The Task of Social Hygiene

We may be sure that women, whose interests are so much at stake in this matter, and who tend to look at it in a practical rather than in a legal and theological spirit, will exert a powerful influence when they have acquired the ability to enforce that influence by the vote. This is significantly indicated by an inquiry held in England during 1910 by the Women's Co-operative Guild. A number of women who had held official positions in the Guild were asked (among other questions) whether or not they were in favour of divorce by mutual consent. Of 94 representative women conversant with affairs who were thus consulted, as many as 82 deliberately recorded their opinion in favour of divorce by mutual consent, and only 12 were against that highly important marriage reform.

It is probably unnecessary to discuss the opinions of other leaders in this movement, though there are several, such as Frau Grete Meisel-Hess, whose views deserve study. It will be sufficiently clear in what way this Teutonic movement differs from that Anglo-Saxon woman's rights' movement with which we have long been familiar. These German women fully recognize that women are entitled to the same human rights as men, and that until such rights are attained "feminism" still has a proper task to achieve. But women must use their strength in the sphere for which their own nature fits them. Even though millions of women are enabled to do the work which men could do better the gain for mankind is nil. To put women to do men's work is (Ellen Key has declared) as foolish as to set a Beethoven or a Wagner to do engine-driving.

It has probably excited surprise in the minds of some who have been impressed by the magnitude and vitality of this movement that it should have manifested itself in Germany rather than in England, which is the original home of movements for women's emancipation, or in America, where they have reached their fullest developments. This, however, ceases to be surprising when we realize the special qualities of the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic temperaments and the special conditions under which the two movements arose. The Anglo-Saxon movement was a special application to women of the general French movement for the logical assertion of abstract human rights. That special application was not ardently taken up in France itself, though first proclaimed by French pioneers, 68 partly perhaps because such one-sided applications make little appeal to the French mind, and mainly, no doubt, because women throughout the eighteenth century enjoyed such high social consideration and exerted so much influence that they were not impelled to rise in any rebellious protest. But when the seed was brought over to England, especially in the representative form of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, it fell in virgin soil which proved highly favourable to its development. This special application escaped the general condemnation which the Revolution had brought upon French ideas. Women in England were beginning to awaken to ideas,—as women in Germany are now,—and the more energetic and intelligent among them eagerly seized upon conceptions which furnished food for their activities. In large measure they have achieved their aims, and even woman's suffrage has been secured here and there, without producing any notable revolution in human affairs. The Anglo-Saxon conception of feminine progress—beneficial as it has undoubtedly been in many respects—makes little impression in Germany, partly because it fails to appeal to the emotional Teutonic temperament, and partly because the established type of German life and civilization offers very small scope for its development. When Miss Susan Anthony, the veteran pioneer of woman's movements in the United States, was presented to the German Empress she expressed a hope that the Emperor would soon confer the suffrage on German women; it is recorded that the Empress smiled, and probably most German women smiled with her. At the present time, however, there is an extraordinary amount of intellectual activity in Germany, a widespread and massive activity. For the first time, moreover, it has reached women, who are taking it up with characteristic Teutonic thoroughness. But they are not imitating the methods of their Anglo-Saxon sisters; they are going to work their own way. They are spending very little energy in waving the red flag before the fortresses of male monopoly. They are following an emotional influence which, strangely enough, it may seem to some, finds more support from the biological and medical side than the Anglo-Saxon movement has always been able to win. From the time of Aristophanes downwards, whenever they have demonstrated before the masculine citadels, women have always been roughly bidden to go home. And now, here in Germany, where of all countries that advice has been most freely and persistently given, women are adopting new tactics: they have gone home. "Yes, it is true," they say in effect, "the home is our sphere. Love and marriage, the bearing and the training of children—that is our world. And we intend to lay down the laws of our world."

IV

THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN IN RELATION TO ROMANTIC LOVE

The Absence of Romantic Love in Classic Civilization—Marriage as a Duty—The Rise of Romantic Love in the Roman Empire—The Influence of Christianity—The Attitude of Chivalry—The Troubadours—The Courts of Love—The Influence of the Renaissance—Conventional Chivalry and Modern Civilization—The Woman Movement—The Modern Woman's Equality of Rights and Responsibilities excludes Chivalry—New Forms of Romantic Love still remain possible—Love as the Inspiration of Social Hygiene.

What will be the ultimate effect of the woman's movement, now slowly but surely taking place among us, upon romantic love? That is really a serious question, and it is much more complex than many of those who are prepared to answer it off-hand may be willing to admit.

