don't 
 conflict in their estimates, because their minds 
 are too choked with conceptions to admit facts. 
 They are faithful to their training by G. Ber- 
 nard Shaw and IT. G. Wells, in thinking that 
 by stating a situation and arguing about it, you 
 can shirk the need of dealing with it. 
 
 Some women want to wipe the sex-side of 
 life out. They cannot. They preach that 
 work and human experience (whatever that 
 may mean) will weaken sex-desire. It does 
 not. Desires may be inhibited, not destroyed, 
 corrupting in quietness they wait opportunity 
 to revive, insistent, clamoring. 
 
 Other young women try deliberately to keep 
 love light. Shrewd enough to understand the
 
 202 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 heavy claims of serious passion, they prefer af- 
 fairs of the senses only; episodes that are a 
 secret detachable part of their lives. They 
 want love as an experience, and to provide the 
 always desired excitement, but they want as 
 well to remain free to take up other aspects of 
 life. And while condescending to fascinate 
 men while deliberately seeking attention, they 
 still hold themselves in hand; intending to ex- 
 ploit life to the uttermost, they find sex amus- 
 ing, but they fight always against its being a 
 vocation. 
 
 There is, of course, a reason for this. The 
 young are more reckless and lawless, they do 
 more and go further than the last generation, 
 and this is but an outward expression of disor- 
 der within, in my opinion, to be traced back to 
 the passionate need felt by the young for love. 
 So that whenever this love-desire is unsatisfied, 
 or falsely satisfied, the dynamic need causes a 
 kind of ferment, which sours love so that it be- 
 comes desire to be considered. If a woman is 
 not important to others, she becomes important 
 to herself, and this unconscious self-glorifica- 
 tion is so devouring, so little based on anything 
 that can possibly satisfy the need that is its 
 cause, that it creates a hunger that can never
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 203 
 
 be appeased, so constant are its demands for 
 nourishment. It is difficult to say how far this 
 insatiable egomania will take our young wo- 
 men. Some men are also empoisoned with it. 
 
 Both these types are modern; opposed to 
 them is another type of young woman, more 
 feminine, easier to explain, but also thwarted, 
 restlessly demanding an outlet. These wo- 
 men do not want to furl their sex, they seek 
 lovers to whom they may surrender themselves, 
 but they suffer from a formless discontent that 
 rots into every love and prevents them finding 
 satisfaction. Eternally they are unsatisfied, 
 without knowing why. 
 
 It is another modern disease and has little 
 connection with flirting and lightness of char- 
 acter, though often the two are confused. Too 
 restless to be faithful, born spiritual adventur- 
 ers, these worshipers of emotionalism set up 
 elaborate pretenses of pure friendships, ignor- 
 ing the hot glow within: they love romanti- 
 cally, but rarely are strong enough to obey 
 their inclinations. Such women are out on an 
 eternal quest, and every now and again, they 
 believe they have found what they are seeking. 
 Then they discover they have not found it, so 
 their search is taken up anew; while often the
 
 204 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 social scheme drives them into dangerous cor- 
 ners, forces them to turn from their quest or to 
 use mean weapons of deceit, does not give them 
 a chance. 
 
 These romantic seekers of love, suffering 
 continual frustration from the evaporation of 
 emotional interest that defies their own needs; 
 the many types of efficient workers, alert, hard, 
 self-satisfied, not wholly cynical, yet with a 
 touch of something that borders on cynicism, 
 submitting almost with <a secret repugnance to 
 the mysterious but supreme bond which holds 
 the sexes miserably together; and the prosti- 
 tute woman of all kinds, out to seize every ad- 
 vantage from men, ruthless, living upon sex 
 these are, it seems to me, the three main types 
 of women resulting in our so-called civilization 
 of to-day, from our repressions and falsehoods, 
 our indefinite wills, from our confused ideals 
 and failure in living ; and it is hard to say which 
 is the most harmful, which is the most wronged, 
 which is the most unhappy, the furthest re- 
 moved from the type that is eternal the ideal 
 woman, satisfied and glad, whom a happier fu- 
 ture may again permit to live.
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 205 
 
 It was Mr. Wells who said in one of his 
 novels, "suppose the liberation of women sim- 
 ply means the liberation of mischief." "Sup- 
 pose she is wicked as a sex, suppose she will 
 trade on her power of exciting imaginative 
 men." 
 
 Something very like this has been happening 
 in the world to-day. 
 
 We are all to pieces morally. The con- 
 sciences of many people are their neighbor's 
 opinions, and the removal of so many young 
 girls and men from their home surroundings, 
 their relations and old friends, has greatly 
 slackened the watchful safe-guarding of mor- 
 als, so that any slightest infringement has not 
 been at once observed and quickly punished. 
 The important barriers of difference in class, 
 in social positions, and in race have also broken 
 through. Conditions in the five war-years and 
 most of the arrangements of society have dis- 
 couraged morality very heavily, and the wise 
 thing for us to do in the matter is not to grow 
 eloquent about sin, but at once to do intelligent 
 things to make right conduct easier. 
 
