The world is on the threshold of revolutionary change. In some places, of course, this change is going on faster, and in more sweeping fashion, than in others. This is inevitable. The disintegration of the family, and the decay of the marital institution of the modern world, accompanied by the rise and revolt of youth, are revolutionary developments in our civilization.

The revolution in morals which has occurred in our age is the harbinger of a revolution in social life which is hastening upon us. The new morality had already started to stir before the War. It was the War, however, that set these forces into rapid rotation. The present struggle against the sexual ethics of the older generations is but part of a larger struggle against the older ways of life.

Revolt in one field can only be genuinely successful if revolt is also carried into the other fields of life. Moral revolt against an old order can never be secure in its success as long as the old order remains dominant in other forms of existence. 

Here we have a new morality and a new woman, and a world that in so many ways is changed in appearance and ideal. These newnesses belong to a new age. A new age, however, does not burst upon us with the unanticipated treachery of a typhoon, sweeping all before it with its suddenness. It is only its external manifestations that sometimes dart upon us unawares, and with a strange violence. Its underlying forms are often of old duration. 

The question—how did we get this way—is, therefore one of very intricate and complicated character. The World War, after all, was in itself but a sharp climax in the career of modern industrial civilization. It gave rise to a number of forces that otherwise might have taken much longer to acquire their present momentum. The old morals had begun to decay before the war. The economic rise of woman had occurred before the War also; it was the War, nevertheless, that inspired this rise with a sharp spurt and made it take on more gigantic proportions. Behind it all, of course, as the fundamental cause of the changes that we have recorded, is the development of the machine age and industrial civilization. Industrialism drew women into industry and destroyed the unity of the home. The economic independence of woman was made possible through the advance of industry.

Economic independence soon brought about moral independence. The clinging vine type of girl and the submissive type of mother, apostrophized in song and celebrated in sermon, have become obsolescent.

Woman's demands for equal rights with man have extended to the sexual sphere as well as to the social. The invention of contraceptives has fortified her independence as a sexual being, and given her an opportunity for a sex life that is no more handicapped than that of man. With economic freedom there is no need for the surrender of her rights to a morality prescribed for her by man. As long as she owed her livelihood to man, she owed him her virtue. It was a debt that was obvious and unavoidable. With the gradual disappearance of this economic dependence, the necessity for moral subjection was no longer urgent. Liberty to live her life as she pleased, in terms of equality of privilege, now became possible for her after centuries of moral enslavement. This meant revolt against the home, the family, and the rigorous demands of domestic life and virtue.

The Industrial Revolution forced women out of the old ways of life. Eventually women of all classes were drawn into economic endeavor. From the quiet submissive housewife she has now become active as factory worker, vocational adviser, stenographer, teacher, politician, orator, preacher, lawyer, doctor, and in fact, has entered into almost every occupation undertaken by men. This change from the static life of a mother into the dynamic life of worker revolutionized her entire outlook upon existence. It effected the feminine revolt against masculine oppression in economics, politics, education and morals.

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Christianity introduced a new attitude which has not yet been erased from the marital ceremony and institution. The concept of sex as a sin is intruded as an ethical attitude at this time, and the theory of indissoluble monogamy was forced upon the world. Divorce was destroyed. The words of Jesus: "What, therefore, God hath joined together, let not man put asunder," served as the cardinal doctrine for the Christian marriage.

If we say that marriage has decayed, we do not mean that people do not still marry, or that they will not marry in the future. It is marriage as we know it, therefore, the marriage of modern monogamy, of the binding-contract variety, our system of marriage, in other words, that has broken down, and today is bankrupt.

A monogamy which is interrupted by frequent divorce is a monogamy only in fiction, but not in fact. The essential idea of monogamy, as we said, is a relationship of life-long duration. Otherwise Mr. Mencken's witticism: "Certainly I believe in monogamy, one woman at a time," is sound doctrine. In other words, if merely living with one woman at a time is monogamy, then many forms of free-love are mentally monogamous. Many an individual, then, classified by conventional society as a profligate or demirep, is genuine monogamist. But everyone knows that it is not in such ways that monogamy is construed.

