<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_XL" id="CHAPTER_XL"></SPAN>CHAPTER XL<br/><br/> EARLY MARRIAGE</h2>
<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses love marriages, how they can be made, and the duty of
parents in respect to them.)</p>
</div>
<p>I have shown how economic forces in our society make for later and later
marriage; and at the present time economic forces are so overwhelming
that all other forces are hardly worth mentioning in comparison. You
are, let us say, the mother of a boy of eighteen, and you have what you
call "common sense"—meaning thereby a grasp of the money facts of life.
If your darling boy of eighteen should come to you with a grave face and
announce, "Mother dear, I have met the girl I love, and we have decided
that we want to get married"—you would consider that the most absurd
thing you had ever heard in all your born days, and you would tell the
lad that he was a baby, and to run along and play. If he persisted in
his crazy notion, you and your husband and all the brothers and sisters
and relatives and friends both of the boy and the girl would set to
work, by scolding and ridiculing, to make life a misery for them, and
ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would break down the young
couple's marital intention.</p>
<p>But now, let us try another supposition. Let us suppose that your
darling boy of eighteen should come to you again and say, "Mother dear,
some of the boys are going to spend this evening in a brothel, and I
have decided to go along." Would you think that was the most absurd
thing you had ever heard in all your born days? Or would you answer,
"Yes, of course, my boy; that is what I had in mind when I made you give
up the girl you loved"? No, you would not answer that. But here is the
vital fact—it doesn't matter what you would answer, for you would never
have a chance to answer. When a mother's darling wants to get married,
he comes and asks his mother's blessing; but never does a mother's
darling ask a blessing before he goes with the other boys to a brothel.
He just goes. Maybe he borrows the money from some other fellow, and<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_067" id="vol_ii_page_067"></SPAN>
next day tells you he went to a theater. Or maybe he picks up some poor
man's daughter on the street, and takes her into the park, or up on the
roof of a tenement. Some such thing he does, to find satisfaction for an
instinct which you in your worldly wisdom or your heavenly piety spurn
and ridicule.</p>
<p>I do not wish to exaggerate. If you are an exceptionally wise and
tactful mother, you may keep the confidence of your boy, and guide him
day by day through his temptations and miseries, and keep him chaste.
But the more you try that, the more apt you will be to come to my
conclusion, that late marriage is a crime against the race; the more
aware you will be of the danger, either that his boy friends may break
him down, or that some lewd woman may come to his bedroom in the
night-time. Never will you be able to be quite sure that he is not lying
to you, because of his shame, and the pain he cannot bear to inflict
upon you. Never will you be quite sure that he is not hiding some cruel
disease, sneaking off to some quack who takes his money and leaves him
worse than before—until finally he shoots off his head, as happened to
a nephew of an old and dear friend of mine.</p>
<p>Such is the problem of the mother of a son; and now, what about the
mother of a daughter? This seems much simpler; because your daughter is
not generally troubled with sex cravings, and if you teach her the
proprieties, and see that she is carefully chaperoned, you may
reasonably hope that she will be chaste. But some day you expect that
she will marry; and then comes your problem. If you are the usual
mother, you are looking for some one who can maintain her in the state
of life to which she is accustomed. If a fairy prince would come along,
or a plaster saint, you would be pleased; but failing that, you will
take a successful business man, one who has made his way in the world
and secured himself a position. But turn back to the figures I gave you
a while ago. If this man is thirty years of age, there is at least a
fifty-fifty chance that he has had some venereal disease; and while the
doctors claim to cure these diseases absolutely, we must bear in mind
that doctors are human, and sometimes claim more than they perform.
Every doctor will admit, if you pin him down, that these diseases burrow
deeply into the tissues, and many times are supposed to be cured when
they are only hidden.<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_068" id="vol_ii_page_068"></SPAN></p>
<p>Here is, in a nutshell, the problem of the mother of a daughter. If you
marry your daughter at seventeen to a lad of her own age, you have a
very good chance of marrying her to a person who is chaste. If you marry
her to a man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hundred.
If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have perhaps one chance in
ten thousand. You may not like these facts; I do not like them myself;
but I have learned that facts are none the less facts on that account.</p>
<p>You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her attitude to a boy
of the same age. She regards him as a child; and you think, perhaps,
that it is natural for a girl to be interested in men of thirty-five and
even forty-five. But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one
of the perversions of pecuniary sex. The girl is interested in such men,
because all her young life she has been carefully coached for the
marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and solemnly brought
out, and introduced to other players of this exciting game of marriage
for money, with its incredible prizes of automobiles and jewels and
palaces full of servants, and magic check-books that never grow empty.
