I realize that all these sex problems are complicated. Every case is individual, and in no two cases can you give exactly the same explanation. But it is my thesis that whatever the cause, if you trace down the causes of the cause, you will find economic inequality and class privilege. It is evident in the lives of the rich, and it is even more evident in the lives of the poor, who are not permitted the luxury of pretense. The poor live in a world dominated by forces which they seldom understand, subjected to enormous pressure which crushes and destroys them, without their being able to see it or touch it. In the world of the poor there is first of all poverty; there is insecurity of employment and insufficiency of wage, and the daily and hourly terror of starvation and ruin. Above this is a world of power and luxury, a wonderland of marvels and thrills, seen through a colored mist of romance. The working-class girl, born to drudgery and perpetual child-bearing, has a brief hour in which her cheeks are red and her beauty is ripe; and out of the heaven above her steps a male creature panoplied in the armor of ruling class prestige—that is to say, a dress suit—and scattering about him a shower of automobile rides, jewelry and candy and flowers. She opens her arms to him; and then, when her brief hour of rapture is past, she becomes the domestic drudge of some workingman, or else the inmate of a brothel.
It is a custom of social workers and church people, seeking data about these painful subjects, to interview numbers of prostitutes, and question them as to the causes of their "fall"; so you read statistics to the effect that seventeen per cent of prostitution has an economic cause, that twenty-six per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These pious people, employed by the ruling class to maintain ruling class prestige by demonstrating that wage slavery has nothing to do with white slavery, attain their purpose by restricting the word "economic" to food and shelter; forgetting that young girls do not live by bread alone, but also by ribbons, and silk stockings, and moving picture shows, and trips to Coney Island, and everything else that gives a momentary escape from drudgery into joy. We all understand, of course, that the daughters of the rich are entitled to joy, and we provide them with it as a matter of course; but the daughters of the poor are supposed to work in a cotton mill ten or eleven hours a day from earliest childhood, and the joy we provide for them is vicarious. As a woman poet sets it forth:
"The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play."
Some years ago my wife and I were invited to meet Mrs. Mary J. Goode, a keeper of brothels in the "Tenderloin," who had revolted against the system of police graft, and had exposed it in the newspapers. My wife questioned her closely as to the psychology of people in her business, and she insisted that the majority of prostitutes were not oversexed, nor were they feeble minded; they were women who had loved and trusted, and had been "thrown down." As Mrs. Goode phrased it, they said to themselves: "Never again! After this, they'll pay!"
As a matter of fact, the causes of prostitution are so largely economic that the other factors are hardly worth mentioning. The sale of sex is unknown in savage society, and would be unknown in a Socialist society. If here and there some degenerate individual would rather sell her sex than do her share of honest labor in a free and just world, such an individual would become a patient in the psychopathic ward of a public hospital. Economic forces drive women to prostitution, first, by direct starvation, and second, by teaching them money standards of prestige, the ideal of living without working, which is the heaven achieved by the rich and longed for by the poor. Contributory to the process are policemen, politicians, and judges who protect the property of the rich, and prey upon the disinherited; also newspaper editors, college professors, priests of God and preachers of Jesus, who attribute the social evil to "original sin," or the "weakness of human nature."
So far as men are concerned, economic forces operate by three main channels; late marriage, loveless marriage, and drudgery in wives. You will find patronizing and maintaining the brothels the following kinds of males; first, young boys who have been taught that it is "manly" to gratify their sex impulses; second, young men who take it for granted that they cannot afford to marry; third, old bachelors who have looked at marriage and decided that it is not a paying proposition; fourth, married men who have been picked out for their money, and have come to the conclusion that "good women" are necessarily sexless; and finally, married men whose wives have lost the power to charm them by continuous childbearing, and the physical and nervous strain of domestic slavery.
This latter applies not merely to the wives of the poor. It applies to members of the middle classes, and even of the richer classes, because the job of managing many servants is often as trying as the doing of one's own work. To explain how domestic drudgery is caused by economic pressure would require a little essay in itself. The home is the place where the man keeps his sex property apart under lock and key, and it is, therefore, the portion of our civilization least influenced by modern ideas. Women still drudge in separate kitchens and nurseries, as they have drudged for thousands of years. They cook their dinners over separate fires, and have each their own little group of children, generally ill cared for, because the work is done by an untrained amateur. Moreover, the prestige of this home has to be kept up, because the social position and future prosperity of the man depend upon it. The children must be dressed in frilled and starched clothing, which makes them miserable, and wears out the tempers and pocketbooks of the mothers. Costly entertainments must be given, and twice a day a meal must be prepared for the father of the family—all good wives have learned the ancient formula for the retention of masculine affections: "Feed the brute!" Living in a world of pecuniary prestige, every particle of the woman's surplus energy must go into some form of ostentation, into buying or making things which are futile and meaningless. In such a blind world, dazed by such a struggle, women become irritable, they lose their sex charm, they forget all about love; so the husband gives up hoping for the impossible, accepts the common idea that love and marriage are incompatible, and adopts the formula that what his wife doesn't know will not hurt her.