Let us observe some of the developments in divorce, which have effected this "consecutive polygamy" that has taken place in our modern world. In Holland there is now a divorce rate of fourteen for every one thousand marriages. In Sweden, there were seven divorces per thousand in 1899, 84 per thousand in 1904, and 97 per thousand in 1909. In Denmark divorces have increased from 550 to 650 out of a total of only 850,000 married persons. In the United States the figures are even more of a revelation. In 1880 the United States had thirty-eight divorces per hundred thousand of the population, and in 1900 it had 73 per hundred thousand. This increase was so startling and appalling that it attracted the attention of the world. Only Japan with an average of 215 per hundred thousand surpassed the American record. Between 1867 and 1886 there were 328,716 divorces, while between 1887 and 1906 there were 945,625. The following comparisons will illustrate the extensity of this increase:

The increase of divorces between 1870 and 1880 was two-and-two-thirds times greater than that of the increase in the population; between 1890 and 1900 it rose to three times. In 1924, for instance, this number had risen to 151. An effective comparison is to be seen in the statistics as to domestic relations in 1887 and 1924. In 1887 there was one divorce to every 17.3 marriages; in 1924 there was one divorce to every 6.9 marriages.

"There were in 1924," writes Professor William Fielding Ogburn, "about 15 to 16 times as many divorces as there were in 1870, and yet the population is only about three times as large."

In specific states, for instance, the conditions are even more astonishing. In Oregon, as we pointed out before, there is one divorce for every 2.6 marriages; in Wyoming one divorce for every 3.9 marriages; and in California one divorce for every 5.1 marriages. If we study divorce libels the conditions are even more astonishing. Divorce libels in Boston, for example, (or in Suffolk County) have increased almost three times as fast as marriages during the twenty years from 1900-1920.

If people are not legally free to contract as they wish in their sexual relations, which would be equivalent to a form of free-love, they modify the law in such ways as to get this effect without being aware of it. They turn monogamy into such a malleable thing that it is no longer monogamy but a chaos of voluntary changes, rejections, and novelties, and yet in still calling it monogamy their fear of convention is pacified. They convert marriage into a kind of experimental liaison, with legal trappings to sanctify it, and convince themselves that by still calling it marriage the institution remains unassailed.

It is instructive also to observe the causes that are assigned for divorces. For example, among 945,625 divorces effected, 642,476 were granted to women, and 316,149 to men. Over two divorces, then, were granted to wives for every one that was granted to husbands, which signifies, in statistical form, an attitude on the part of woman that is distantly removed from that of her Victorian predecessors. In the nineteenth century divorce sought by woman was a sign of stigma. Women then were not to "take arms against a sea of trouble," but to accept it with resignation. Such response was supposed to be part of the innate nobility of her nature. Today woman is in a state of protest and revolt. At one time the double-morality was accepted as a phase of the inevitable. Today, as we know, it is denied. In the matter of desertion, we see a similar situation. Among 367,502 divorces granted on the basis of desertion, 211,219 were given to women, and 156,283 to men. This change is directly connected, of course, with the economic independence of woman that has become so marked in the present generation and which has so decisively influenced the new feminine psychology.

In America the grounds for divorce vary with almost every state in the union. The chaos is extremely annoying and troublesome. It is almost as bad as certain of the marital laws that exist in different states. One white man, for instance, who had married a colored woman in Chicago, where intermarriage between white and colored people is legal, found that when he moved to Maryland he would be imprisoned if he lived with his wife. When he insisted upon his natural rights as a husband he was informed that he could not even get a divorce since in the eyes of Maryland he had never been married. Such cases are numerous. In Reno one can get a divorce after a residence of three months, on the ground of cruelty or one year's desertion. In New York one can get a divorce only on the grounds of adultery, or proof of the unchastity of a wife before marriage. At the same time New York permits a common law marriage. In one case there was a man who was a bigamist in one state and a monogamist in another. There are other instances in which children can be legitimate in one state and illegitimate in another. South Carolina, curiously enough, permits no divorce at all. Nevertheless, its compensations are in other directions. It does not make adultery an indictable offense, and it has actually passed a law, regulating the amount of property a man can bestow upon his concubine. This is one of the most unique gestures of compromise on record. Rather than modify its marital code, and concede the existence of necessary difficulties and deviations in marital relationships, it invents another law to circumscribe these deviations without violating the original statute. Thus the old seems firm and unchanged, although in reality it has been fundamentally altered.

Divorce has menaced the marital institution in every country in Europe as well as America. In Germany divorces rose from 13,344 in 1918 to 36,542 in 1920; in Switzerland from 1,699 in 1918 to 2,241 in 1920; in Sweden from 1,098 in 1918 to 1,455 in 1923. In the United States, with 180,868 actual divorces (an advance of 3.1% over the 1925 record) and 3,823 annulments in the year 1926, it is apparent, the increase has been the most widespread and profound.