 An organized freedom and independence for
 
 206 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 women has certainly had startling moral re- 
 sults. The reasons are obvious enough. It is 
 a necessary consequence of our modern insist- 
 ence on individual values; the harping of one 
 generation on freedom, which has caused our 
 young women, in many directions, to carry 
 their ideas of freedom far beyond the accepted 
 conventions of our ordinary civilized human 
 association. It has been shown as manifestly 
 true that for all ordinary young women that 
 intimate association with men, fellowship in the 
 workshops and factories and in play, turns 
 them with extreme readiness to love-making. 
 Now, I am very far from wishing to blame 
 women ; rather am I glad that what I have as- 
 serted, for so long and against so much oppo- 
 sition, about the elementary power of sex in 
 women, has been vindicated by themselves. 
 
 Life for women so often has been wrong and 
 discordant, and the wretchedness has been 
 greatly increased by the way we have left, in 
 the immediate past, the force of sex unregu- 
 lated and unrecognized, thereby causing much 
 of the modern companionship of women with 
 men, of girls with boys, to be really a mon- 
 strous sham, maintained and made exciting by
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 207 
 
 false situations that often have closed around 
 the two like a trap. 
 
 There are, and always have been, far more 
 women and girls than we like to acknowledge 
 who are by their inclinations sexually promis- 
 cuous. It is just conventional rot to talk of 
 sex impulse being weaker and quite different 
 in women from men; of constancy as the spe- 
 cial virtue of women. Sometimes it is, but 
 oftener it is not. It depends on the type of 
 woman. A great and possibly increasing 
 number of girls to-day regard love affairs in 
 very much the same way as they are regarded 
 by the average sensual man, as enjoyable and 
 exciting incidents of which they are ashamed 
 only when they are talked about and blamed. 
 Such girls very rarely give trouble to men or 
 make scenes, they don't care enough; that, I 
 think, is why they always find lovers. It is 
 also why it is easy for them to have secret rela- 
 tions. With no sex-conscience, such girls, 
 even when quite young, exhibit a logic and a 
 frankness that sometimes is rather startling. 
 They seem to have no modesty, though many 
 of them are prudes ; they have no consciousness 
 of responsibility; they feel no kind of shame.
 
 208 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 Such libidinous temperaments have been com- 
 mon at all times and in all societies, if in stricter 
 periods so many women did not follow their 
 inclinations with the openness now so frequent, 
 it was simply out of fear; possibly they took 
 more careful precautions against discovery. 
 
 There are as well as these wantons, girls of 
 a different type, who are more contradictory 
 and difficult because of a less simple sexuality, 
 but who are equally, even if not more, harm- 
 fully destructive in the utter misery they often 
 create. This is the type of girl who ripens to 
 a premature and too emotional sexuality, and 
 who, though still keeping herself physically in- 
 tact, is spiritually corrupt. The spiritual 
 masochism of a woman may lead to depths of 
 cruelty rarely understood. 1 
 
 Many other nobler types of women have 
 been playing with vice. Many wild impulses 
 have found strange expressions. Women have 
 been very like children playing at desperate 
 rebels, who take up weapons to use far more 
 deadly than they knew. All this playing with 
 love is detestable, all of it. It shows a shame- 
 ful shirking of responsibility. Women are the 
 custodians of manners in love, and very many, 
 
 i See I. Bloch, " Sexual History of our Times," pp. 320-322.
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 209 
 
 who have not dreamt of the results of their 
 slackenings, have been urging on the young to 
 a riotous festival, extravagant and disquiet- 
 ing. 
 
 It must, I think, be acknowledged! that a 
 vast impatience on the part of women has made 
 conduct less decent and less responsible. Lov- 
 ers are more reckless, even sometimes more 
 consciously and vulgarly vicious. Women of 
 profound and steadfast emotional nature are 
 rare. The great majority now, perhaps, are 
 not entirely light-minded, but they are less ser- 
 ious, more noisily determined to do what they 
 want, and get what they can both out of men 
 and out of life. 
 
 And the great fact that stands out from all 
 this the great need for our private personal 
 good as well as the public good is the need of 
 the young for guidance and regulation, the ne- 
 cessity for refixing of moral standards in sex- 
 ual conduct, of formulating a code of good 
 manners, to meet the present needs. Nothing 
 else, in my opinion, can avert even greater dis- 
 asters of license in the future, than those condi- 
 tions we are now facing.
 