But suppose that, instead of regarding her as a prize in a lottery, you
let her grow up naturally, and taught her the truth about herself, both
body and mind; suppose that, instead of dressing her in ways
deliberately contrived to emphasize her sex, you put her in a simple
uniform, and taught her to be honest and straightforward, instead of
mincing and coy; suppose she played athletic games with boys of her own
age, and invited them to her home, not for "jazz" dancing and stuffing
cake and candy, but for the sharing of good music and literature and
art—don't you think that maybe this girl might become interested in a
lad of her own age, and choose him with some understanding of his real
self?</p>
<p>You take it for granted that young people should not marry until they
can "afford it." But stop and consider, is not this a relic of old days?
Always it takes time, and deliberate effort of the reason, to adjust our
conventions to new facts; so face this fact—marriage today does not
necessarily mean children, it may just mean love. It involves little
more expense, because the young people need cost no more together than
they cost in the separate homes of their parents. If they are children
of the poor, they are already taking care<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_069" id="vol_ii_page_069"></SPAN> of themselves. If they are
children of the moderately well off, their parents expect to support
them while they are getting an education; and why can they not just as
well live together, and the parents of each contribute their share? Let
the parents of the boy give him, not merely what it costs to keep him at
home, but also the sums which otherwise the boy would pay to the
brothels. By this argument I do not mean that I favor keeping young
people financially dependent upon their parents. My own son is working
his own way through college, and I should be glad to see every young man
doing the same. All that I am saying is that if parents are going to
support their children while they are getting an education, they might
just as well support them married as single, instead of penalizing
matrimony by making all allowances cease at that point.</p>
<p>I know a certain ardent feminist, who is all for late marriage for
women, and abhors my ideas on this subject. She wants women to get a
chance to develop their personalities; whereas I want to sacrifice them
to the frantic exigencies of the male animal! Young things of seventeen
and eighteen have no idea what they are, or what they want from life;
the mating impulse is a blind frenzy in them, and they must be taught to
control it, just as they are taught not to kill when they are angry!</p>
<p>In the first place, I point out that young ladies in colleges and in
ballrooms give a lot of time and thought to sex, even though they do not
call it by that inelegant term. I very much question whether, if we
should apply our wisdom to the task of getting our young people happily
mated before we sent them off to college, we should not get a lot more
serious study out of them than we now do, with all their "fussing" and
flirting and dancing.</p>
<p>Second, I am willing to make heroic moral efforts, where I see any
chance of adequate results, but I have examined the facts, and
definitely made up my mind that it is not worth while, in our present
stage of culture, to preach to the mass of men the doctrine that they
should abstain from sex experience until they are twenty-five or thirty
years of age. You may storm at them, but they only laugh at you; you may
pass laws, and try to put them in jail, but you only provide a harvest
for blackmailers and grafters. As to sacrificing the girl, my answer is
simply that I believe in love;<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_070" id="vol_ii_page_070"></SPAN> and in this I think the girl will agree
with me, if you will let her! I have never heard any qualified person
maintain that it hurts a girl to respond to love at the age of seventeen
or eighteen; nor do I think that it hurts a boy, provided that he is
taught the virtues of moderation and self-restraint. Without these, it
will hurt him to eat; but that is no argument for starving him. As for
the question of his maturity and power to judge, we are able at present
to keep him from marrying anybody, so I think we might reasonably hope
to keep him from marrying a wanton or a slut. Certainly we might find
somebody better than the peroxide blonde he now picks up in front of the
moving picture palace.</p>
<p>The question, at what ages we shall advise our young couple to have
children, is a separate one, depending upon many circumstances. First,
of course, they should not have any until they are able financially to
maintain them. As to the age at which it is physically advisable, that
is a question to be settled by physicians and physiologists. I myself
had the idea that the proper age would be when the woman had attained
her full stature; but my friend Dr. William J. Robinson sends me some
statistics from the Johns Hopkins Hospital <i>Bulletin</i>, which startle me.
