Sex in Relation to Society

407 Pages·1945·6.209 MB·English

by  Havelock Ellis (Auth.)

Also by Havelock Ellis
*
PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX
HAVELOCK ELLIS
SEX IN RELATION
TO SOCIETY
Being the First English Edition of
STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX
Volume VI
LONDON
WM. HEINEMANN MEDICAL BOOKS LTD.
1945
First published in this edition, I937-
Second impression re-set, 1945·
BOOK
PRODUCTION
WAR ECONOMY
STANDARD
THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED IN
COMPLETE COMFORMITY WITH THE
AUTHORISED ECONOMY STANDARDS
Printed by McCorquodale <S- Co. Ltd., London.
PREFACE
THE volume here presented in a new edition, abridged and revised
throughout, was first published (though only now in England) nearly
thirty years ago. It appeared, and still appears, as the sixth and
concluding volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex. That original
edition is not hereby superseded, but the present edition is intended
for a wider public.
As to-day I carefully re-examine my work from a later standpoint,
I receive two opposed impressions. On the one hand I note how
numerous are the small advances which must now be recorded. On
the other hand I also realize acutely that, at every main point, what
I said before still remains true, and that the conclusions I sought to
draw are as urgently as ever in need of emphasis.
To begin at the beginning : there are all sorts of improvements to
recognize in the social attitude to the pregnant woman and the infant,
an art of puériculture has been constituted, clinics for maternal and
infant welfare set up. At the next stage, that of education, an
enormous popular literature has been put forth, there are signs of
progress in many English and more American schools and colleges,
and it is becoming understood that " sex education " does not mean
as was once supposed, a warning against vice and disease, but reason-
ably constitutes an essential part of that wider knowledge of elementary
biology which is the right of every boy and girl. Then arises for the
young man or woman the difficult problem of sexual activity. It
s
was conventionally held that the choice for the unmarried man (the
girl was not supposed to have any choice) lay between prostitution,
probably involving a venereal disorder, and a total sex abstinence.
We now tend to view this matter as not to be settled solely by abstract
considerations ; it is increasingly felt that every young person, even
of either sex, must possess the knowledge necessary to form a judgment
as to his or her own needs and be held responsible for the necessary
self-control and self-discipline. The result, noted alike in England
and America, is that, among the educated middle class, men tend
to be more chaste (in the sense of being less inclined to seek promiscuous
sexual intercourse) than formerly, and women to be less chaste (in the
sense of being less frequently virginal at marriage). Even those
persons who do not regard this result as ideal, admit that it is an
approach to a more wholesome and equitable condition of affairs.
When, next, we reach marriage, we find that in all civilized countries
there has been a more or less gradual approach to the reasonable
recognition that,if the marital bond is to be fairly adjusted, its dissolution
V
vi PREFACE
must be rendered, under legal conditions to prevent injustice, equally
possible with its formation. Those conditions are necessary because
marriage is not a mere licence to practise sexual intercourse. It is
the portal by which the new generation enters the world, and society
cannot be indifferent to the state of that portal. Marriage is more,
however, than an institution to ensure, so far as possible, the welfare
of the future race ; it is also an arrangement for securing the happiness
and well-being of the partners themselves. That is why I dared
to follow up the discussion of the evolution of marriage with a chapter
on the art of love. At that period the recognition of such an art was
regarded as indecent if not immoral, and even the Lancet, in a laudatory
review of my book which showed general sympathetic approval,
disapproved of that chapter. No critic would enter such a protest
to-day. It is accepted, even by the most orthodox writers on marriage,
that married couples are entitled to seek a life of marital harmony,
and that a well-adjusted physical and psychic relationship is essential
to such harmony. Finally, there remains the " science of procreation."
I might now hesitate to use this term. At that date, genetics, which
deals with the inner mysteries of procreation and the essential elements
of heredity, scarcely existed even as a name. It is still in its early
phases and making progress every day, so that it would be out of
place to attempt a statement of its position in the present volume.
Yet, even stopping short of genetics in a strict sense, there remains,
a large amount of information, properly termed scientific, which
cannot be passed over, and it has developed so greatly in recent years
that this concluding chapter has undergone more revision and addition
than any of the others.
