The Moral Basis of the Demand for Free Divorce
William Thur&on Brown
•Principal "The Modern School9'
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Published by "THE MODERN SCHOOL" PORTLAND, OREGON
To
the realization of that marriage which is the perlett union of two personalities
z-hlr-fir
William Thurston Brown.
We are to think together of the Moral Basis of the Demand for Free Divorce. To propose such a theme as this implies two facts: first, that there is a demand for free divorce—that is, that the dissolution of the marriage bond which the State now insists upon may take place simply at the request of either party; and second, that this demand arises solely from the highest moral considerations. What I mean to assert, is, not that freedom of divorce is desired or demanded by a few individuals and as a result of unbridled sexual passion, but that it is demanded, at least implicitly, by the whole of present day society—that it is a demand which conditions themselves are.voicing, regardless of the consciousness of individuals—a demand, too, as much in the interest of woman as in the interest of man. And furthermore, I wish to impress the fact upon your minds that this demand grows out of the deepest and highest considerations of morality—that is to say, out of the deepest, highest, strongest needs of human life as such.
I do not mean to say that a law granting freedom of divorce simply at the request of either party in a marriage would be the final solution of the sex problem. Quite the contrary. Indeed, forces are working right now to effect radical changes in this whole matter of sexual relation and expression, forces which nothing under heaven can defeat. He would show himself a total stranger to history, to human development, who did not see that nothing whatever in human society stands still, that all things change and must continue to change. It is the part of wisdom to know something about these changes as they have taken place in the past, in order that we may better understand the processes of change which are taking place in our own present and adapt ourselves to them. The supreme tragedy of human life arises from the failure of society to make those constant readjustments which the ceaseless evolution and change of personal and social need make necessary.
The maintenance of chattel slavery in'the South two or three generations ago was the supreme social—yes, and personal—tragedy of that time. It. was a tragedy alike for masters and for slaves. It seems almost impossible for some of us to believe that here in this avowedly most advanced nation on earth chattel slavery was maintained up to a period beyond the middle of the 19t.h century.. And yet, we know that this was the ease. And we kno\v that practically all of the master class and most of the slave class were utterly unconscious of the tragedy of which both were victims. The whole mass of white people in the South, educated, cultured, religious, professedly moral, cherished chattel slavery as the very basis of their whole civilization—because it was the basis of their economic system. And yet, under that system white men in the 19th century sold their own flesh and blood into slavery and four millions of human beings were simply pieces of property. To have asserted in the South at that time that the institution of human slavery was immoral.
degrading, the supreme tragedy of life, would have been regarded as a blasphemy by practically the whole white population of that section, and would hardly have been understood at all by the mass of the slaves. Whatever the forces were which precipitated the conflict of 1861-1865, we know perfectly well now that the doom of chattel slavery in the South had struck, and the Civil War costing a waste of wealth amounting to thirty-one billions of dollars at the lowest estimate and nearly a million of human lives ought to be a sufficiently impressive object lesson to convince any thoughtful person that humanity cannot permanently afford to oppose the demands of expanding, growing life.
And yet, any thinking man or woman must admit that there is no evidence at all that society has begun to learn the lesson taught by that fearful struggle, that terrible waste of human life. Read the speeches of those who are at the very head of our political life today, from the least to the greatest of them, and you will find not a single indication that these men have learned anything at all from that conflict. It is a closed book to them. It might just as well never have happened so far as they are concerned. They learn nothing. And for that reason all progress, all gains for the race, must be at the expense of revolution, warfare, suffering, conflict, and terrible tragedy. A man more completely blind to all the lessons of history than Mr. Taft never occupied the presidential chair in this country. In the very midst of the most terrific struggle that history knows anything about and on the eve of the greatest revolution in the life of the race, Mr. Taft as little sees the significance of the signs of the times as Louis XVI or Marie Antoinette in 1789.
Let me say again that the demand for free divorce is neither a final solution of the sex problem nor is it what might be called a conscious universal demand. At best, it would be the least the State could do to
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mitigate the evils inherent in our present marriage laws. So long as the State requires a legal contract as the imperative condition of marriage, regardless what the outcome of such marriage may be, the demand is morally imperative that the power to dissolve such a bond be left to the discretion of either party and at no expense to either. Under present conditions, every divorce law on the statute books is at once a source of open and shameless graft by the State and an unwarranted interference on the part of the State with the indispensable liberty of the individual.