 210 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 VI 
 
 New wine is being put into old bottles and 
 the wine of life is being poured out and wasted. 
 The old convention that irregular love is ex- 
 cusable in the case of the man, but always to be 
 punished in the case of the woman will never 
 again be accepted, at least not by women. It 
 is not women's ideas so much that are confused 
 as their emotions, and wills. Their impulses 
 are not focused to any ideal. They are driven 
 hither and thither. That is the essential fail- 
 ure to-day. The irregular unions, now so 
 common, are but the more intimate aspect of a 
 general attitude toward life. Many women 
 who have entered them, have done so rather in 
 a mood of protesting refractoriness than from 
 any serviceable desire ; already they find them- 
 selves left after transitory passionate friend- 
 ships in difficult situations in which there is as 
 yet no certain tradition of behavior. And in 
 this way, there is left open an inviting door to 
 those who are weak, as well as to those who are 
 corrupt, to behave irresponsibly and commit 
 every kind of uncleanness. 
 
 Where is this wild love going to end? 
 
 These dissatisfied women of strong sexual-
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 211 
 
 ity, and women of the other types I have noted, 
 must either marry or must continue lawless 
 careers of unregulated promiscuity, each one 
 acting according to her own fancy, curbed only 
 by the will of her lover or lovers, and the cir- 
 cumstances in which she is placed: there is at 
 present no third course. 
 
 Now, the moralist, who does not face facts, 
 would have them all marry. Certainly this is 
 an easy way to settle the matter, but is it wise? 
 is it even right? Moreover, even if this were 
 possible and there was no surplus of women, 
 would this solution be acceptable to these wo- 
 men? I am doubtful if it would. Many of 
 them who want a lover do not want a husband, 
 they make a surprisingly clear distinction be- 
 tween the two. There is, as I have before said, 
 a hardly-yet-realized change in woman's atti- 
 tude: they are beginning to take the ordinary 
 man's view of these affairs, to regard them as 
 important and providing interest and pleasure, 
 but not to be exaggerated into tragedies. 
 They deliberately want to keep love light and 
 dread the bondage of any deep emotions. 
 
 Now, such an attitude is not good for mar- 
 riage, and, indeed, there can be no manner of 
 use in forcing into the marriage bonds those
 
 212 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 who are unwilling to accept its duties of 
 permanent devotion. Some other way, more 
 practical and more helpful, must be found. 
 We shall have, I am convinced, to broaden our 
 views on this question of passionate friendships 
 between women and men, to reconsider the 
 whole position of sexual relationships apart 
 from marriage, in order to decide what may be 
 permitted, to regulate conduct and fasten re- 
 sponsibility, to open up in the future new ways 
 of virtue. And in attempting, thus, to face 
 squarely the difficult situations before us, I can 
 find only one clear simple and honest way 
 to act. 
 
 VII 
 
 We come, then, to this : how can the way be 
 made plainer for those women and also men 
 who are unsuited for marriage and do not wish 
 to devote their lives to its duties? 
 
 I believe that if there were some open recog- 
 nition of honorable partnerships outside of 
 marriage, not necessarily permanent, with 
 proper provision for the future, guarding the 
 woman, who, in my opinion, should be in all 
 cases protected; a provision not dependent on 
 the generosity of the man and made after the
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 213 
 
 love which sanctioned the union has waned, but 
 decided upon by the man and the woman in- 
 the form of a registered contract before the re- 
 lationship was entered upon, then there would 
 everywhere be women ready to undertake such 
 unions gladly, there would, indeed, be many 
 women, as well as men, who, for the reasons I 
 have shown, would prefer them to marriage. 
 
 There is (I must again insist upon this), 
 whether we like it or not, a new kind of woman 
 about, who is to snatch from life the freedom 
 that men have had, and to do this, she knows, 
 if she thinks at all, that she must keep marriage 
 at bay. For marriage binds the woman while 
 it frees the man, and this injustice if so you 
 like to term it is dependent on something fun- 
 damental; something that will not be changed 
 by endowment of motherhood, an equal moral 
 standard in the marriage laws, or any of the 
 modern patent medicines for giving health to 
 marriage and liberty to wives. There is an in- 
 escapable difference in the results of marriage 
 on the two partners. I mean, marriage holds 
 the woman bound through her emotions, while 
 it liberates the man through what he receives 
 from her. The woman gains her greatest lib- 
 eration only from the child, but again that
 
 214 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 holds her bound. Perhaps this is the way na- 
 ture will not let women get away from their 
 service to life. 
 
