Woman and Labour | Page 5

thinking of which I have always felt it necessary almost
fiercely to crush down indignation and to restrain it, if I would maintain
an impartiality of outlook. I should therefore much regret if the light
and passing manner in which this question has been touched on in this
little book made it seem of less vital importance than I hold it.
In the last chapter of the original book, the longest, and I believe the
most important, I dealt with the problems connected with marriage and
the personal relations of men and women in the modern world. In it I
tried to give expression to that which I hold to be a great truth, and one
on which I should not fear to challenge the verdict of long future
generations-- that, the direction in which the endeavour of woman to
readjust herself to the new conditions of life is leading today, is not
towards a greater sexual laxity, or promiscuity, or to an increased
self-indulgence, but toward a higher appreciation of the sacredness of
all sex relations, and a clearer perception of the sex relation between
man and woman as the basis of human society, on whose integrity,
beauty and healthfulness depend the health and beauty of human life, as
a whole. Above all, that it will lead to a closer, more permanent, more
emotionally and intellectually complete and intimate relation between

the individual man and woman. And if in the present disco-ordinate
transitional stage of our social growth it is found necessary to allow of
readjustment by means of divorce, it will not be because such
readjustments will be regarded lightly, but rather, as when, in a
complex and delicate mechanism moved by a central spring, we allow
in the structure for the readjustment and regulation of that spring,
because on its absolute perfection of action depends the movement of
the whole mechanism. In the last pages of the book, I tried to express
what seems to me a most profound truth often overlooked--that as
humanity and human societies pass on slowly from their present
barbarous and semi-savage condition in matters of sex into a higher, it
will be found increasingly, that over and above its function in
producing and sending onward the physical stream of life (a function
which humanity shares with the most lowly animal and vegetable forms
of life, and which even by some noted thinkers of the present day
seems to be regarded as its only possible function,) that sex and the
sexual relation between man and woman have distinct aesthetic,
intellectual, and spiritual functions and ends, apart entirely from
physical reproduction. That noble as is the function of the physical
reproduction of humanity by the union of man and woman, rightly
viewed, that union has in it latent, other, and even higher forms, of
creative energy and life-dispensing power, and that its history on earth
has only begun. As the first wild rose when it hung from its stem with
its centre of stamens and pistils and its single whorl of pale petals, had
only begun its course, and was destined, as the ages passed, to develop
stamen upon stamen and petal upon petal, till it assumed a hundred
forms of joy and beauty.
And, it would indeed almost seem, that, on the path toward the higher
development of sexual life on earth, as man has so often had to lead in
other paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason of those very
sexual conditions which in the past have crushed and trammelled her,
who is bound to lead the way, and man to follow. So that it may be at
last, that sexual love--that tired angel who through the ages has
presided over the march of humanity, with distraught eyes, and
feather-shafts broken, and wings drabbled in the mires of lust and greed,
and golden locks caked over with the dust of injustice and

oppression--till those looking at him have sometimes cried in terror,
"He is the Evil and not the Good of life!" and have sought, if it were
not possible, to exterminate him--shall yet, at last, bathed from the mire
and dust of ages in the streams of friendship and freedom, leap upwards,
with white wings spread, resplendent in the sunshine of a distant
future--the essentially Good and Beautiful of human existence.
I have given this long and very wearisome explanation of the scope and
origin of this little book, because I feel that it might lead to grave
misunderstanding were it not understood how it came to be written.
I have inscribed it to my friend, Lady Constance Lytton; not because I
think it worthy of her, nor yet because of the splendid part she has
played in the struggle of the women fighting today in England for
certain forms