Sex and Common-Sense | Page 5

the
same as in a man, or that they suffer in precisely the same way. I
believe indeed that if men and women understood each other a little

better they would hurt each other a good deal less. But I am persuaded
that we shall not even begin to reach a wise morality so long as we
persist in basing our demands on the imbecile assumption that women
suffer nothing or little by the unsatisfaction of the sex side of their
nature.
I emphasize this point here, because it is involved in the present state of
affairs. I have reminded you that there are nearly 2,000,000 women
whose lives are to be considered. If the number were quite small, it
might comfortably be assumed that the women who remained
unmarried were those who, in any case, had no vocation for marriage.
For it is, of course, true that there are such women, as there are such
men. The normal man and woman desire marriage and parenthood, and
are fitted for it; but there are always exceptions who either do not desire
it, or, desiring it, feel bound to put it aside at the call of some other
vocation, which they feel to be supremely theirs, and which is not
compatible with marriage. They sacrifice; but they do so joyfully, not
for repression, but for a different life, another vocation. And where the
number of the unmarried is small, it may without essential injustice be
supposed that these are the natural celibates.
But you cannot suppose that of 2,000,000! Among the number how
many are young widows, girls engaged to marry men now dead, and
how many whose natural vocation was marriage, motherhood,
home-making, and all that is meant by such things as these? If this be
the normal vocation of the normal woman how many of these have
been deprived of all that seemed to them to make life worth living? Is it
astonishing if they rebel? If they determine to snatch at anything that
yet lies in their grasp? If they affirm "the right to motherhood" when
they want children, or the satisfaction of the sex-instinct when that need
becomes imperious?
If we are to say to such women--"The normal life is denied to you, not
by your fault, or because you do not need it, but because we have
unfortunately been obliged to sacrifice in war the men who should have
been your mates: and we now invite you in the interests of morality to
accept as your lot perpetual virginity"--it is not difficult to imagine

their reply: "What is this morality in whose interests you ask so huge a
sacrifice? Is it worth such a price? Is the whole community willing to
pay it, or is it exacted from us alone? And on what, in the end, is it
based?"
The answer to this question is often given to the young, even before the
question arises; and it is given in the lives of men and women. The
lives of those who are nobly celibate, or nobly married, are in
themselves so moving a plea, that few who have been closely in contact
with them are left untouched. It is the ideal realized that is the best
defence of the ideal. But let us admit that, too often, the actual marriage
is a very pitiful comment on our morality, and celibacy either a mere
pretence or a very mean and pinched reality. What answer then shall we
give to the rising generation which questions us--"On what do you base
your moral standards?"
I do not doubt that I am voicing the experience of many if I say that
when I first began to ask such questions I met first of all with extreme
horror at such a question being put at all; and that, when I persisted, I
found that it was almost entirely by women that the cost was to be
borne. Women were to conform strictly to the moral standard (whose
basis I was not questioning), but men need not and, generally speaking,
did not. I reasoned that if men need not be chaste there must exist at
least a certain number of women who could not be so, and that this
reduced "morality" to a farce. I soon found that it was not a farce but a
tragedy. These women were admittedly necessary but outcast. They
were the safeguards of the rest. I wish that men would try for a moment
to put themselves in the place of a young girl who learns for the first
time that prostitution is the safeguard of the virtuous! I think that they
would never again wonder at the rejection of such "moral standards" by
the rising generation of women. You would only wonder why women
had tolerated such a