The propriety of this demand for free divorce can best be seen in the light of these words from Ellen Key's book, 44Love and Marriage
"The ideal form of marriage is considered to be the perfectly free union of a man and a woman, who through mutual love desire to promote the happiness of each other and of the race.
"But as development does not proceed by leaps no one can hope that the whole of society will attain this ideal otherwise than through transitional forms. These must preserve the property of the old form: that of expressing the opinion of society on the morality of sexual relations—and thus providing a support for the undeveloped—but at the same time must be free enough to promote a continued development of the higher erotic consciousness of the present time. The modern man considers himself supreme in the sense that no divine or human authority higher than the collective power of individuals themselves can make the laws that confine his liberty. But he admits the necessity of a legal limitation of freedom, when this prepares the way for a more perfect future system for the satisfaction of the needs of the individual and a more complete freedom for the use of his powers. Insight into the present erotic needs and powers of individuals must thus be the starting point of a modern marriage law, but not any abstract theories about the 'idea of the family* or juridical considerations of the 'historical origin* of marriage."
While the individualist can only be satisfied with the full freedom of love, he is compelled by the sense of solidarity, at least, for the present, to demand a new law for marriage, since the majority is not yet ready for perfect freedom.7'
I do not quote these words of Ellen Key's because I would have you consider them infallible. They are not quoted as an authority. She speaks or writes from a very inclusive standpoint, but it is not a final judgment on the subject discussed. At the same time, I know of no other words that are more adequate or well considered than hers.
The whole force of these demands concerning marriage and divorce which are being expressed by practically all the masters in literature, such as our modern dramatists —those men and women who more than all others sense the intellectual and moral and spiritual advance of the race—and by the men and women of science, lies in the fact that a new morality, or better still a new and larger need, is manifesting itself in human life today, and these men and women of literature and science are but voicing the demand of this new morality, this new and deeper need.
If you will think again of the situation in the southern States a hundred years ago, you will understand clearly what I have already said concerning this matter of chattel slavery. Chattel slavery was as vital a part of the life of those States as the family itself, as marriage, or any other institution, and every clergyman in those States defended that institution as divinely ordained, and proved his teaching from the bible, as men have been able to prove the sacrednees of every sort of institution which economic conditions have seemed to require. Chattel slavery was an intimate and essential part of the morality of the South in that period. And yet, like a thief in the night a new morality had developed—had developed not in the South where slavery was the foundation of civilization, but in the North where chattel slavery had been abolished and was no longer profitable. But it developed, and it became a part of the consciousness of the most morally potent individuals in the nation, individuals so potent in their moral personalities, that they imparted something of that morality to the whole of the North until the conflict was precipitated which ended that hoary iniquity of chattel slavery.
Today, the whole situation is changed. Chattel slavery has been wiped out as it existed before the war, and yet the social structure of the South has not been destroyed, as so many of its people would have predicted. On the contrary, no one in the South would consent today to return to the institution of chattel slavery: wage slavery is cheaper, for one thing, and for another, society there has adapted itself so universally to a wholly different system, that chattel slavery would now be an immoral institution even in the South. In other words, the whole morality of the South in that one respect has been changed. This does not mean any great gain in virtue for individuals because another form of slavery has been accepted very cheerfully in the place of the old. But it does mean change, a great and fundamental change, so far as the South is concerned.
A similar process is going on today all over the civilized world in regard to this whole question of marriage, or of sexual relation and expression, in the words of Ellen Key: "With ever-growing seriousness the new conception of morality is being affirmed : that the race does not exist for the sake of monogamy, but monogamy for the sake of the race; that mankind is therefore master of monogamy, to preserve or to abolish it."