It is not surprising, then, that Professor John B. Watson's prognostication that: "the present marriage system will end in fifty years . . . that (since) the mystery of marriage has been broken down. . . we must have a new kind of ethic, based on a scientific study of human behavior as a way to more simple marital adjustments" did not disturb nor terrify the public. Such predictions are no longer uncommon. A century ago, or even two generations ago, however, such a declaration would have aroused horror and disdain. Such utterances, then, were considered the attributes of lunacy and far-flung fanaticism. A few radicals might entertain and cherish such notions, but these radicals scarcely constituted a fragmentary fringe of the public opinion which prevailed. They were social pariahs, and their ideas isolated dogmas that touched the imagination only of the maniac. In the last generation the change has occurred. We have been rushed and plunged across so many new horizons and twisting seas that the very tempo of our life has been broken and changed, and its rhythm shaken into somersaulting jerk and recoil.

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One of the most interesting and striking effects of this new morality and the decay of marriage is the obvious decline which has occurred in prostitution. Perhaps it would be more precise to describe the change in terms of the fading appeal that the prostitute has come to have for modern youth. It is not that the economic situation which is the fundamental cause of prostitution has been altered, but that the necessity of the prostitute has diminished with the greater opportunity for sex relations upon the basis of mutual attraction. If the trade of the prostitute has not seriously decreased in connection with men of the old generation, it, nevertheless, has unquestionably declined with the youth of the new. Few men would ever choose the prostitute as a means of expressing their sexual urge if a less indelicate adjustment were attainable. The prostitute has been scorned by the very men who have turned to her for escape.

The story of prostitution is a story of bodies bartered for sustenance. While the history of prostitution had a picturesque career in the life of ancient as well as modern society, it was the Industrial Revolution that turned it from a practice into a plague. The terrific growth of prostitution in the last few centuries attests the evil effects of our economic system and the bankruptcy of the marital institution that has grown out of it. In reference to prostitution and its relationship to monogamous marriage, all men, asserts Bernard de Mandeville, become physically tired of their wives and find the prostitute a very necessary and delectable variation. His own words are striking:

With the advancing independence of women and their revolt against the old morality, the prostitute is beginning to lose her monopoly upon the avenues of erotic escape. With youth this is particularly manifest. At one time the young man had practically no other retreat than that of the brothel. Respectable girls, in the old days, as we have seen, were taught to avoid even the minor intimacies of the kiss before betrothal. The passionate caress was a violation of respectable virtue. In these days of petting and necking, however, and the freedoms that often follow, the difficulties incident to sex expression have largely disappeared. This is well-illustrated by the following quote from New Student, April 7, 1926: 

"Necking in itself has already lowered—and if properly encouraged would still further decrease greatly—the amount of vice among college men. Under the present short-sighted rules, whether it has done the same for college women is doubtful. Twenty or thirty years ago, as some of the boys of that time tell us, it was quite regular and ordinary for a large number of college men to visit the 'tenderloin' districts, with, of course, terrible results. Some fraternities even maintained private institutions of this nature. That was in the pre-necking era. The cloistered students had no contact with decent women, and so they used such means as were at their disposal. But with the advent of the petting-party that has largely changed."

In brief, prostitution has become much less popular among these college men, because, with the loosening of the old morals, sexual experience with women of the new generation is certainly to be preferred.

The young man of today is turning away from the prostitute because he can find his sex expression with the so-called "decent" girl who has adopted the new morals. According to one survey, only 14% of these men had had any contact with the prostitute at all. How important this is one can only realize when he takes into consideration the fact that in the days before the War, when the old morality was still in the stirrups, at least 90% of these men would have had their sex relationships entirely with prostitutes. It has only been with the rise of the new morality that this contamination could be avoided.

What we discover in the decline of prostitution is a realization of the important part that birth control has played in the development of a finer expression of the sexual impulse. While all of the factors which we have considered in connection with the rise of the new morality have been instrumental in bringing about this freer expression of the sexual urge, it has been the invention of birth control methods which has made possible the "geologic shift in the center of gravity from procreation to recreation as the true goal of sex expression." The flapper and the new woman, informed in the ways of enjoying sex as recreation without procreation, are freeing sex expression from its old fetters.

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With primitive man sex was a superstition, with ancient man it was a religious cult. The primeval attitude toward sex was free of pruriency and secretiveness. The sex organs were symbols of potency and objects of adoration. Even the exanimate world was endowed with sexual attributes. In the primitive concept of the gods was embodied the sexual origin of the world. Uranus (SKY), for example, was the male in unending sexual congress with Gaia (EARTH), the female; in this embrace humanity was conceived as in a constant state of propagation. Phallic worship among the Greeks and Romans was a widespread and accepted custom. In all these attitudes sex has a social aspect. It is translated into every form of life. In art its manifestations are arresting and signal The Comedy, for instance, as Aristotle observed, originated in the Phallic performances, in honor of Phales himself. Greek religion is saturated with sex. Judaism likewise embodies the concrete evidences of phallicism.

