Sex and Common-Sense | Page 8

sexes under
ordinary circumstances. The idea most people appear to have about it is
that in some parts of the world, like India and China, every man is
blessed with three or four wives. It is a perfectly fantastic picture. The
balance of the sexes--on the whole--is equal. It is, therefore, a physical
impossibility for polygamy to be a universal custom. It cannot be
practised, and has never been practised, except among the rich--a small
class always. Now that surely makes it obvious that it is not a real
solution. It might meet a temporary difficulty; but is it reasonable, is it

statesmanlike, to alter our entire moral standard merely to tide over a
temporary difficulty; to meet a state of affairs which is purely artificial?
I think that morals go deeper, and should be based on some
fundamental need, rather than on a purely artificial need created by a
passing difficulty, however great that difficulty may be at the time. I do
not, therefore, wish to dwell on other better but temporary solutions,
such as emigration. I do think that this is a solution which would ease
the situation to some extent, and in a normal and right way, because the
disproportion in the Overseas Dominions, where the balance is the
other way, and there are more men than women, is every whit as
unwholesome and as disastrous as is the disproportion of women in this
country. Consequently, from the point of view of both men and women,
I think that emigration is a thing that ought to be considered and helped
forward very much more than it is; but there, again, this is only a
temporary solution. We are trying to arrive at some moral position
which is based on the permanent needs and the real nature of human
beings.
It has become almost a habit with me to feel that the real solution of
every problem can be found, by those people who are hurt by it, if they
will take hold of life where it hurts, and find out, not how they
themselves can escape from that hurt, but how they can prevent that
hurt from becoming a permanent factor in the lives of their brothers and
sisters. Now, the point at which this problem hurts many of us lies in
this, that women have been taught, by a curious paradox, first of all that
they ought not to have any sexual feeling, any hunger, any appetite at
all on that side of their natures; and secondly, that they exist solely to
meet that particular physical need in men. The idea that woman was
created, not like man, for the glory of God, but for the convenience of
man, has greatly embittered and poisoned public opinion on this subject.
Women are taught, almost from the moment they come into the world,
that their chief end in existence is to be, in some way or other, a
"helpmeet" for man. I remember, in the early days of the Suffrage
struggle, hearing people, and women quite as often as men--more often
I think--urging certain rights and principles for women, on the ground
that they were meant to be the helpmeets of man. They used to quote
the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis to show that women were

created for that purpose; and it was considered a very lofty kind of
appeal. I think it never failed to evoke the applause of those whom you
will forgive my calling a little sentimental. I do not think it ever failed
to arouse in myself a deep sense of resentment. The writer of the first
chapter of the Book of Genesis speaks of humanity as being created in
the image and likeness of God, "_male and female created He them_";
there is no suggestion here that one sex was simply to be the servant of
the other. That occurs in the second chapter. The idea is persistent; it is,
of course, much older than the Old Testament. And it persists right into
the New Testament, where you hear a man of the intellectual and
spiritual calibre of St. Paul affirm that man was made for God, but
woman was made for man. Down the ages this message has come, and
women have been taught to consider themselves, and men to consider
them, as primarily instruments of sex, of marriage and motherhood, or
of other forms of serving men's needs. You do not find that feeling in
Christ's attitude towards women. When people speak as though it were
one of the weaknesses of Christianity that it appeals, or seems to appeal,
more to women than to men, I ask you to believe that sometimes
consciously, often quite unconsciously, women respond with
passionate gratitude to Christ, because of His sublime teaching that
every