This universal fact recalls, in its form, those oft-quoted words attributed to Jesus, namely, that "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Whoever made that statement, whether Jesus or some one else, it was the statement of an indisputable fact, even if it has taken a long time for humanity to realize that fact. Let me remind you that, in spite of this plain statement of the superiority of man to the Sabbath—rank heresy for that period —the very opposite principle was insisted upon by the Christian Church, avowedly founded on the teachings of Jesus, from the third century down to the latter part of the nineteenth. ' The whole influence of the Christian Church during the greater part of the nineteenth century—and nowhere more insistently than in America—sought to impose on men and women and children the notion that man was made for the Bab-
bath, not the Sabbath for man. And yet. ♦
you and I know how impotent in the long run the Church has proved to be. In spite of its declarations condemning as a sin any use of the Sabbath except for going to church, the whole tendency of society has been to carry out the principle attributed to Jesus: that man is superior to the Sabbath and is under obligation to make that and everything else subordinate to his happiness and welfare. That is but one of hundreds of illustrations of the growth and ascendency of a new morality over one that had been outgrown.
Exactly such a process underlies this whole movement in regard to marriage and divorce. The claim or demand that society shall not condemn any sex relationship merely because it does not conform to some legal provision, but that the social and personal attitude toward sex relationship shall be determined wholly by the results of such relationship on the individuals concerned and upon society—that demand is simply the demand of as real and vital a moral and spiritual need of human life as was the demand that chattel slavery be abolished or the demand that human life, and not mouldy tradition, shall be the final arbiter in deciding what we shall do with the Sabbath.
You will all freely admit that no man or woman in the whole master class of the South was qualified to express an opinion concerning the morality or immorality of the institution of chattel slavery. That is a fact universally recognized. It. should therefore not be a matter of wonder if the bulk of society today—practically the whole of conventional society—is in exactly the same condition relative to marriage so far as its morality or immorality is concerned. People who accept without question whatever institution exists are thereby disqualified from judging whether that institution is good or bad. It is only those people who have attained a higher level of moral vision and who have acted in accordance with that vision, who are qualified for such a judgment.
When Mr. Bernard Shaw declares that "marriage is the most licentious of human institutions, and that this is the secret of its popularity," I have no doubt his words are treated by the majority of present day society as either a satirical witticism not to be taken seriously, or else as a shocking blasphemy upon a sacred institution. Such a judgment on the part of present day society is as shallow and as unsound as the judgment of Southern slave-holders upon the Northern critics of chattel slavery. Mr. Shaw has stated the exact, bald truth. And he has not stated it any more plainly or convincingly than Ellen Key has. Stop a moment, you men and women, and think what marriage means today, what it involves as regards sex relationship, and then ask yourself if Ellen Key overstates the facts when she declares: "Whatever abuses free divorce may involve, they cannot often be worse than those which marriage has produced and si ill produces—marriage, which is degraded to the coarsest sexual habits, the most shameless traffic, the most agonizing soul-murders, the most inhuman cruelties, and the grossest infringements of liberty that any department of modern life can show." "The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error," says Shaw. That is no more than a simple statement of fact.
What all conventional people fail to understand, fail utterly to see, is that the supreme immorality of which life is capable is this: that either a man or a woman shall cease to be an individual, shall become a mere possession. That is the root of all that is most degrading in human life: that any human being should be or become a possession, should fail or cease to he an independent individual. But marriage, as now constituted, makes both man and woman a possession and not an individual. Marriage, considered as a legal contract, cannot be other than degrading, because it almost universally leads men and women—but especially men—to take or claim as a right what is a saorilege and a prostitution unless it is the free gift of love. And it is against this prostitution supremely that the new sexual morality is protesting. It is for the abolition of this prostitution that the new morality is working. And the new sexual conscience of today is seeing that prostitution means "all trading with one's sex, whether this traffic is carried on by women or by men, who from necessity or inclination sell themselves with or without marriage." The sole motive of this modern crusade lies in the desire and determination to make mutual love the only ground of marriage, the only condition which shall be recognized as n justification of sexual relations.
It is for this reason that the most thought-marriage; and divorce
ful people, the men and women who are in the van of the world's forward march morally and spiritually, demand love's freedom "to unite without external tie, and also man's right more freely than at present to loosen the tie, when real union is no longer possible." A growing number of men and women are feeling that "as soon as love is admitted as the moral ground of marriage, it will be a necessary consequence that he who has ceased to love should be allowed a moral as well as a legal right to withdraw from his marriage, if he chooses to avail himself of this right." And "an increasing number of people find it impossible to contract marriage, or to ask it of the other party—or to continue in marriage or ask its continuance of the other—when 'their love has died or has awakened for another." "The erotically noble person of the present day cannot, without the deepest sense of humiliation, belong to one he does not love, or by whom he knows he is not loved."