It has only been since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the rise of the bourgeois class and its narrow-bound morality, as we saw in earlier chapters, that sex became discussion-gagged by the censor. The stork now became the errand boy of the doctor, and ignorance was sweetly cherished as innocence. Candor became a vice, and hypocrisy a virtue. Art in the nude was draped, legs suddenly became limbs, and passion became a sin of the pagans. The difference between the clean attitude of ancient man toward sex and the unclean attitude of modern man is well illustrated in the controversy that arose about the Greek play Lysistrata. In this play, when it was originally staged in Greece, the actors wore artificial phalli, and no one was either shocked, surprised or bewildered. When Aubrey Beardsley, however, illustrated this Greek play according to its original form, with its phallicism manifest, he horrified the bourgeois world, and was scorned and attacked with unmitigated vigor.

To primitive and ancient man, it is clear, sex was a significant phenomenon, which he approached with reverence and candor. He did not allow the element of shame to intrude into his conception of it. He did not attempt to obscure or deny its realities. He spoke of the organs of procreation with affection and with a clean respect for their potency. To him sex embodied the mysterious source of creation and he idealized it in art and religion. Modern man, on the contrary, has been taught either to look upon sex as a sin, or as something unclean and unbeautiful except in its stupid sentimentalities and childish bathos. He has endeavored to hide it, and confine it to the unspoken. He has encouraged ignorance of it as an ideal. Pruriency and smugness grew up as characteristic manifestations of this ostrich-like attitude. An unclean and unhealthy "refinement" was the consequence. It was not until our present generation that this "refinement" was recognized as a form of hypocrisy, a spurious virtue that brought only ignorance and pain, and a sense of sickening impotency with its realization.

Sexual customs in modern times as well as in ancient reveal wide and sweeping fluctuations. The concept of chastity has often been singled out as something which all moralities have advocated. This again is nothing more than an attempt to force historical fact to fit one's moral predilections. It is, of course, essentially fallacious. Among primitive peoples chastity is often considered a vice instead of a virtue. Among the Nasamonians the custom is for the bride to surrender herself to all the wedding guests before she welcomes her husband. Herodotus describes this custom in the following manner:

"When a Nasamonian marries, it is the custom for the first night to lie with all the guests in turn, and each, when he has intercourse with her, gives her some present which he has brought with him."

Pomponius Mela claimed that greater honor attached to those women who had many such sex relations on their wedding night than those who had but a few. Diodorus, commenting upon the customs of the inhabitants of the Belearic Islands, wrote:

"They have a strange custom at their weddings, for on the wedding night the oldest friends and guests lie first with the bride; then the others in the order of their ages. The bridegroom is the last man who is admitted to that honor."

Even at the present day this same custom continues among the Barea of Abyssinia, the Australian aborigines, and the Waitata and the Watveta of East Africa. Similar usages existed in New Guinea, Cuba, Peru and Central America. Among Southern Slavs, until a short time ago, it was the convention for the two best men at the wedding to spend the night with the bride in bed before she experienced the embrace of her husband. Until fifty years ago it was still the custom for the male guests to disrobe the bride in the nuptial chamber. Just as it had been the practice in ancient Ireland for the king to deflower every bride before she reached her husband. Fertility in these early societies was important, and not virginity. The fear of hemorrhage accompanying defloration was perhaps the main reason for the contempt for virginity.

Virginity is often the source of great superstitious fear. Many peoples, for instance, specifically enjoined early intercourse in order to avoid the stigma of virginity. In Egypt the girl had to lose her virginity by promiscuous intercourse prior to puberty. With the Basoga-Batamba of Uganda virginity in a woman, who has reached a marriageable age, is considered criminal. Among the Bushango the aim of a girl after she has been betrothed is to have frequent intercourse with many men in order to occasion a pregnancy. This is an accomplishment which gratifies her prospective husband because it is definite assurance that she is not sterile. The Indians of Canada were so inbred with the same idea that a pregnant girl was the greatest attraction for men anxious to marry. In the Philippines, the Bisayos scorn their wives if they prove virgins. In Nigeria, among the Kaje, this same attitude predominates. A virgin there can command only the price of a goat; a girl who has already borne a child, however, is worth a horse. In the Congo regions a virgin is worth only one-sixth as much as a woman who has had

a child. In New Zealand women are considered fortunate because they have never known when they were virgins—for they have love affairs with boys almost from the cradle. This tendency to unrestricted intercourse from childhood is to be found among most primitive and many ancient peoples. Only in certain places, where virginity is associated with property value, is this general freedom reined-in by an economic custom. It is a curious phenomenon that virginity should be particularly guarded in parts of Africa where the influence of the slave-trade was most profound. And wherever it is guarded it is done so because of its economic value and not moral virtue.

