THE DUALISM IN MODERN LIFE: THE INSTITUTIONAL TABOO

The taboo and modern institutions; Survival of ideas of the uncleanness of woman; Taboo and the family; The “good” woman; The “bad” woman; Increase in the number of women who do not fit into the ancient classifications.

With the gradual accumulation of scientific knowledge and increasing tendency of mankind toward a rationalistic view of most things, it might be expected that the ancient attitude toward sex and womanhood would have been replaced by a saner feeling. To some extent this has indeed been the case. It is surprising, however, to note the traces which the old taboos and superstitions have left upon our twentieth century social life. Men and women are becoming conscious that they live in a world formed out of the worlds that have passed away. The underlying principle of this social phenomenon has been called the principle of “the persistence of institutions." Institutionalized habits, mosaics of reactions to forgotten situations, fall like shadows on the life of to-day. Memories of the woman shunned, of the remote woman goddess, and of the witch, transmit the ancient forms by which woman has been expected to shape her life.

It may seem a far cry from the savage taboo to the institutional life of the present; but the patterns of our social life, like the infantile patterns on which adult life shapes itself, go back to an immemorial past. Back in the early life of the peoples from which we spring is the taboo, and in our own life there are customs so analogous to many of these ancient prohibitions that they must be accounted survivals of old social habits just as the vestigial structures within our bodies are the remnants of our biological past.

The modern preaching concerning woman’s sphere, for example, is an obvious descendant of the old taboos which enforced the division of labour between the sexes. Just as it formerly was death for a woman to approach her husband’s weapons, so it has for a long time been considered a disgrace for her to attempt to compete with man in his line of work. Only under the pressure of modern industrialism and economic necessity has this ancient taboo been broken down, and even now there is some reluctance to recognize its passing. The exigencies of the world war have probably done more than any other one thing to accelerate the disappearance of this taboo on woman from the society of to-day.

A modern institution reminiscent of the men’s house of the savage races, where no woman might intrude, is the men’s club. This institution, as Mr Webster has pointed out, is a potent force for sexual solidarity and consciousness of kind. The separate living and lack of club activity of women has had much to do with a delay in the development of a sex consciousness and loyalty. The development of women’s organizations along the lines of the men’s clubs has been a powerful factor in enabling them to overcome the force of the taboos which have lingered on in social life. Only through united resistance could woman ever hope to break down the barriers with which she was shut off from the fullness of life.

Perhaps the property taboo has been as persistent as any other of the restrictions which have continued to surround woman through the ages. Before marriage, the girl who is “well brought up” is still carefully protected from contact with any male. The modern system of chaperonage is the substitute for the old seclusion and isolation of the pubescent girl. Even science was influenced by the old sympathetic magic view that woman could be contaminated by the touch of any other man than her husband, for the principle of telegony, that the father of one child could pass on his characteristics to offspring by other fathers, lingered in biological teaching until the very recent discoveries of the physical basis of heredity in the chromosomes. Law-making was also influenced by the idea of woman as property. For a long time there was a hesitancy to prohibit wife-beating on account of the feeling that the wife was the husband’s possession, to be dealt with as he desired. The laws of coverture also perpetuated the old property taboos, and gave to the husband the right to dispose of his wife’s property.

The general attitude towards such sexual crises as menstruation and pregnancy is still strongly reminiscent of the primitive belief that woman is unclean at those times. Mothers still hesitate to enlighten their daughters concerning these natural biological functions, and as a result girls are unconsciously imbued with a feeling of shame concerning them. Modern psychology has given many instances of the rebellion of girls at the inception of menstruation, for which they have been ill prepared. There is little doubt that this attitude has wrought untold harm in the case of nervous and delicately balanced temperaments, and has even been one of the predisposing factors of neurosis.

The old seclusion and avoidance of the pregnant woman still persists. The embarrassment of any public appearance when pregnancy is evident, the jokes and secrecy which surround this event, show how far we are from rationalizing this function.