If it is declared that a man and woman should remain together for the sake of the children, it may be answered that society does not ask men and women that."for the sake of the children they should commit other crimes; thus a woman who committed forgery to support her child would be condemned. But other women are judged leniently who for the sake of their children feel themselves prostituted year after year in their marriage.
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Besides, the failure of mature men and women to protest against, such criminal living by severing this degrading tie means the corruption and poisoning of every succeeding generation. For 4'if the young are accustomed to see their elders content with false and ugly relations, they will learn to be so likewise. If they see around them an aspiration toward ideal conditions in love— an idealism which is revealed now in a beautiful married life, now in the dissolution of one that is not beautiful—then their ideals also will be lofty."
Nor is this all of the evil of conformity. "Marriage under constraint forces people to continue their cohabitation and to bring children into the world in a revolt of soul which must leave its mark on their children's nature and thus influence their future destiny. But this is not a well-deserved punishment for a mistake, as the unthinking would say; it is the profoundest violation of the sanctity of the personality and of the race." Not only the fundamental moral claims of men and women, but equally the claims of the race, of the unborn children, require that sexual relations from which love has departed or in which it has never been, shall be discontinued.
It need surprise no one that the Christian Church, and especially that part of it which bears the name of Catholic, should represent an obsolete and degrading position in this whole matter of marriage and sex relationship. Nothing else could be expected from an institution which belongs wholly to the dead past and in no sense whatever to the living present, an institution which openly and frankly and proudly derives all its justification from an ignorant past and not at all from any known moral demand or intel-leetual concept of the living present. The Catholic Church holds that since even marriages which are entered into with the warmest expressions or feelings of love and under the most favorable conditions may and often do turn out unhappily—which is perfectly true-r-we cannot therefore base the morality of marriage on the emotion of love. They therefore claim that even the best of us need an inflexible law, an irremovable tie, to prevent our being at the mercy of winds and waves through our emotions, and the lower classes need them so as not to be driven out of their course by their desires.
The chief trouble with this claim is exactly that of all claims made by the Church : it is based on premises which have no basis in reason or in experience. It is of one piece with the Church's doctrine of eternal punishment in hell, is merely a reflex, in this most intimate personal relationship, of that hideous doctrine. And it is based on a conception of human life which is utterly and ridiculously false. The very idea of eternal punishment is so contrary to the. most rudi-
t
mentary notions of justice or right, that every sane man or woman would instinctively rebel against it, if he did not regard it as an empty superstition. And today no man or woman whose opinions are worth considering believes any longer in that ancient nightmare. The time is bound to come when people will believe as little in the irrevocability of human mistakes in this life. And they will no more maintain the idea that because a man and a woman have made a mistake in entering upon marriage with each other, they must therefore suffer a lifelong torment, than they will believe that anything a human being can do in this world can possibly merit eternal torment in some future world, assuming there is any future life.
4'In love," says Ellen Key, "the idea of personality has now brought us to the view that property is theft; that only free gifts are of value; that the ideas of connubial rights and duties are to be exchanged for the great reconstructive thought, that fidelity can never be promised, but that indeed it may be won every day." Indeed, it ought to be plain to almost any one that morality can exist anywhere only in proportion as freedom exists. Where there is no freedom there is no morality, no virtue. A machine has no morality. It does not act in any sense on its own initiative. We predicate morality only of human beings because we recognize only in human beings a certain amount of at least relative freedom of choice. And just in so far as the sexual relations of two persons are taken out of the realm of freedom, become a part of a piece of machinery, namely, the institution of marriage, as if the license of the State or the rite of the Church immediately changed a man and a woman from individuals to machines, from persons exercising choice and judgment to mere parts of a system—just in this measure is sexual relation removed wholly from the sphere of morality. And it can be brought under the control of anything worthy to be called morality only as the absolute freedom of the two parties in relation to each other is secured and maintained, which can be done only by removing all bonds from this relationship, or at least giving to each the liberty of dissolving this relationship without the consent of the other.