With the exaltation of virginity is associated the subjection of women. Virginity has a value for the man who sells the woman or who purchases the wife. It is not the woman who profits by the economic asset which her virginity commands—but the man. While suicide in defense of one's virtue is not an uncommon gesture on the part of the Chinese woman, Chinese men indulge in a variety of sexual freedoms all of which are entirely approved by custom. Little Wives become their property as well as their Great Wife; female slaves are often employed to offer more devious thrills for their master's erotic proclivities; and the habit of providing prostitutes for the entertainment of male friends is a frequent practice among the mandarins. It is only the woman who is forced to protect her purity. Among those peoples in which women are dominant, we do not find them enslaving themselves in any such manner. In fact they maintain a greater freedom in their sexual relations often than the men. In Uganda, Hawaii, Tahiti, Paraguay, Sierra Leone, Madagascar and among the Bosonge of the Congo, women disdain such virtues as foolish and unnatural. In these places women are not subject to men.

The exclusive possessiveness which has been encircled about the sexual relation it is patent, is only of recent evolution. The habit of lending one's wife, or even daughter, was common in many parts of Europe not many generations ago. It continued even in the fifteenth century in Holland:

"It is the custom in the Netherlands that whosoever hath a dear guest, unto him he giveth his wife in good faith."

The idea that marriage has always been an affair of life-long duration is likewise absurd. Among many primitive peoples marriage usually lasted until the birth of a child or at best for a few years afterwards. Among the Manes of Sahara the women consider it proper to marry frequently; a long married life is condemned as unrefined and vulgar. The Abyssinians have limited or trial marriages as a general practice. The North American Indians also had trial marriages. For instance the Wyandottes had trial marriages which continued for only several days. Among the Hurons, Rev. D. Jones states that women are purchased (for marriage) by the night, week, month, or winter. The Cherokee Iroquois change wives several times a year. The Esquimaux are known for seldom keeping their wives more than a few years. In Malaya individuals marry forty and fifty times during a life-span. These variations could be multiplied without number were we to touch the habits and customs of all the different peoples in our world.

In very modern times the practice of polygamy, which ordinarily is associated with primitive and barbarous peoples—although the Biblical Jews practiced it on the basis of moral principle—was recommended by a poet no less conspicuous than John Milton and a moralist no less ingenious than John Lyser. Milton, who was a Puritan, made a plea for polygamy that was grounded in Biblical testimony:

"Either polygamy is a true marriage, or all children born in that state are spurious, which would include the whole race of Jacob, the twelve tribes chosen by God. . . Not a trace appears of the interdiction of polygamy throughout the whole law, not even in any of the prophets."

In 1650 shortly following the peace of Westphalia, the Frankish Kreistag at Nuremberg, confronted by the decimated population which had resulted from the Thirty Years' War, passed a ruling permitting every man to marry two women.

In other words, it was only a little over 275 years ago when an actual decree in favor of polygamy was issued by a Christian state in what is now Germany. And today we find Norman Haire prophesying polygamy as a possible solution for the sex problem: 

“Legalized polygamy would offer many advantages . . . there are many men, and some women, who apparently need more than one person of the opposite sex to make life reasonably happy for them. Before marriage the man and women would state whether they desired the union to be monogamous or polygamous."

The attitude of the Christian Church itself has undergone a surprising change. In the early centuries of its era "married life was treated as absolutely unlawful." St. Ambrose declared that "married people ought to blush at the state in which they are living," and Tertullian maintained that the disappearance of man was better than his propagation by sexual intercourse. The Christian hatred of woman strengthened her subjection. "Marriage and propagation are of Satan" was one of the famous proclamations of the priest Saturninus. Today the Church has reversed its attitude completely. Marriage is now lawful and priests and preachers confirm and bless it. The words of Tertullian are repudiated. It is the multiplication and not the extinction of humankind which is embodied in its opposition to birth control and abortion.

It has been our purpose in this long recitation of varying attitudes toward love and the sex-life to illustrate the relativity of standards and their impermanency in terms of social change. There is apparently nothing inherent or irrevocable in any attitude. We can only speak of values in reference to their immediate environment. They have no universal or unchanging sanctity which can be defended as ideal.

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