It must be remembered that romantic love has not been a constant accompaniment of human relationships, even in civilization. It is true that various peoples very low down in the scale possess romantic love-songs, often, it appears, written by the women. But the classic civilizations of Greece and Rome in their most robust and brilliant periods knew little or nothing of romantic love in connection with normal sexual relationships culminating in marriage. Classic antiquity reveals a high degree of conjugal devotion, and of domestic affection, at all events in Rome, but the right of the woman to follow the inspirations of her own heart, and the idealization and worship of the woman by the man, were not only scarcely known but, so far as they were known, reprehended or condemned. Ovid, in the opinion of some, represents a new movement in Rome. We are apt to regard Ovid as, in erotic matters, the representative of a set of immoral Roman voluptuaries. That view probably requires considerable modification. Ovid was not indeed a champion of morality, but there is no good reason to suppose that, before he appeared, the rather stern Roman mind had yet conceived those refinements and courtesies which he set forth in such charming detail. If we take a wide survey of his work, we may perhaps regard Ovid as the pioneer of a chivalrous attitude towards women and of a romantic conception of love not only new in Rome but of significance for Europe generally. Ovid was a powerful factor in the Renaissance movement, and not least in England, where his influence on Shakespeare and some others of the Elizabethans cannot easily be overrated. 69

For the ordinary classic mind, Greek or Roman, marriage was intended for the end of building up the family, and the family was consecrated to the State. The fulfilment of so exalted a function involved a certain austere dignity which excluded wayward inclination or passionate emotion. These might indeed occur between a man and a woman outside marriage, but putting aside the very limited phenomena of Athenian hetairism, they were too shameful to be idealized. Some trace of this classic attitude may be said to persist even to-day among the so-called Latin nations, notably in the French tradition (now dying out) of treating marriage as a relationship to be arranged, not by the two parties themselves, but by their parents and guardians; Montaigne, attached as he was to maxims of Roman antiquity, was not very alien from the ordinary French attitude of his time when he declared that, since we do not marry so much for our own sakes as for the sake of posterity and the race, marriage is too sacred a process to be mixed with amorous extravagance. 70 There is something to be said for that point of view which is nowadays too often forgotten, but it certainly fails to cover the whole of the ground.

It is not only in the West that a contemptuous attitude towards the romantic and erotic side of life has prevailed at some of the most vigorous moments of civilization. It is also found in the East. In Japan, for instance, even at the present day, romantic love, as a reputable element of ordinary life, is unknown or disapproved; its existence is not recognized in the schools, and the European novels that celebrate it are scarcely understood. 71

The development of modern romantic love in connection with marriage seems to be found in the late Greek world under the Roman Empire. 72 That is commonly called a period of decadence. In a certain limited sense it was. Greece had become subjugated to Rome. Rome herself had lost her military spirit and was losing her political power. But the fighting instinct, and even the ruling spirit, are not synonymous with civilization. The "decline and fall" of empires by no means necessarily involves the decay of civilization. It is now generally realized that the later Roman Empire was not, as was once thought, an age of social and moral degeneration. 73 The State indeed was dissolving, but the individual was evolving. The age which produced a Plutarch—for fifteen hundred years one of the great inspiring forces of the world—was the reverse of a corrupt age. The life of the home and the life of the soul were alike developing. The home was becoming more complex, more intimate, more elevated. The soul was being turned in on itself to discover new and joyous secrets: the secret of the love of Nature, the secret of mystic religion, and, not least, the secret of romantic love. When Christianity finally conquered the Roman world its task very largely lay in taking over and developing those three secrets already discovered by Paganism.

It was inevitable, however, that in developing these new forms of the emotional life, the ascetic bent of Christianity should make itself felt. It was not possible for Christianity to cast its halo around the natural sexual life, but it was possible to refine and exalt that life, to lift it into a spiritual sphere. Neither woman the sweetheart nor woman the mother were in ordinary life glorified by the Church; they were only tolerated. But on a higher than natural plane they were surrounded by a halo and raised to the highest pedestal of reverence and even worship. The Virgin was exalted, Bride and Bridegroom became terms of mystical import, and the Holy Mother received the adoring love of all Christendom. Even in the actual relations of men and women, quite early in the history of Christianity, we sometimes find men and women cultivating relationships which excluded that earthly union the Church looked down on, but yet involved the most tender and intimate physical affection. Many charming stories of such relationships are found in the lives of the saints, and sometimes they existed even within the marriage bond. 74 Christianity led to the use of ideas and terms borrowed from earthly love in a different and symbolic sense. But the undesigned result was that a new force and beauty were added to those ideas and terms, however applied, and also that many emotions were thus cultivated which became capable of re-inforcing earthly human love. In this way it happened that, though Christianity rejected the ideal of romantic love in its natural associations, it indirectly prepared the way for a loftier and deeper realization of that love.