When, however, I view this book from another aspect, overlooking
the minor changes made necessary by our social progress, I am struck
—I will not say surprised and shocked—by the actuality to-day of
the demands I had so long ago made for a much greater progress.
After all, while slight movement is ever present, sex and society are
both alike so deeply traditionalized and institutionalized that they
both move with extreme slowness. Knowledge indeed grows ; practice
lingers.
Thus at the essential point of the position of the mother, the guardian
of the future race, whatever improvements we may note, they seem
trivial when we realize that in most countries no adequate provision
is legally made to ensure that measure of rest and economic indepen-
dence at and around the period of pregnancy which skilled observation
has shown to be necessary to secure not only her own welfare but that
of her offspring, the generation which will rule the world to-morrow.
If we go on to the educational preparation of those rulers, never before
has there been such insistence on the sexual enlightenment of youth
from the earliest age and for the mother's leading place in that first
PREFACE vii
stage. Yet those most familiar with the facts declare that in this
respect mothers are still, on the whole, complete failures. In the
minor but significant matter of a reasonable attitude towards naked-
ness, it is true that numberless nudist societies have been formed,
and that those who object to societies for such a purpose have never-
theless tended to change their opinion of private nudity ; yet the
attitude of law and the police remains fixed to its nineteenth-century
phase, while the possibility of stage performances of the " strip tease "
order, witnesses to the continued existence among the general public
of the old prudish pruriency. If we turn to prostitution and the
struggle with the venereal diseases chiefly propagated by prostitution,
while it is true that they are now more frankly faced than before and
that great progress has been made in diagnosis and in treatment, the
social approach remains full of hesitation, and all sorts of difficulties
are found in following up the pioneering steps of the Scandinavian
countries. Again, in the central field of the marriage institution,
while here and there some progress has been made in a rational
direction, yet, and especially in England, the most timid reforms are
only effected with extreme difficulty in the face of ancient entrenched
traditions. Even the control of conception is met with an opposition
which to some may well seem criminal. By all whose opinions carry
weight, and now even the Roman Catholic clergy (the Catholic laity
seem to have always accepted it), it is admitted that some degree ôf
birth control is necessary. It is usually essential to domestic happiness
and, in our social state, to economic welfare, while it is also a key to
racial betterment if undesirable stocks are 'slowly to be reduced.
Yet even out governments, willing or unwilling slaves to evil super-
stitions, do little or nothing to make it available to the masses who
most need it. In short, all the main conclusions of this book, as
originally written, still remain valid.
Yet, as I now present it anew, there is a difference. Thirty years
ago it was only possible to publish my Studies of the problems of sex
in an edition restricted to professional readers. The reception accorded
to the work by distinguished representatives of medicine in the various
countries which it reached was sympathetic, and indeed in the highest
degree favourable. But the physician is above all the healer. It is
not his primary business to mould social opinion and still less to seek
to modify the laws of his country. Social and legal opinion, never-
theless, has during recent years been so far changed that what pre^
viously it was only possible to bring before the professional reader
may now be presented to all serious readers. Since everything that
is written in this book does really concern, and indeed most intimately,
all serious persons, I rest content that it is now placed within their
reach
August, 1937. HAVELOCK ELLIS.
SEX IN RELATION TO SOCIETY
CHAPTER I
THE MOTHER AND HER CHILD
The Child's Right to Choose Its Ancestry—How This is Effected—The Mother
the Child's Supreme Parent—Motherhood and the Woman Movement—The
Immense Importance of Motherhood—Infant Mortality and Its Causes—The
Chief Cause in the Mother—The Need of Rest during Pregnancy—Frequency
of Premature Birth—The Function of the State—Recent Advance in Puéri-
culture—The Question of Coitus during Pregnancy—The Need of Rest during
Lactation—The Mother's Duty to Suckle Her Child—The Economic Question—
The Duty of the State—Recent Progress in the Protection of the Mother—The
Fallacy of State Nurseries.
A MAN'S sexual nature, like all else that is most essential in him,
is rooted in a soil that was formed long before his birth. In this, as
in every other respect, he draws the elements ôf his life from his
ancestors, however new the re-combination may be and however
greatly it may be modified by subsequent conditions. A man's
destiny stands not in the future but in the past. That, rightly
considered, is the most vital of vital facts. Every child thus has a
right to choose his own ancestors. Naturally he can only do this
vicariously, through his parents. It is the most serious and sacred
duty of the future father to choose one half of the ancestral and
hereditary character of his future child ; it is the most serious and
sacred duty of the future mother to niake a similar choice. In
choosing each other they have between them chosen the whole
ancestry of their child. They have determined the stars that will
largely rule his fate.
