Chapter III: Mating

_Woman’s Equality._—As we have shown before in this Little Blue Book, woman, in the dawn of man’s history, was acknowledged as superior. It was woman who mothered the race, therefore she was allowed to rule the clan. With the coming of paternal knowledge, woman sank, until in the days when civilization had reached its highest point in Greece and Rome, woman was merely a chattel. This was not wholly true, even then. In the Old Testament, lineage was always traced through the mother, showing that the matriarchal idea still lingered. In Greece, Rome and Egypt women were politically men’s equal, at least in the matter of property rights. With the coming of Christianity woman reached her lowest point in the social scale. She became hardly more than a breeder. Men ruled the world and their homes with equal rigor. But slowly, during the past hundred years, woman has been winning back her rightful position. The very nature of woman’s duty, her motherhood, may keep her from ever fully sharing all of man’s activities, but she can and will be equal in importance and in power. The first thing for her to realize is that she must concentrate on shining in those lines of endeavor where she has supremacy, and leave to men the other fields of endeavor. Man has built up a civilization of dollars and things. It remains for women to reconstruct this to a civilization of persons. Millions of dollars are spent yearly to produce better cattle, and almost nothing is spent for better babies. It remains for the women to see that this condition is altered.

Already, they have done a great deal. One hundred years ago, women had no voice in the government; today, they have gained seats in state legislatures, in federal legislatures, in state and federal courts and two have gained seats in State capitols. A century ago, a woman entering upon industrial life found it impossible to receive the same wages or consideration paid to men; the higher institutions of learning were closed to her. Now, she can engage in any occupation, and granted the same ability, can earn as much as a man; she can attend a good college or university. Worst of all, one hundred years ago, she was completely dependent upon a man for her very livelihood. Her choice was limited. She must choose between being the wife, mistress, or spinster daughter of a man. Now she has won in the economic field, and can accept or decline any or many men, at will.

This last is of the utmost importance and has done more than anything else to change woman’s status, and to give her love-life a chance to blossom normally. A woman of a century ago had neither the opportunity nor the ability to choose the man she wished for husband or lover. She was dependent upon a father, who sold her to the highest bidder. Her wishes were rarely consulted. The father had reared her and he decided who would undertake her future support. A woman, unable to support herself, could not afford to refuse a man when he offered to marry her. Now, any woman can support herself. She is limited only by her education, which she can make as little or as great as she chooses, and by her abilities. But there is some path of economic independence opened to every woman. She need no longer wait for a man to marry her so as to insure her future safety. She can pick a mate, or decline one at will. This more than anything else will help to put love relationships upon a footing of decency and equality. When a man marries a woman, not because the woman needs support, but because she loves him, there will be less chance or need for illicit and clandestine loves.

_The Right of Choice._—Those who oppose woman’s entry into industry, when defeated on every point, fall back upon the absurd notion that it will tend to make woman bold, incline her to do the choosing of a mate. Naturally, men resent this. It will take from them their lordship. They will no longer be able to feel themselves masters in their own homes. Nothing better for civilization could happen. There should be no master in any home. Men and women should rule equally.

In point of fact, women have always done the choosing, from the matriarchate down to the present. To be sure, daughters have been married off according to parental arrangement, but where this custom has prevailed, the sons have been similarly treated. Marriages were arranged by the families, with little regard for the young persons. In America, the large majority of young people are allowed to decide for themselves in the matter of marriage. And the women do the choosing. Oh, they don’t actually propose. Their tactics are far more subtle. Tantalizing frocks, alluring rouges, provocative perfumes, all do their part toward luring the man on. From among several young men, it is the girl who makes the choice, and does it so cleverly, and perhaps so unconsciously, that the young man thinks all credit is due to him. When the daughters are inept, the mothers are usually on hand to help.