 Sometimes there is the necessity of purifying 
 by loss. I do not believe in changing the ideal 
 of marriage so that its duties are less binding 
 on women, already we have gone too far in that 
 direction. Thus, I think it better to make pro- 
 vision for other partnerships to meet the sex- 
 needs (for we can cause nothing but evil by 
 failing to meet them) of those women who, de- 
 siring the same freedom as the man, would del- 
 egate the duties of wife and mother to the odd 
 moments of life, and choose to pursue work or 
 pleasure unvexed and unimpeded by the home 
 duties and care of children. Marriage also is 
 a trust ; we are the trustees to the future for the 
 most sacred institution of life. 
 
 VIII 
 
 A society parched for honesty cannot suffer 
 the ignominious and chaotic conditions of our 
 sexual lives to go on as they have been lately 
 among us, for it is plain to me that our moral 
 code that marriage itself cannot stand, and, 
 indeed, is not standing, the strain of our dis-
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 215 
 
 honesties. Our social life is worm-eaten and 
 crumbling into rottenness with secret and scan- 
 dalous hidden relationships; these dark and 
 musty by-ways and corners of sexual conduct 
 want to be spring-cleaned and made decent. 
 Never before have we needed so urgently to 
 put our house in order. We must begin to 
 tidy up and begin soon. If we cut out some 
 parts of the labyrinth, we shall give the young 
 a surer chance of finding their way out of the 
 rest of the labyrinth. 
 
 IX 
 
 An open recognition of unions outside of 
 marriage would prevent the present easy es- 
 cape on the part of so many men and women 
 from responsible conduct in these unregulated 
 relationships. It is because I believe this 
 that I am advocating this course, which will 
 not make immorality easier, but rather will im- 
 pose definite obligations where now none exist. 
 
 This proposal is not made lightly. I am not 
 advocating such a cwirse as being in itself 
 desirable or undesirable. I am attempting 
 merely to estimate the drift and tendency of 
 the times, considering those forces which for
 
 216 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 long have been in action and, as I think, must 
 continue to act with even greater urgency in 
 the difficult years that are before us. 
 
 I must affirm how necessary, in my opinion, 
 is some kind of fixed recognition for every form 
 of sexual relationship between a woman and a 
 man, so that there may be an accepted standard 
 of conduct for the partners entering into them. 
 Regulation is more necessary in sex than in 
 any other department of conduct, for the plain 
 reason that we are dealing with a force that 
 pierces the slashes through our conscious wills, 
 holding us often helpless in its power; a force 
 which often finds its momentum in atavisms 
 stored up through countless ages before ever 
 society began; a force merely glossed over, as 
 it were, by a worn smudge of civilization. 
 And to-day "the smudge" has grown more than 
 ever ineffective. 
 
 May not something be done now, when we 
 are being forced to consider these questions, 
 to make some wider recognition possible. 
 Partnerships other than marriage have had a 
 place as a recognized and guarded institution 
 in many older, and in some ways wiser, soci- 
 eties, and, it may be that the conditions brought 
 upon us after the World War may act in fore-
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 217 
 
 ing upon us a similar acceptance. I believe 
 that, in face of much that is happening to-day 
 the terrible disorder, like spreading-sores, 
 infesting our sexual lives such a change 
 would work for good, and not for evil, that it 
 would not destroy marriage, but might re-es- 
 tablish its sanctity. 
 
 X 
 
 I can anticipate an objection that probably 
 will be raised. Why, I shall be asked, if sex- 
 ual relationships are to be acknowledged out- 
 side of marriage, preserve marriages at all? 
 This question can be answered confidently. 
 Marriage in its permanent monogamous form 
 will be maintained because the great majority 
 of women and men want it to be maintained. 
 The contract-partnerships I have suggested 
 will be powerless to harm wedded love, of which 
 the child is the glorious symbol. No law is 
 needed to protect this beauty. There will al- 
 ways remain a penalty to those who seek va- 
 riety in love, in that unrest that is the other side 
 of variety. 
 
 It is the highest type of men and women who 
 will seek to marry and be best and happiest, if 
 living together as faithful husband and wife,
 
 218 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 as devoted father and mother. I do, however, 
 hold, that there are others women and men 
 without the gifts that make for successful par- 
 enthood or happy permanent marriage. I 
 would recognize this frankly, and let those who 
 do not desire marriage be openly permitted to 
 live together in honorable temporary unions. 
 
 Surely it is the wisest arrangement for the 
 man and woman worker who do not want chil- 
 dren, and, not wishing for the bondage of a 
 continuous companionship, desire to pass their 
 lives in liberty. It is possible that in some 
 cases such friendship-contracts might serve as 
 a preliminary to marriage, while, under our 
 present disastrous conditions, they might also 
 be made by those who are unsuitably mated 
 and yet are unable, or do not wish, to sever the 
 bond with some other partner. Such contracts 
 would open up possibilities of honorable rela- 
 tions to many who now are driven into shame- 
 ful and secret unions. 
 