The facts are indeed not so simple as this statement might seem
to imply. The processes of heredity are in fact highly complex. The
epoch-making experiments of Mendel are still inspiring progress along
this line of knowledge. We have here indeed a new science of genetics
which is developing every day. In choosing a sexual mate no one
knows precisely what contribution will be added to the resulting
offspring. At the most he is only now learning to realize the
possibilities of his fateful deteraiination.1
In the past that determination has usually been made altogether
helplessly, ignorantly, even unconsciously. It has either been guided
1 There are many excellent books on the mechanism of heredity, though the
subject is constantly developing. A. E. Watkins' Heredity and Evolution is,
for example, a sound short work for general.readers on the whole subject ; so,
and also for the general reader, Professor Jennings' Genetics, and by the same
author, but more technical, Genetic Variations in Relation to Evolution.
ι
2 SEX IN RELATION TO SOCIETY
by an instinct which, on the whole, has worked out fairly well, or
controlled by economic interests of the results of which so much
cannot be said, or left to the risks of lower than bestial chances which
can produce nothing but evil. In the future we cannot but have
faith—for the hope of humanity must rest on that faith—that a
new guiding impulse, reinforcing natural instinct and becoming in
time an inseparable accompaniment of it, will lead civilized man on
his racial course. Just as in the past the race has, on the whole,
been moulded by a natural, and in part sexual, selection, that was
unconscious of itself and ignorant of the ends it made towards, so in
the future the race will be moulded by deliberate selection, the
creative energy of Nature becoming self-conscious in the civilized
brain of man. This is not a faith which has its source in a vague
hope. The problems of the individual life are linked on to the fate
of the racial life, and again and again we shall find as we ponder the
individual questions we are here concerned with, that at all points
they ultimately converge towards this same racial end.
Since we have here, therefore, to follow out the sexual relationships
of the individual as they bear on society, it will be convenient at this
point to put aside the questions of ancestry and to accept the individual
as, with hereditary constitution already determined, he lies in his
mother's womb.
It is the mother who is the child's supreme parent. At various
points in zoological evolution it has seemed possible that the functions
that we now know as those of maternity would be largely and even
equally shared by the male parent. Nature has tried various experi-
ments in this direction, among the fishes, for instance, and even among
birds. But reasonable and excellent as these experiments were, and
though they were sufficiently sound to secure their perpetuation
unto this day, it remains true that it was not along these lines that
Man was destined to emerge. Among all the mammal predecessors
of Man, the male is an imposing and important figure in the early
days of courtship, but after conception has once been secured the
mother plays the chief part in the racial life. The male must be
content to forage abroad and stand on guard when at home in the
ante-chamber of the family. When she has once been impregnated
the female animal angrily rejects the caresses she had welcomed so
coquettishly before, and even in Man the place of the father at the
birth of his child is not a notably dignified or comfortable one.
Nature accords the male but a secondary and comparatively humble
place in the home, the breeding-place of the race ; he may compensate
himself, if he will, by seeking adventure and renown in the world
outside. The mother is the child's supreme parent, and during the
period from conception to birth the hygiene of the future man can
only be affected by influences which work through her.