This is right. Only, it should be frankly admitted, rather than cloaked under a veil of hypocrisy. For the good of the race, women are the better choosers. Man, whose only instinct is the biological urge to fertilize, pursues all women, and takes those whom he can get. From among a group of women, he is sure to take the least clever, the one who is slow-witted in eluding him, the one whom he can get. To be sure, he may try to pick the most beautiful, but usually her beauty covers an empty head, and he doesn’t care. Needless to say, these women are not the best fitted to mother the race. When a woman chooses from among a number of men, she picks the tallest, the strongest, the most clever. So, while man’s choice tends to bring down the standard of the race, woman’s tends to raise it.

Prudish minds may some day come to realize that there is no immodesty in a woman’s letting a man know that she is willing to marry him. The best of all methods would be where the proposal was a mutual thing.

_The Child Problem._—The natural purpose of mating is to beget children. The original scheme of nature is built around this fact. But nature had no hand in planning civilization, large cities, and our present economic standards. It is all very well to say that people are going contrary to the plans of nature in refusing to have children, and that this is a sin. Poverty is a sin, the struggle for existence is a sin. And since these are part and parcel of our living today, it is often better to add the so-called sin of refusing to have children to the list than to commit a more heinous offense by bringing small lives into the world without having the adequate means to provide for them. No human being has an ethical right to bring children into the world unless he can provide healthy surroundings and all of the normal advantages.

Those who rant against socialism and the insubordination of the working classes, and who spend large sums of money in a vain endeavor to keep these less fortunate individuals from rising against wealth, would do better if they spent that money in preaching against too many children and in teaching men and women how to limit their families to their means. If the poor were not largely sex-ignorant, and were not over-ridden by religious superstition, they would not have such families, and would stand some chance of improving their condition. A working man with a dozen children stands very little chance of raising himself out of the squalor in which he was born. Give the same man one or two children, and his energies could be spent in learning more, in rising, instead of in the everlasting enervating struggle for enough bread to feed the too-profuse mouths. The children would have a greater chance. Two children put through high school are infinitely more valuable to the state and the family than a dozen who are forced into sweat shops before they are old enough to leave off playing dolls.

Here is where the women of today may help. Those who give an intelligent interest to politics can, if they will, help the passage of bills that will allow for sex education, and that will teach families not to have more children than they can decently support. The general idea that all women want children is an absurd fallacy. Most women have them because they do not know how to prevent it. Certainly, the average man, given his choice, would not elect to have a number of children, so that he could have the privilege of slaving away his days to feed them.

Nor need the pessimists fear that this will lead to race suicide. The average couple is glad enough to have two or three children, provided they can support them adequately. If some of the economic load of the present were lifted by a wise state legislation, most married persons would be glad to raise a small family. It is the strain of too many children that wears out the parents, and that reduces each child’s chance for a happy, useful life.

_Moral Codes._—The double code of morality is one of the most insidious weeds of our man-made civilization. By this code man is forgiven all of the social sins; woman, none. This code has been rigidly enforced down to the last twenty years, and is still largely favored in many places. This amazing code allowed—rather expected—every young man to sow his wild oats before his marriage. His escapades, provided they were carried on so as not to appear too brazen, were condoned, and frequently encouraged. But when he came to marry, regardless of how many unsavory affairs he had indulged in, he demanded, and society backed him in this demand, a pure, unsophisticated girl. Women, on the other hand, were required to be absolutely pure and innocent, else their value as wives was gone. It was insisted that the young girl sit by the fire and sew a fine seam until some man came with the offer to transfer her to his fireside, to continue the seam. If, as too frequently occurred, no man came, she must decline into a sour spinsterhood, and give her energies to care of the sick, or church suppers, with a sweet smile, while her vitals were gnawed by the malignant cancer of ingrowing love-longing. Any girl, who by the slightest gesture, stepped a fraction of an inch from this allotted way, was immediately damned, and was thenceforth not a fit mate for any “nice” man, but the prey of all men. If a girl yielded to unmarried love, the river or prostitution were the delightful alternatives offered her, and men and women united in maligning her. Surreptitiously, the men changed their maledictions with the waning light of day. Needless to say, since the human animal is removed by degree rather than kind from his four-footed ancestors, there was a great demand for prostitutes. Men could not satisfy their urge toward variety among the women of their class, so they devised a system whereby they could keep their women virtuous, and still enjoy the fruits of passion. The prostitute was allowed to carry on her tragic trade, but was thrust into the lowest depths of degradation.