And step by step, as economic evolution progresses, as vested wealth becomes more firmly established and claims for itself a larger and larger share of the total product of society—so step by step you find the pecuniary ideals becoming more firmly established, you find marriage becoming more and more a matter of property, and less and less a matter of love. In European countries there may still be some love marriages among the poor, but in the upper classes there is no longer any pretense of such a thing, and if you spoke of it you would be considered absurd. In countries of fresh and naive commercialism, like America, the women select the men because of their money prestige; but in Germany, the process has gone a step further—the men are so firmly established in their class positions that they insist upon being bought with a fortune. The same is true when titled foreigners condescend to visit our "land of the dollar." They will stoop to a vulgar American wife only in case her parents will make a direct settlement of a fortune upon the husband, and then they take her back home, and find their escape from boredom in the highly cultivated mistresses of their own land.
Everywhere on the Continent, and in Great Britain also, it is accepted that marriages are matters of business, and only incidentally and very slightly of affection. The initiative is commonly taken, not by the young people, but by the heads of the families. Preliminary protocols are exchanged, and then the family solicitors sit down and bargain over the matter. If they were making a deal for a carload of hams, they would be governed by the market price of hams at the moment, also by the reputation of that particular brand of ham; and similarly, in the case of marriage, they are governed by the prestige of the family names, and the market price of husbands prevailing. Always the man exacts a cash settlement, and in Catholic countries he becomes the outright owner of all the property of his wife, thus reducing her completely to the status of a chattel. If any young couple dares to break through these laws of their class, the whole class unites to trample them down. One of the greatest of English novelists, George Meredith, wrote his greatest novel, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," to show how, under the most favorable circumstances, the union of a ruling class youth with a farmer's daughter could result in nothing but shipwreck.
The country in which the property marriage is most firmly established is probably France; and in France the rights of nature are recognized in a kind of supplementary union, which constitutes what is known as the "domestic triangle," or in the French language, "la vie trois." The young girl of the French ruling classes is guarded every moment of her life like a prisoner in jail. She is sold in marriage, and is expected to bear her husband an heir, possibly two or three children. After that, she is considered, not under the law or by the church, but by the general common sense of the community, to be free to seek satisfaction of her love needs. Her husband has mistresses, and she has a lover, and to that lover she is faithful, and in her dealings with him she is guided by an elaborate and subtle code. Practically all French fiction and drama deal with this "life in threes," and the complications and tragedies which result from it. I name one novel, simply because it happens to be the last that I myself have read, "The Red Lily," by Anatole France.
Of course, every human being knows in his heart that this is a monstrous arrangement, and there are periods of revolt when real feeling surges up in the hearts of men, and we have stories of true love, young and unselfish love, such for example as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," or St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," or Halévy's "L'Abbe Constantin." Everybody reads these stories and weeps over them, but everybody knows that they are like the romantic shepherds and shepherdesses of the ancient régime; they never had any existence in reality, and are not meant to be taken seriously. If anybody attempts to carry them into action, or to preach them seriously to the young, then we know that we are dealing with a disturber of the foundations of the social order, a dangerous and incendiary villain, and we give him a name which sends a shudder down the spine of every friend of law and order—we call him a "free-lover."
I see before my eyes the wretch cowering upon the witness stand, and the virtuous district attorney, who has perhaps spent the previous night in a brothel, pointing a finger of accusing wrath into his face, and thundering, "Do you believe in free love?" The wretch, if he is wise, will not hesitate or parley; he will not ask what the district attorney means by love, or what he means by freedom. Here in very truth is a case where "he who hesitates is lost!" Let the wretch instantly answer, No, he does not believe in free love, he believes in love that pays cash as it goes; he believes in love that investigates carefully the prevailing market conditions, decides upon a reasonable price, has the contract in writing, and lives up to the bargain—"till death do us part." If the witness be a woman, let the answer be that she believes in slave love; that she expects to be sold for the benefit of her parents, the prestige of her family and the social position of her future offspring. Let her say that she will be a loyal and devoted servant, and will never do anything at any time to invalidate the contract which is signed for her by her parents or guardians.