THE MOTHER AND HER CHILD 3
Fundamental and elementary as is the fact of the predominant
position of the mother in relation to the life of the race, it must be
admitted that it has sometimes been forgotten or ignored. In the
great ages of humanity it has indeed been accepted as a central and
sacred fact. But it has not always been so. At the present time, for
instance, we are but emerging, from a period during which this fact
was often disputed and denied, both in theory and in practice, even
by women themselves. This was notably the case both in England
and America. Motherhood and the future of the race were system-
atically belittled. Paternity is but a mere incident, it was argued,
in man's life : why should maternity be more than a mere incident
in woman's life ? By a curiously perverted form of sexual attraction,
women were so fascinated by the glamour that surrounded men that
they desired to suppress or forget all the facts of organic constitution
which made them unlike men, counting their glory as their shame,
and sought the same education as men, the same occupations as
men, even the same sports. As we know, there was at the origin an
element of Tightness in this impulse.1 It was absolutely right in so far
as it was a claim for freedom from artificial restriction, and a demand
for economic independence. But it became mischievous and absurd
when it developed into a passion for doing, in all respects, the same
things as men do ; how mischievous and how absurd we may realize
if we imagine men developing a passion to imitate the ways and
avocations of women. Freedom is only good when it is a freedom
to follow the laws of one's own nature ; it ceases to be freedom when
it becomes a slavish attempt to imitate others, and would be
disastrous if it could be successful.2
At the present day this movement on the theoretical side no longer
possesses any representatives who exert serious influence. Yet its
practical results are still prominently exhibited in England and the
other countries in which it has been felt. Infantile mortality is
sometimes enormous, and in England at all events has only in recent
years shown a tendency to diminish.
What we need above all, as the most competent authorities agree,
1 It should scarcely be necessary to add that to assert that motherhood is a
woman's supreme function is by no means to assert that her activities should
be confined to the home. That is an opinion which may now be regarded as
almost extinct even among those who most glorify the function of woman as
mother. As Friedrich Naumann and many since have pointed out, a woman
is not adequately equipped to fulfil her functions as mother and trainer of children
unless she has lived in the world and exercised a vocation.
2 "„Were the capacities of the brain and the heart equal in the sexes," Lily
Braun well said, " the entry of women into public life would be of no value to
humanity, and would even lead to a still wilder competition. Only the recog-
nition that the entire nature of woman is different from that of man, that it
signifies a new vivifying principle in human life, makes the women's movement,
in spite of the misconception of its enemies and its friends, a social revolution "
(see also Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, eighth edition, especially Ch. XVI.).
4 SEX IN RELATION TO SOCIETY
is a higher standard of physical motherhood. The problem of infantile
mortality, as Newman long since stated in an important and compre-
hensive work on the subject, is not alone of sanitation, housing, or
even poverty as such, but mainly a question of motherhood. This
must always be borne in mind when we have to deal with the employ-
ment of married women. The superiority in general of Jewish over
Christian ^children, and their lower infantile mortality, seems entirely
due to the fact that Jewesses are better mothers. Their environment
may be bad, but they are well cared for when pregnant, the offspring
are in general breast-fed, and later receive abundance of nourishing
and bone-making food.
The healthy woman carrying a healthy fœtus, it may be remarked,
does not suffer thereby from undue strain. Paul Bar, a distinguished
French investigator, after thorough study, long since came to the
conclusion that there is during gestation what he termed a " homo-
geneous harmonious symbosis." By extensive investigation of the
chemical exchanges between mother and fœtus, and chemical analysis
of the excretions of pregnant patients, he found that the mother
does not lose in strength by her apparent self-sacrifice but gains an
increased power of extracting from her food the essential elements
needed for the fœtus, and even has a balance over, so that she stands
to gain rather than to lose.
The fundamental need of the pregnant woman is rest. Without
a large measure of maternal rest there can be no puériculture.1 The
task of creating a man needs the whole of a woman's best energies,
more especially during the three months before birth. It cannot be
subordinated to the tax on strength involved by manual or mental
labour, or even strenuous social duties and amusements. The
numerous experiments and observations which have been made in
maternity hospitals, more especially in France, have shown con-
clusively that not only the present and future well-being of the
mother and the ease of her confinement, but the fate of the child,
are immensely influenced by rest during the last months of pregnancy.
" Every working woman is entitled to rest during the last three
months of her pregnancy.'' This formula was adopted long since
by the International Congress of Hygiene in 1900, but it cannot be
practically carried out except by the co-operation of the whole
community. It is not enough to say that a woman ought to rest
during pregnancy ; it is the business of the community to ensure
1 The word " puériculture " was invented by Dr. Caron in 1866 to signify the
culture of children after birth. It was Pinard, the distinguished French obste-
trician, who, in 1895, gave it a larger and truer significance* by applying it to
include the culture of children before birth. It is now defined by Péchin as
" the science which has for its end the search for the knowledge relative to the
reproduction, the preservation, and the amelioration of the human race." The
Ecole de Puériculture was established in Paris in 1920.