One of the reasons given in the Courts of Love in the middle ages why love is impossible in marriage is this: "that woman cannot expect from her husband the delicate conduct that a lover must snow, since the latter only receives by favor what the husband takes as his right. When divorce becomes free, the attention to each other's emotions, the delicacy of conduct and the desire to captivate by being always new, which belong to the period of engagement, will be continued in married life."
The truth of the matter is, all the old grounds upon which men and women have unthinkingly based morality have gone, and the knowledge and need of a new age now dawning are asserting new and irresistible demands based on the well-understood needs and necessities of life. We are coming to see clearly that there are no eternal foundations for conduct, for morality. What is more to the point, we are coming to see that the deepest law of morality is, as Ellen Key so many times reminds us, the enhancement of life, the happiness of the individual aiiu the higher well-being of society. MoreuVcf, and this is vital, the welfare of society cannot be served without the happiness of the individuals.
Nothing so clearly marks the difference between the old morality for which the Church has stood and stands, and the morality which is now making its irresistible demand upon us, as this: that while the older morality subordinated the individual to the will or law of a supposed Being external to himself, the new morality rests upon the inalienable needs and rights of personality. That is to say, while the older morality, if it is worthy to be called that—say rather, the old superstition which tried to function as a morality, and still does in the name of an obsolete institution called the Church— while that older morality saw human life to be a very little thing, of no consequence, and its alleged God, underlying and supporting its priesthoods and other forms of human oppression and parasitism, as the supreme fact of the universe; the new morality sees human life as the supreme thing now and always, and each individual's life as for him the supremely valuable thing, to be realized to its utmost limit. That difference is vital and fundamental.
Having cast aside, as all thinking people have done, this old and obsolete view of life, it is characteristic of our time that tor almost the first time in history men ana wo men are studying the phenomena of life without bias and simply for the purpose of finding out the facts. Hitherto, people have gone to life with such powerful preconceptions, that they could not see it as it is. They have looked at it through colored glass—the colored glass of ecclesiastical doctrines—and so looking they were bound to see everything in an illusion. Under the influence of this scientific age, thinking men and women are taking a new, fresh look at life without any glasses, without any illusions, without any preconceptions, just to see what it is, and the result has been revolutionary, as it must be.
The result is, that while "it is a beautiful sight when two married people enjoy the happiness of their love for the whole day of human life," we are compelled to see that no marriage compact that can be made can guarantee any such event, and that the sac-redness therefore of any sexual relationship lies not at all in its legality, nor in its beginning, but wholly in its fruits. We are learning that when we are dealing with human beings, we are dealing with something radically different from anything thought of by the founders of the older morality. We are not dealing with free moral agents. We are not dealing with individuals who are the masters of their fate. We are rather dealing with beings who, with very limited knowledge of themselves or of life itself, are seeking, blindly it may be, but with more or less purpose, not only for the expression of nature's purpose—that of reproducing and perhaps improving the species—but also for their own happiness and fulfilment. Life itself, with its infinite differences and varied needs, becomes our supreme authority, and we cannot without profaning and violating life, insist upon any absolute uniformity of action. What we must rather seek is the largest and fullest freedom of action consistent, with the welfare of all concerned. And that freedom of action must inevitably grow greater with every changing year, every increase of knowledge or experience.
Be it remembered that "in the ideas of the Church, the physical incapacity for marriage —the incapacity for cohabitation—of one party frees the other from the duty of fidelity. Such a marriage may be annulled." "In the more spiritual view of the future," says Ellen Key, "it will be equally evident that the same right exists to dissolve a marriage which has remained unconsumm&ted in a spiritual sense; and there may be just as many possibilities of incapacity to fulfil the spiritual claims of marriage .as there are men and women; therefore also just as many causes of divorce."