 In this way much evil would be prevented. 
 As time went on, hasty marriage would come 
 to be looked on with disapproval, and many 
 unions would be prevented that now inevit- 
 ably come to disaster. And this would leave 
 greater chances of marriage and child-bearing
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 219 
 
 for others and more suitable types ; while fur- 
 ther, these sterile unions would, by their child- 
 lessness, act to remove for ever from the world 
 those unsuited to be parents. It is this last re- 
 sult that matters most. 
 
 XI 
 
 The whole question of any sexual relation- 
 ships outside of marriage in the past has been 
 left in the gutters, so to speak, of necessity 
 made disreputable by the shames of con- 
 cealment. Much of this would be changed. 
 Moreover, prostitution, and also the diseases so 
 closely connected with prostitution, would be 
 greatly lessened, though I do not think sexual 
 sins would cease. There will always be, for a 
 very long time at least, men and women who 
 will be attracted to wild-love. This we have to 
 recognize. No one, however, need be driven 
 into the dark paths of irresponsible love. 
 
 It is the results that have almost always fol- 
 lowed these irregular unions that have always 
 branded them as anti-social acts. But irre- 
 sponsible conduct, such, for instance, as the de- 
 sertion of women, which is made easy by the 
 condition of secrecy under which they now
 
 220 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 exist, would be put an end to. And by doing 
 this would follow another and, perhaps, even 
 greater gain. The recognition of these part- 
 nerships would prevent the ostracism which 
 even yet falls on the discarded mistress. 
 There are many women who dread this more 
 than anything else. A woman is hounded 
 out of decent life, if the facts of her history be- 
 come known; honorable love is closed to her, 
 too often she finds the easiest and pleasantest 
 life is that of the streets. 
 
 One reason why extra-conjugal relationships 
 are discredited is, because the difficulties placed 
 around all who enter them are so numerous 
 that, as a rule, it is the weak, the foolish and 
 the irresponsible who undertake these partner- 
 ships. Of course, this is not always true. 
 Men and women, against their wills and often 
 before they know, become entangled in a net of 
 furtive and dishonorable acts. Squalid in- 
 trigues are the shadow that I want to eliminate 
 out of existence. But make these partnerships 
 honorable, and the men and women who enter 
 into them will act honorably. I do not see that 
 we can forbid or treat with bitterness any union 
 that is openly entered into and in which the 
 duties undertaken are faithfully fulfilled. It
 
 FORESEEING EVIL 221 
 
 is our attitude of blame that so often makes de- 
 cent conduct impossible; forces men and wo- 
 men into corners where there is no escape from 
 embittered rebellious sin. 
 
 XII 
 
 I have sought to put these matters as plainly 
 as may be in the conviction that nothing can be 
 gained without honesty. Anyone who writes 
 on such a question is, I know, very open to mis- 
 conception. It will not be realized by many 
 that my effort is not to lessen responsibility, 
 to weaken at all the bonds between the sexes, 
 rather my desire is to strengthen them ; but, I 
 know, the form of the bonds will have to be 
 made wider. We shall have more morality in 
 too much wideness than in too little. 
 
 Matters are likely to get worse and not bet- 
 ter. And the answer I would give to those 
 who fear an increase of immorality from any 
 openly recognized provision for sexual partner- 
 ships outside of permanent marriage is that no 
 deliberate change made in this direction can 
 conceivably make the moral conditions of our 
 society, in the future, worse than they have 
 been in the recent past. As a matter of fact,
 
 222 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 every form of irregular union has existed and 
 does exist to-day, but shamefully and hidden. 
 It is certain that they will continue and that 
 their numbers will not lessen, but increase. 
 
 The only logical objection that I can think 
 of being advanced against an honorable recog- 
 nition of these partnerships is that, by doing 
 away with all necessity for concealments, their 
 number is likely to be much larger than if the 
 old penalties were maintained. I doubt if this 
 would happen, but, even if it were so, and more 
 of these partnerships were entered into; it is 
 also true that recognition is the only possible 
 way in which such union can cease to be shame- 
 ful. We have, then, to choose whether we will 
 accept recognition and regulations, unless, in- 
 deed, we prefer the continuance and increase of 
 unregulated secret vice. 
 
 There is no other choice, at least I can find 
 none ; no other way except to establish respon- 
 sibility in all our sexual relationships. Secret 
 relationships must be contraband in the new 
 order.
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 WITHOUT VISION 
 
 "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Pro. 
 xxix. 18. 
 