Even medical men show the influence of old superstitions when they refuse to alleviate the pains of childbirth on the grounds that they are good for the mother. Authorities say that instruction in obstetrics is sadly neglected. A recent United States report tells us that preventable diseases of childbirth and pregnancy cause more deaths among women than any other disease except tuberculosis.

The belief in the possession by woman of an uncanny psychic power which made her the priestess and witch of other days, has crystallized into the modern concept of womanly intuition. In our times, women “get hunches,” have “feelings in their bones,” etc., about people, or about things which are going to happen. They are often asked to decide on business ventures or to pass opinions on persons whom they do not know. There are shrewd business men who never enter into a serious negotiation without getting their wives’ intuitive opinion of the men with whom they are dealing. The psychology of behaviour would explain these rapid fire judgments of women as having basis in observation of unconscious movements, while another psychological explanation would emphasize sensitiveness to suggestion as a factor in the process. Yet in spite of these rational explanations of woman’s swift conclusions on matters of importance, she is still accredited with a mysterious faculty of intuition.

A curious instance of the peculiar forms in which old taboos linger on in modern life is the taboos on certain words and on discussion of certain subjects. The ascetic idea of the uncleanness of the sex relation is especially noticeable. A study of 150 girls made by the writer in 1916-17 showed a taboo on thought and discussion among well-bred girls of the following subjects, which they characterize as “indelicate,” “polluting,” and “things completely outside the knowledge of a lady.”

1. Things contrary to custom, often called “wicked” and “immoral.”

2. Things “disgusting,” such as bodily functions, normal as well as pathological, and all the implications of uncleanliness.

3. Things uncanny, that “make your flesh creep,” and things suspicious.

4. Many forms of animal life which it is a commonplace that girls will fear or which are considered unclean.

5. Sex differences.

6. Age differences.

7. All matters relating to the double standard of morality.

8. All matters connected with marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth.

9. Allusions to any part of the body except head and hands.

10. Politics.

11. Religion.

It will be noted that most of these taboo objects are obviously those which the concept of the Model Woman has ruled out of the life of the feminine half of the world.

As might well be expected, it is in the marriage ceremony and the customs of the family institution that the most direct continuation of taboo may be found. The early cérémonials connected with marriage, as Mr Crawley has shown, counteracted to some extent man’s ancient fear of woman as the embodiment of a weakness which would emasculate him. Marriage acted as a bridge, by which the breach of taboo was expiated, condoned, and socially countenanced. Modern convention in many forms perpetuates this concept. Marriage, a conventionalized breach of taboo, is the beginning of a new family. In all its forms, social, religious, or legal, it is an accepted exception to the social injunctions which keep men and women apart under other circumstances.

The new family as a part of the social order comes into existence through the social recognition of a relationship which is considered especially dangerous and can only be recognized by the performance of elaborate rites and ceremonies. It is taboo for men and women to have contact with each other. Contact may occur only under ceremonial conditions, guarded in turn by taboo, and therefore socially recognized. The girl whose life from puberty on has been carefully guarded by taboos, passes through the gateway of ceremonial into a new life, which is quite as carefully guarded. These restrictions and elaborate rituals which surround marriage and family life may appropriately be termed institutional taboos. They include the property and division of labour taboos in the survival forms already mentioned, as well as other religious and social restrictions and prohibitions.

The foundations of family life go far back of the changes of recent centuries. The family has its source in the mating instinct, but this instinct is combined with other individual instincts and social relationships which become highly elaborated in the course of social evolution. The household becomes a complex economic institution. While the processes of change may have touched the surface of these relations, the family itself has remained to the present an institution established through the social sanctions of communities more primitive than our own. The new family begins with the ceremonial breach of taboo, the taboo which enjoins the shunning of woman as a being both sacred and unclean. Once married, the woman falls under the property taboo, and is as restricted as ever she was before marriage, although perhaps in slightly different ways. In ancient Rome, the wife was not mistress of the hearth. She did not represent the ancestral gods, the lares and penates, since she was not descended from them. In death as in life she counted only as a part of her husband. Greek, Roman and Hindu law, all derived from ancestor worship, agreed in considering the wife a minor.