With woman’s rising importance in the economic world, this double standard will cease. Already it is showing signs of age. Woman has traded the fragility of the hot-house rose for the sturdier wind-blown beauty of the wild rose, and she has not suffered for it. The old legend that men admired only the shy retiring girl has been shattered. The business girl is not left to sit at home in the evening while her more simple sister is wooed. Far from it—men are anxious to win the favor of these new women. Nor do they ask for ignorance in them, nor decline to marry them when they discover their knowledge of life. The modern girl, who accepts a friendship if she wishes one, has no difficulty in finding a permanent mate when she desires to. The time will come when the double code is but an unpleasant memory of an incomplete civilization. Woman has the choice. It is more probable, and will be infinitely more beneficial to the race, that she will choose a single standard, whereby men and women may be monogamous, if they desire, but may elect any other course that is mutually agreeable. Under such a system, prostitution will wither, or will be carried on only by those who select it voluntarily, and the exploitation of young and innocent girls will end.

_Courtship._—The average person believes that courtship ends when the minister brushes the bride’s cheek with his ecclesiastical lips. And this belief is the rock on which marriage founders. The girl, once married, is convinced that her life-work has been accomplished, so she ceases to consider her new husband. How many young girls are there who would come down to entertain her beau for the evening with frowsy hair, and in an untidy house dress? Not one. When a young man is coming to call, the girl primps and dresses in her most becoming frocks. She fixes her hair smartly, powders, and looks as alluring as possible when she opens the door for him. One year after they are married, the man comes in after a weary day’s work and finds a dowdy woman, with wisps of hair streaking an unpowdered face, through which a shiny nose gleams like a beaconlight. When the beau comes wooing, the young girl sees that the living room is neat and dusted. When the young husband returns in the evening, papers may be lying about everywhere, the furniture undusted, and a general air of unkemptness may prevail. We do not say this is universally true. Fortunately it is not. But it has a wide enough prevalence to be worthy of discussion. These same women complain bitterly that their husbands come home and bury themselves in the paper, or do not come home at all, or pay more heed to their business than to their wives. True, and can you blame them? Far better to fasten their eyes upon neat black print than upon a frowsy woman. It is this sort of carelessness that sends men to billiard parlors, to poker games and to other women.

Of course there arises the cry of the old justification. Before marriage, the woman had no house nor children to keep her busy all day. Cannot a woman keep her house and herself clean and attractive at the same time? A large number of women do do it, so all could. It is hard to understand the psychology that is deep-rooted in many women and that allows them to be slovenly. No one expects a woman, if she must do her own work, to be attired in a party frock when her husband comes home in the evening. But she can wear a simple pretty house dress, with a gay cretonne apron over it, she can have her hair nicely arranged, and her face powdered. If a woman must do her own work, she should live in a home small enough for her to take care of, and still allow her time for herself. She should not have so many small babies that every minute is occupied with them. She should learn all of the simple labor-saving devices that make housework easier. The home is the last place to be standardized. It is no wonder that men become impatient with women, and conclude that they are shiftless and brainless. If the same tactics were applied to business universal bankruptcy would result. Housework can be standardized, and should be. Once that women realize this, their labors will be cut in half.

The only way to make marriage a continual happiness is to continue the courtship through life. Each party must make the effort to keep the desire of the other alive and eager. Husband and wife must regard each other as they did before marriage. This will not be hard if there was true love to start with, and it will be infinitely worth while. Marriage is not a thing to be lightly entered into and lightly cast aside. It requires constant care on the part of each.

To be sure, if after these attempts to preserve the love of the pre-marriage days, that love dies, it is better for the temper, health, and morality of both parties to separate. But all other methods should be adequately tried first.