 I BEGAN this book on Armistice day, and am 
 ending it on Peace day. This period of about 
 eight months has been a time of great disillu- 
 sionment. Even those little inclined to be de- 
 ceived by the customary exaggerations of poli- 
 ticians, and little disposed to believe in sudden 
 conversions, had hoped that the immense effort 
 of this Great War was to awaken the deadened 
 conscience of the world; to leave a permanent 
 improvement in social and international rela- 
 tions ; making class and individual and sex com- 
 petition, as also national rivalry, a less pro- 
 nounced feature in the new order; replacing 
 greed by desire for service, war by a League of 
 Nations to enforce justice. But a war of jus- 
 tice was followed by a peace of trickery and in- 
 justice. The victors (if not every one of them, 
 still collectively) claimed their spoils as in 
 
 223
 
 224 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 earlier wars. Clemenceau's desire for ven- 
 geance triumphed over Wilson's principles in 
 the center of the world stage. 
 
 More than ever we search the future with 
 anxiety. Amid the confusions and compul- 
 sions, the changes unavoidable in this time of 
 uncertainty, it is immensely more difficult to 
 act wisely. In the old days it all seemed so 
 much easier, as if life could be shuffled, like a 
 pack of cards, into new arrangements. War 
 has made a difference to the whole of life, shat- 
 tered everything, as it were, in our hands, made 
 the daily duties of most of us much harder. 
 We have been robbed of serenity. 
 
 When you stand at the threshold of this 
 new difficult world, knowing, as I do, that the 
 milestones marking the backward path tell you, 
 with certainty, that the greater part of your life 
 and your work lies behind you, then, in these 
 waiting days of urgency, you will want to hold 
 a reckoning with yourself and with life, in hu- 
 mility to question everything, your own faith 
 and what you have tried to teach to others with 
 all the honesty you have. 
 
 My task has been a difficult one, and it is 
 made much more difficult by reason of the un- 
 certainties of our outlook, because there are
 
 CONCLUSION 225 
 
 now so few principles accepted by all of us as 
 true ; every principle is faced by a counter prin- 
 ciple. It is so much easier to have fixed stand- 
 ards of conduct than to argue every case that 
 occurs. We have failed in every direction to 
 establish ideals fine enough and complete 
 enough, and useful enough to hold our imagi- 
 nation and our wills. Everyone seems to be 
 more or less at loose ends of conflicting pur- 
 poses. Morals now are like clothes, made to 
 measure and to fit each wearer. Too often, in 
 important particulars, they change as easily 
 and foolishly as the fashions change. 
 
 I wish to bring people back to a disciplined 
 freedom; to a recognition of their own needs 
 and the needs of others the deepest desires of 
 life. A morality based on individual values is 
 breaking down in every direction, under the 
 temptations and unsettlements, increased and 
 hastened by the war, but brought about pri- 
 marily by profit seeking, by the struggle of 
 everyone doing as he likes, by a society so large, 
 so ill organized and so hurried that personal in- 
 tercourse gives way to mechanical relationships. 
 
 My position is all the more difficult as, while 
 inclining more to the spirit of those who, in re- 
 lation to the moral questions I have dealt with,
 
 226 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 are conservative, I yet regard very many of our 
 accepted conventions and our laws as produc- 
 tive of evil. I realize the way in which they act 
 so disastrously in hindering the spiritual and 
 physical health of our society. I am, there- 
 fore, eager for certain very wide-reaching re- 
 forms. 
 
 I have not great patience with abstract 
 theories of right and wrong, rather I would test 
 every law and every institution by its useful- 
 ness in helping men and women. However 
 imperfectly I have succeeded, I have set this 
 aim of helpfulness steadfastly before me in 
 every proposal I have made for changes in our 
 marriage laws and in the hindering laws which 
 regulate personal conduct. I do not want to 
 discuss and consider humanity, life, or any- 
 thing else as I would like them to be, but, as 
 honestly as I can, I would observe and then 
 help them as they are. 
 
 So many calamities and so much sin that 
 could be prevented are listlessly accepted by us 
 as inevitable. New ideas and needs are en- 
 tangled among old; there is much of the new 
 that is desirable to preserve, much of the old 
 that needs to be reformed. I would wish to 
 oppose two tendencies: I would prevent the
 
 CONCLUSION 227 
 
 too ready acceptance of the fashions of the day, 
 and I would also prevent a too loyal obedience 
 to the prejudices of yesterday. I would unite 
 the intelligence of the modern with the passion 
 and sincerity of the ancient. 
 
 Such is the immensely difficult task that must 
 be faced by every one of us to-day. All of us 
 are charged with heavy responsibility. Ours is 
 a greater inheritance than ever before there has 
 been in the world. We have all of us become 
 responsible in a new and sterner way; to unite 
 in our search to find the new right paths. 
 Three generations of industrialism have cre- 
 ated hideous abuses; we have to end them. 
 With our wider vision and more knowledge, 
 with the lessons we have learned, with the pain 
 of our suffering, and our sacrifices still branded 
 on our hearts, we have to unite one with the 
 other and all of us together to renew and to 
 justify life. We have to remake the world.
 