These practices are of the greatest significance in a consideration of the modern institutional taboos which surround the family. Students agree that our own mores are in large part derived from those of the lowest class of freedmen in Rome at the time when Christianity took over the control which had fallen from the hands of the Roman emperors. These mores were inherited by the Bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages, and were passed on by them as they acquired economic supremacy. Thus these practices have come down to us unchanged in spirit even if somewhat modified in form, to fit the changed environment of our times.

The standardization of the family with its foundations embedded in a series of institutional taboos, added its weight to the formulation of the Model Woman type referred to at the close of the preceding chapter. The model wife appears in the earliest literature. In The Trojan Women, Hecuba tells how she behaved in wedlock. She stayed at home and did not gossip. She was modest and silent before her husband. The patient Penelope was another ideal wife. To her, her son Telemachus says:

“Your widowed hours apart, with female toil, And various labours of the loom, beguile, There rule, from palace cares remote and free, That care to man belongs, and most to me.”

The wifely type of the Hebrews is set forth in Proverbs xxxi, 10-31. Her virtues consisted in rising while it was yet night, and not eating the bread of idleness. In her relation to her husband, she must never surprise him by unusual conduct, and must see that he was well fed.

The Romans, Hindus, and Mohammedans demanded similar virtues in their wives and mothers. The wives of the medieval period were to remain little girls, most admired for their passive obedience. Gautier puts into the mouth of a dutiful wife of the Age of Chivalry the following soliloquy:

“I will love no one but my husband. Even if he loves me no longer, I will love him always. I will be humble and as a servitor. I will call him my sire, or my baron, or domine..."

The modern feminine ideal combines the traits demanded by the worship of the madonna and the virtues imposed by the institutional taboos which surround the family. She is the virgin pure and undefiled before marriage. She is the protecting mother and the obedient, faithful wife afterward. In spite of various disrupting influences which are tending to break down this concept, and which will presently be discussed, this is still the ideal which governs the life of womankind. The average mother educates her daughter to conform to this ideal woman type which is the synthesized product of ages of taboo and religious mysticism. Home training and social pressure unite to force woman into the mould wrought out in the ages when she has been the object of superstitious fear to man and also a part of his property to utilize as he willed. Being thus the product of wholly irrational forces, it is little wonder that only in recent years has she had any opportunity to show what she in her inmost soul desired, and what capabilities were latent within her personality.

In sharp contrast to the woman who conforms to the standards thus created for her, is the prostitute, who is the product of forces as ancient as those which have shaped the family institution. In the struggle between man’s instinctive needs and his mystical ideal of womanhood, there has come about a division of women into two classes the good and the bad. It is a demarcation as sharp as that involved in the primitive taboos which set women apart as sacred or unclean. In building up the Madonna concept and requiring the women of his family to approximate this mother-goddess ideal, man made them into beings too spiritual to satisfy his earthly needs. The wife and mother must be pure, as he conceived purity, else she could not be respected. The religious forces which had set up the worship of maternity had condemned the sex relationship and caused a dissociation of two elements of human nature which normally are in complete and intimate harmony. One result of this divorce of two biologically concomitant functions was the institution of prostitution.

Prostitution is designed to furnish and regulate a supply of women outside the mores of the family whose sex shall be for sale, not for purposes of procreation but for purposes of indulgence. In the ancient world, temple prostitution was common, the proceeds going to the god or goddess; but the sense of pollution in the sex relation which came to be so potent an element in the control of family life drove the prostitute from the sanctuary to the stews and the brothel, where she lives to-day. She has become the woman shunned, while the wife and mother who is the centre of the family with its institutional taboos is the sacred woman, loved and revered by men who condemn the prostitute for the very act for which they seek her company. Such is the irrational situation which has come to us as a heritage from the past.