There can be no doubt that the emotional training and refining of the fleshly instincts by Christianity was the chief cause of the rise of that conception of romantic love which we associate with the institution of chivalry. Exalted and sanctified by contact with the central dogmas of religion, the emotion of love was brought down from this spiritual atmosphere by the knightly lover, with something of its ethereal halo still clinging to it, and directed towards an earthly mistress. The most extravagant phase of romantic love which has ever been seen was then brought about, and in many cases, certainly, it was a real erotomania which passed beyond the bounds of sanity. 75 In its extreme forms, however, this romantic love was a rare, localized, and short-lived manifestation. The dominant attitude of the chivalrous age towards women, as Léon Gautier has shown in his monumental work on chivalry, was one of indifference, or even contempt. The knight's thoughts were more of war than of women, and he cherished his horse more than his mistress. 76

But women, above all in France, reacted against this attitude, and with splendid success. Their husbands treated them with indifference or left them at home while they sought adventure in the world. The neglected wives proceeded to lay down the laws of society, and took upon themselves the part of rulers in the domain of morals. In the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, says Méray in a charming book on life in the days of the Courts of Love, we find women "with infinite skill and an adorable refinement seizing the moral direction of French society." They did so, he remarks, in a spirit so Utopian, so ideally poetic, that historians have hesitated to take them seriously. The laws of the Courts of Love 77 may sometimes seem to us immoral and licentious, but in reality they served to restrain the worst immoralities and licences of the time. They banished violence, they allowed no venality, and they inculcated moderation in passion. The task of the Courts of Love was facilitated by the relative degree of peace which then reigned, especially by the fact that the Normans, holding both coasts of the Channel, formed a link between France and England. When the murderous activities of French kings and English kings destroyed that link, the Courts of Love were swept away in the general disorder and the progress of civilization indefinitely retarded. 78 Yet in some degree the ideals which had been thus embodied still persisted. As the Goncourts pointed out in their invaluable book, La Femme au Dix-huitième Siècle (Chap. v), from the days of chivalry even on into the eighteenth century, when on the surface at all events it apparently disappeared, an exalted ideal of love continued to be cherished in France. This conception remained associated, throughout, with the great social influence and authority which had been enjoyed by women in France even from medieval times. That influence had become pronounced during the seventeenth century, and at that time Sir Thomas Smith in his Commonwealth of England, writing of the high position of women in England, remarked that they possessed "almost as much liberty as in France."

There were at least two forms of medieval romantic love. The first arose in Provence and northern Italy during the twelfth century, and spread to Germany as Minnedienst. In this form the young knights directed their respectful and adoring devotion to a high-born married woman who chose one of them as her own cavalier, to do her service and reverence, the two vowing devotion to each other until death. It was a part of this amorous code that there could not be love between husband and wife, and it was counted a mark of low breeding for a husband to challenge his wife's right to her young knight's services, though sometimes we are told the husband risked this reproach, occasionally with tragic results. This mode of love, after being eloquently sung and practised by the troubadours—usually, it appears, younger sons of noble houses—died out in the place of its origin, but it had been introduced into Spain, and the Spaniards reintroduced it into Italy when they acquired the kingdom of Naples; in Italy it was conventionalized into the firmly rooted institution of the cavaliere servente

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1

Muralt, Lettres sur les Anglais. Lettre V.

2

In the reign of Richard II (1388) an Act was passed for "the punishment of those which cause corruption near a city or great town to corrupt the air." A century later (in Henry VII's time) an Act was passed to prevent butchers killing beasts in walled towns, the preamble to this Act declaring that no noble town in Christendom should contain slaughter-houses lest sickness be thus engendered. In Charles II's time, after the great fire of London, the law provided for the better paving and cleansing of the streets and sewers. It was, however, in Italy, as Weyl points out (Geschichte der Sozialen Hygiene im Mittelalter, at a meeting of the Gesellschaft für Soziale Medizin, May 25, 1905), that the modern movement of organized sanitation began. In the thirteenth century the great Italian cities (like Florence and Pistoja) possessed Codici Sanitarii; but they were not carried out, and when the Black Death reached Florence in 1348, it found the city altogether unprepared. It was Venice which, in the same year, first initiated vigorous State sanitation. Disinfection was first ordained by Gian Visconti, in Milan, in 1399. The first quarantine station of which we hear was established in Venice in 1403.