 APPENDICES
 
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 233
 
 234 
 
 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 TABLE IV. 
 
 Showing Changes between July, 1914, and October, 1918, 
 in Numbers of Girls under 18 employed in Various 
 Occupations. 
 
 
 Numbers on 
 
 Gross 
 
 OCCUPATIONS WITH 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 July 
 
 Oct. 
 
 In- 
 
 De- 
 
 
 1914. 
 
 1918. 
 
 crease. 
 
 crease. 
 
 ( 1 ) Very large Increase . 
 
 
 
 
 
 Building and Construction 
 
 1,500 
 
 6,000 
 
 4,500 
 
 
 Metal Trades .... 
 
 45,000 
 
 108,000 
 
 63,000 
 
 
 Chemical Trades . 
 
 11,000 
 
 25.000 
 
 14,000 
 
 
 Woodworking Trades 
 
 10,500 
 
 20,000 
 
 9,500 
 
 
 Other Trades 
 
 26,000 
 
 37,000 
 
 11,000 
 
 
 Total in Industry . 
 
 94,000 
 
 196,000 
 
 102,000 
 
 
 (2) Large Increase, but no 
 
 
 
 
 
 serious problem. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Mines and Quarries . 
 
 1,500 
 
 4,000 
 
 2,500 
 
 
 Agriculture .... 
 
 12.000 
 
 18,000 
 
 6,000 
 
 
 Professional Occupations 
 
 5,000 
 
 11,000 
 
 6,000 
 
 
 Postal Service 
 
 10,000 
 
 14,000 
 
 4,000 
 
 
 Municipal Gas, Water, 
 
 
 
 
 
 and Electricity 
 
 
 1.000 
 
 1,000 
 
 
 Municipal Tramways . 
 
 
 1,000 
 
 1,000 
 
 
 Other Local Government 
 
 
 
 
 
 Service .... 
 
 5,000 
 
 8,000 
 
 3,000 
 
 
 Total in Class 2 . 
 
 33,500 
 
 57,000 
 
 23,500 
 
 
 ( 3 ) Small Increase. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Food, Drink, and To- 
 
 
 
 
 
 baco Trades 
 
 49,000 
 
 53,000 
 
 4,000 
 
 
 TABLE V. 
 
 Number of Children and Young Persons convicted of 
 Indictable Offenses in Juvenile Courts in large 
 Cities and in the Metropolitan Police Area from 
 
 1914-1917. 
 INDICTABLE OFFENSES. 1914 1915 1916 1917 
 
 Manchester 435 
 
 Liverpool 1,169 
 
 Leeds 191 
 
 Bristol 106 
 
 Birmingham .... 368 
 
 Newcastle 86 
 
 708 
 1,545 
 256 
 207 
 423 
 177 
 
 767 750 
 
 2,013 2,196 
 
 295 385 
 
 331 279 
 
 504 625 
 
 222 234 
 
 Metropolitan Police 
 District 
 
 2,355 3,316 4,132 4,469 
 1,778 3,069 3,858 3,856
 
 APPENDIX II 
 
 SOME STATISTICS REFERRING TO THE 
 ILLEGITIMATELY BORN CHILD. 
 
 i. Births. 
 
 About 50,000 illegitimate children are born yearly in 
 the United Kingdom. Consider what this means. In 
 the course of a single generation of twenty years one 
 million of these unprotected little ones are born, branded 
 because their parents have acted illegitimately. 1 
 
 The exact figures for England and Wales - during the 
 past five and a half years are as follows: 
 
 
 
 
 
 Illegitimate 
 
 Year 
 
 Total Births 
 
 Legitimate 
 
 Illegitimate 
 
 Percentage 
 Total 
 
 1913 
 
 881,890 
 
 843,981 
 
 37,909 
 
 4.29 
 
 1914 
 
 879,096 
 
 841,767 
 
 37,329 
 
 4.24 
 
 1915 
 
 814,614 
 
 778,369 
 
 36,245 
 
 4.44 
 
 1916 
 
 785,520 
 
 7-17,831 
 
 37,689 
 
 4.79 
 
 1917 
 
 668,346 
 
 631,336 
 
 37,010 
 
 5.54 
 
 1918 3 . . 
 
 332.547 
 
 312,587 
 
 19,960 
 
 6.0 
 
 It should be noted that in England still-born births 
 are not registered; were these recorded the illegitimate 
 birth-rate would be much higher than the present statis- 
 tics show. In those countries where the records arc kept 
 the number of still-born illegitimate births is always very 
 high, sometimes twice as high as it is for children born 
 under the protection of marriage. 
 