Among the chief causes which have impelled women into prostitution rather than into family life are the following: (1) Slavery; (2) poverty; (3) inclination. These causes have been expanded and re-grouped by specialists, but the only addition which the writer sees as necessary in consequence of the study of taboo is the fact that the way of the woman transgressor is peculiarly hard because of the sex taboo, the ignorance and narrowness of good women, and the economic limitations of all women. Ignorance of the results of entrance into a life which usually means abandonment of hope may be a contributing cause. Boredom with the narrowness of family life and desire for adventure are also influences.

That sex desire leads directly to the life of the prostitute is unlikely. The strongly sexed class comes into prostitution by the war of irregular relationships with men to whom they have been attached, and who have abandoned them or sold them out. Many authorities agree on the frigidity of the prostitute. It is her protection from physical and emotional exhaustion. This becomes evident when it is learned that these women will receive thirty men a day, sometimes more. A certain original lack of sensitiveness may be assumed, especially since the investigations of prostitutes have shown a large proportion, perhaps one-third, who are mentally inferior. It is an interesting fact that those who are sensitive to their social isolation defend themselves by dwelling on their social necessity. Either intuitively or by a trade tradition, the prostitute feels that “she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, blasted for the sins of the people.” A beautiful young prostitute who had been expelled from a high grade house after the exposures of the Lexow Investigation, once said to the writer: “It would never do for good women to know what beasts men are. We girls have got to pay.”

The lady, dwelling on her pedestal of isolation, from which she commands the veneration of the chivalrous gentleman and the adoration of the poet, is the product of a leisure assured by property. At the end of the social scale is the girl who wants to be a lady, who doesn’t want to work, and who, like the lady, has nothing to sell but herself. The life of the prostitute is the nearest approach for the poor girl to the life of a lady with its leisure, its fine clothes, and its excitement. So long as we have a sex ethics into which are incorporated the taboo concepts, the lady cannot exist without the prostitute. The restrictions which surround the lady guard her from the passions of men. The prostitute has been developed to satisfy masculine needs which it is not permitted the lady to know exist.

But in addition to the married woman who has fulfilled the destiny for which she has been prepared and the prostitute who is regarded as a social leper, there is a large and increasing number of unmarried women who fall into neither of these classes. For a long time these unfortunates were forced to take refuge in the homes of their luckier sisters who had fulfilled their mission in life by marrying, or to adopt the life of the religieuse. Economic changes have brought an alteration in their status, however, and the work of the unattached woman is bringing her a respect in the modern industrial world that the “old maid” of the past could never hope to receive.

Although at first often looked upon askance, the working woman by the sheer force of her labours has finally won for herself a recognized place in society. This was the first influence that worked against the old taboos, and made possible the tentative gropings toward a new standardization of women. The sheer weight of the number of unattached women in present day life has made such a move a necessity. In England, at the outbreak of the war, there were 1,200,000 more women than men. It is estimated that at the end of the war at least 25% of English women are doomed to celibacy and childlessness. In Germany, the industrial census of 1907 showed that only 9-1/2 millions of women were married, or about one-half the total number over eighteen years of age. In the United States, married women constitute less than 60% of the women fifteen years of age and over.

The impossibility of a social system based on the old sex taboos under the new conditions is obvious. There must be a revaluation of woman on the basis of her mental and economic capacity instead of on the manner in which she fits into a system of institutional taboos. But the old concepts are still with us, and have shaped the early lives of working women as well as the lives of those who have fitted into the old grooves. Tenacious survivals surround them both, and are responsible for many of the difficulties of mental and moral adjustment which make the woman question a puzzle to both conservative and radical thinkers on the subject.