Those who are insisting upon the new ideas concerning marriage and divorce do not insist upon any infallible rule by which all cases are to be governed. Neither do they set up any fanciful ideal of sentimentality by which to judge what is right or wrong in this relationship. They recognize the fact that men and women are quite as likely to make mistakes in dissolving a tie as in forming one. They believe that the realization of a great love is not an accident, but must often be the result of years of intertwined experience and memories. And they also believe that "only he who, after unceasing effort and patient self-examination, can say that he has used all his resources of goodness and understanding; has put into his married life all his desire for happiness and all his vigilance; has tried every possibility of enlarging the other's nature and yet has been unsuccessful—only he can with an easy conscience give up his married life."
On the other hand it is a one-sided notion "that nothing is more important than that parent8 should remain together for the sake of the children—since everything must finally depend upon how the parents remain together, and what they become through re-mailing together." For it often happens 4 4 that even exceptional natures have a greater burden than they can bear, and then it is not the living together but the dying together of their parents that the children witness."
Moreover—and this is perhaps the most important point in the whole matter—there is such a thing as a great love, a love which is or becomes the motive power of all beautiful living and all noble achievement. There have been examples of such love in history— and no one can doubt its verity or its worth, who once has seen it, to say nothing of those who have experienced it. Perhaps Madame Curie, one of the discoverers of radium, is an example in point. At any rate, when a few weeks ago the papers made public some of her letters to the husband of another woman and his letters to her, I venture to say that the deepest feelings both of Europe and of America recognized in that relationship something more than a momentary fancy— recognized the discovery of a great and absorbing affection. And practically the whole of Prance assented to its right.
As Ellen Key has put it, "this mighty emotion—which arouses one's whole being through another's and gives one's whole being rest in another's—this emotion seizes a man without asking whether he is bound or free. lie who feels strongly and wholly enough need never wonder what it is he feels: it is the feeble emotion that is doubtful of itself. Nor does he who feels strongly enough ever ask himself whether he has a right to his feeling. He is so exalted by his love, that he knows he is thus exalting the life of mankind. He knows he would commit a sin in killing his love just as he would in murdering his child."
While I would not pretend to dogmatize about it, I believe, with my present knowledge, that the ideal marriage is that which proves to be the union of one man and one woman for life. Not the legal binding together of a man and a woman for life, but the finding and fulfilment of such a union. To put it in the words of Edward Carpenter: "That there should exist one other person in the world toward whom all openness of interchange should establish itself,
from whom there should be no concealment; whose body should be as dear to one, in every part, as one's own; with whom there should be no sense of Mine or Thine, in property or possession; into whose mind one's thoughts should naturally flow, as it were to know themselves and receive a new illumination ; and between whom and oneself there should be a spontaneous rebound of sympathy in all the joys and sorrows and experiences of life; such is perhaps ODe of the dearest wishes of the soul. It is obvious however that this state of affairs cannot be reached at a single leap, but must be the gradual result of years of intertwined memory and affection. For such a union Love must lay the foundation, but patience and gentle consideration and self-control must work unremittingly to perfect the superstructure. At length each lover comes to know the complexion of the other's mind; the wants, bodily and mental, the needs, the regrets, the satisfactions of the other, almost as his or ' her own—and without prejudice in favor of self rather than in favor of the other; above all, both parties come to know in course of
time, and after perhaps some doubts and trials, that' the great want, the great need, which holds them together, is not going to fade away into thin airj but is going to become stronger and more indefeasible as the years go on. There falls a sweet, an irresistible, trust over their relations to each other, which consecrates as it were the double life, making both feel that nothing can now divide; and robbing each of the desire to remain, when death has indeed (or at least in outer semblance) removed the other."
Such is an ideal which may well be cherished by persons in all classes of society, because it is the product of no temporary economic mode of living, but of that deeply-rooted instinct which has made us—and of at least occasional experience in perfect union. But, just as we have made any approach at all to the fulfilment of any other ideal only as we have attained ever-larger measure of liberty, so the attainment of this most precious of all human needs, desires, ideals, lies only in the path of an ever-growing freedom.
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L HIS mighty emotion — which I arouBOS on© 's whole being A through another's and gives one's whole being rest in another^—this emotion seizes a man without asking whether he is bound or free. He who feels strongly and wholly enough need never wonder what it is he feels: it is only the, feeble emotion that is doubtful of itself.} 7
—ELLEN KEY.
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