3

The rate of infant mortality in England and Wales has decreased from 149 per 1000 births in 1871-80 to 127 per 1000 births in 1910. In reference to this remarkable fall which has taken place pari passu with the fall in the birth-rate, Newsholme, the medical officer to the Local Government Board, writes: "There can be no reasonable doubt that much of the reduction has been caused by that 'concentration' on the mother and the child which has been a striking feature of the last few years. Had the experience of 1896-1900 held good there would have been 45,120 more deaths of infants in 1910 than actually occurred." In some parts of the country, however, where the women go out to work in factories (as in Lancashire and parts of Staffordshire) the infantile mortality remains very high.

4

Mrs. Bertrand Russell, "The Ghent School for Mothers," Nineteenth Century, December, 1906.

5

It is scarcely necessary to say that other classifications of social reform on its more hygienic side may be put forward. Thus W.H. Allen, looking more narrowly at the sanitary side of the matter, but without confining his consideration to the nineteenth century, finds that there are always seven stages: (1) that of racial tutelage, when sanitation becomes conscious and receives the sanction of law; (2) the introduction of sanitary comfort, well-paved streets, public sewers, extensive waterworks; (3) the period of commercial sanitation, when the mercantile classes insist upon such measures as quarantine and street-cleaning to check the immense ravages of epidemics; (4) the introduction of legislation against nuisances and the tendency to extend the definition of nuisance, which for Bracton, in the fourteenth century, meant an obstruction, and for Blackstone, in the eighteenth, included things otherwise obnoxious, such as offensive trades and foul watercourses; (5) the stage of precaution against the dangers incidental to the slums that are fostered by modern conditions of industry; (6) the stage of philanthropy, erecting hospitals, model tenements, schools, etc.; (7) the stage of socialistic sanitation, when the community as a whole actively seeks its own sanitary welfare, and devotes public funds to this end.

(W.H. Allen, "Sanitation and Social Progress," American Journal of Sociology, March, 1903.)

6

Dr. F. Bushee has pointed out ("Science and Social Progress," Popular Science Monthly, September, 1911) that there is a kind of related progression between science and practice in this matter: "The natural sciences developed first, because man was first interested in the conquest of nature, and the simpler physical laws could be grasped at an early period. This period brought an increase of wealth, but it was wasteful of human life. The desire to save life led the way to the study of biology. Knowledge of the physical environment and of life, however, did not prevent social disease from flourishing, and did not greatly improve the social condition of a large part of society. To overcome these defects the social sciences within recent years have been cultivated with great seriousness. Interest in the social sciences has had to wait for the enlarged sympathies and the sense of solidarity which has appeared with the growing interdependence of dense populations, and these conditions have been dependent upon the advance of the other sciences. With the cultivation of the social sciences, the chain of knowledge will be complete, at least so far as the needs which have already appeared are concerned. For each group of sciences will solve one or more of the great problems which man has encountered in the process of development. The physical sciences will solve the problems of environment, the biological sciences the problems of life, and the social sciences the problems of society."

7

This exclusive pre-occupation with the improvement of the environment has been termed Euthenics by Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, who has written a book with this title, advocating euthenics in opposition to eugenics.

8

Not one of the four stages of social reform already summarized can be neglected. On the contrary, they all need to be still further consolidated in a completely national organization of health. I may perhaps refer to the little book on The Nationalization of Health, in which, many years ago, I foreshadowed this movement, as well as to the recent work of Professor Benjamin Moore on the same subject. The gigantic efforts of Germany, and later of England, to establish National Insurance systems, bear noble witness to the ardour with which these two countries, at all events, are moving towards the desired goal.

9

In some countries, however, the decline, although traceable about 1876, only began to be pronounced somewhat later, in Austria in 1883, in the German Empire, Hungary and Italy in 1885, and in Prussia in 1886. Most of these countries, though late in following the modern movement of civilization initiated by France, are rapidly making their way in the same direction. Thus the birth-rate in Berlin is already as low as that of Paris ten years ago, although the French decline began at a very early period. In Norway, again, the decline was not marked until 1900, but the birth-rate has nevertheless already fallen as low as that of Sweden, where the fall began very much earlier.

10

"Foresight and self-control is, and always must be, the ground and medium of all Moral Socialism," says Bosanquet (The Civilization of Christendom, p. 336), using the term "Socialism" in the wide and not in the economic sense. We see the same civilized growth of foresight and self-control in the decrease of drunkenness. Thus in England the number of convictions for drunkenness, while varying greatly in different parts of the country, is decreasing for the whole country at the rapid rate of 5000 to 8000 a year, notwithstanding the constant growth of the population. It is incorrect to suppose that this decrease has any connection with decreased opportunities for drinking; thus in London County and in Cardiff the proportion of premises licensed for drinking is the same, yet while the convictions for drunkenness in 1910 were in London 83 per 10,000 inhabitants, in Cardiff they were under 6 per 10,000.