 1 The word illegitimacy is derived from the I/atin \llffjitimw, 
 meaning "not in aeeordanee with law." 
 
 2 The bastardy laws in Scotland and Ireland are different 
 from the Knplish laws, and therefore the figures for these coun- 
 tries are not given. 
 
 3 First half-year. 
 
 235
 
 236 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 2. Deaths. 
 
 An unusually high infant mortality is found every- 
 where among illegitimate children. In general, the ille- 
 gitimate rate is twice as great as the legitimate. Two 
 unprotected children die for each protected child. 
 
 1912-1916 DEATHS PER 1,000 UNDER 1 YEAR. 
 
 
 All infants 
 under 1 year. 
 
 Legitimate. 
 
 Illegitimate. 
 
 1912 
 
 95 
 
 91 
 
 121 
 
 1913 
 
 106 
 
 104 
 
 213 
 
 1914 
 
 105 
 
 100 
 
 207 
 
 1915* 
 
 190 
 
 105 
 
 203 
 
 1916 
 
 91 
 
 87 
 
 183 
 
 The mortality of unmarried mothers is proportionately 
 great. 
 
 "The ratio of illegitima;te to legitimate mortality in 
 the first week of life has increased from 170 per cent, in 
 1907 to 201 per cent, in 1916. These facts have a some- 
 what ominous aspect and suggest that infant welfare 
 organizations might well devote special attention to the 
 first days of the life of illegitimate children." (Report 
 of the Registrar-General for 1916.) 
 
 The Law of Affiliation and Bastardy. (Brief Sum- 
 mary of the Law in England and Wales.) 
 The mother is the legal parent. The child is not legit- 
 imized on the marriage of its parents. The child has 
 no rights of inheritance from either parent. Where 
 paternity is established the father is liable for support 
 (or alimony). In Scotland the marriage of the mother 
 with the father legitimizes the child. In Ireland the 
 mother is not allowed to claim alimony herself she must 
 go into the workhouse and the guardians must sue for 
 her.
 
 APPENDIX 237 
 
 To Obtain an Affiliation Order. 
 
 By the Bastardy Laws Amendment Act, 1872, the 
 mother must apply to a justice of the peace for a sum- 
 mons to be served on the man alleged by her to be the 
 father of her child. The cost of this summons is 3/6 
 with an additional 2/- for delivery if beyond the limits 
 of a city borough. The cost of the affiliation order, when 
 obtained, is 9/-. The application for the order may be 
 made before the birth of the child or within twelve 
 months after the birth. It cannot be done after that 
 time unless (1) the man has acknowledged his paternity 
 by paying money for the child, (2) the alleged father has 
 left England, in which case a summons can be served any 
 time within 12 months after his return. 
 
 The Affiliation Order. 
 
 The maximum amount that up to the present time has 
 been allowed under an Affiliation Order is 5/- a week, 
 such payments to continue until the child reaches the age 
 of sixteen years. The justices determine the exact 
 amount the father shall pay. It also rests entirely 
 within their discretion to make any allowance for the 
 mother's expenses at the time of birth. In fixing the 
 sum the justices are supposed to act having regard to all 
 the circumstances of the case, and often the payments 
 were fixed as low as 2/6 or 3/6 per week before the 
 passing of New Act 1919. 
 
 The Affiliation Orders Act, 1914. 
 
 By the Affiliation Orders Act, 1914, two important 
 changes in the law were gained. The appointment of 
 an officer, known as the collecting officer, took out of the 
 hands of the mother the work of collecting the weekly 
 payments granted under the maintenance order, while 
 new powers were given of enforcing payment from a de- 
 faulting father. Further, the compulsory interval of six 
 days (a period which gave the man opportunity to es-
 
 238 WOMEN'S WILD OATS 
 
 cape) between the summons and the appearance in court 
 of the putative father was abolished. 
 
 The New Act. 
 
 The inadequacy of such sums with which to bring up a 
 child has at last led to action, and the maximum of 5/- 
 a week has been done away with. The maximum pay- 
 ment in the future will be 10/- a week. This Act (which 
 is called the Affiliation Orders Increase of Maximum 
 Payment Act, 1918) came into operation on January 1st, 
 1919. 
 
 Provisions Affecting Soldiers and Sailors. 
 
 If a soldier is alleged to be the father of the child, 
 action must be taken while he is in England or Wales. 
 In Scotland and Ireland the bastardy laws are different, 
 and if he is abroad or under orders to go abroad action 
 cannot be taken. The summons should be served on his 
 commanding officer, with a sufficient payment to cover 
 his journey to and from the court where his case is to be 
 heard. Before the war the alimony granted to the 
 mother for a child by a soldier was even less than in or- 
 dinary cases; this injustice has, however, been ended 
 and the allowance now granted for an illegitimate child 
 is 6/8 per week.
 
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