This publication for January, 1922, gives the results in five hundred
childbirths, in which the mother's age was from twelve to sixteen years
inclusive. It appears that pregnancy and labor at these ages are no more
dangerous than in older women; but on the other hand, the duration of
the labor is actually shorter, and the size of the children is not
inferior. These facts are so contrary to the general impression that I
content myself with calling attention to them, and leave the commenting
to be done by feminists and others who oppose themselves to the idea of
early marriage.<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_071" id="vol_ii_page_071"></SPAN></p>
<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_XLI" id="CHAPTER_XLI"></SPAN>CHAPTER XLI<br/><br/> THE MARRIAGE CLUB</h2>
<div class="blockquot"><p>(Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to avoid
unhappy marriages.)</p>
</div>
<p>I will make the assumption that you would like to have a trial of my
cure for prostitution. You would like to do something right here and
now, without waiting for the social revolution. Very well: I propose
that you shall find a few other parents of boys and girls who are in
revolt against our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and
form a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of course; you
will tactfully describe it as a literary society, or a social circle, or
an Epworth League. The parents who run it will know what it is for, just
as they do today; the only difference being that it will exist to
promote love matches instead of money matches. It happens that I am
myself a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying what
I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself with setting forth
exactly what this marriage club will do, and leaving it to more clever
people to supply the necessary camouflage.</p>
<p>This club will begin by correcting the most stupid of all our
educational blunders, the assumption of the necessary immaturity of the
young. Our young people nowadays have ten times as much chance to learn
and ten times as much stimulus to learn as we had; and it is a generally
safe assumption that they know much more than we think they do, and are
ready to learn every sensible and interesting thing. I am carrying on an
epistolary acquaintance with a little miss of twelve, who has read half
a dozen of my books—among the "worst" of them—and writes me letters of
grave appreciation. I have talked on Socialism to a thousand school
children, and had them question me for an hour, and heard just as worth
while questions as I have heard from an audience of bankers. Never in my
life have I talked about real things with children that I did not find
them proud to be treated seriously, and eager to show that<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_072" id="vol_ii_page_072"></SPAN> they were
worthy of that honor. A great part of our foolishness with children is
due to the emptiness of our own heads.</p>
<p>These parents will delegate one man and one woman to make a thorough
study of the sex education of the young. Of course, there is knowledge
about sex which has to be given to the very youngest child, and more and
more must be given as they grow older and ask more questions. But what I
have in mind here is that detailed and precise knowledge which must be
given to the young when they approach the period of puberty. At this age
of fourteen or fifteen the man will take each of the boys apart, and the
woman will take each of the girls, and will explain to them what they
need to know. This duty will not be trusted to parents, for parents have
an imbecile fear of talking straight to their children, and try to get
by with rubbish about bees and flowers. Let every child know that the
days of the hole-and-corner sex business is forever past, and that here
is an instructed person, who talks real American, and knows what he is
talking about, and will deal with facts, instead of with evasions.</p>
<p>This club will help to educate the youngsters, and also to give them a
good time, developing both their minds and bodies, and learning to know
them thoroughly. When they are sixteen each one will have another talk,
this time about marriage and what it means; learning that it is not
merely flirtations and delicious thrills, but a business partnership,
and the deepest and best of all friendships. So when John finds that he
likes Mary best of all the girls he knows, this won't be a subject for
"kidding" and sly innuendo, and blushes and simpering on Mary's part,
but an occasion for decent and sensible talk about what each of them
really is, and what each thinks the other to be. If they think they are
in love, then there will be a council of the elder statesmen, to
consider that case, and what are the chances of happiness in that love.
This may sound forbidding, but it is exactly what is done at
present—only it is not done honestly and frankly, and therefore does
not carry proper weight with the young people.</p>
<p>I am an opponent of long engagements, but I am also an opponent of no
engagements at all; I know no truer proverb than "Marry in haste and
repent at leisure." It would be my idea that a very young couple should
announce their<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_073" id="vol_ii_page_073"></SPAN> engagement, and then wait six months, and be consulted
again about the matter, and have a chance to withdraw with no hard
feelings, if either party thought best. If they wished to go on, they
might be asked to wait another six months, if their elders felt very
certain there were reasons to doubt the wisdom of the match.</p>
<p>There are, of course, people who, because of disease or physical defect,
should never be allowed to marry; and others who might marry, but should
not be allowed to have children. There should be laws providing for such
cases, requiring physical examination before marriage, and in extreme
cases providing for a simple and harmless surgical operation to prevent
the hopelessly unfit from passing on their defects to the future. But
dealing for the moment with normal young persons, members of our modern
marriage club, I should say that if, after they have listened to the
warning of their elders, and have waited for a decent interval to think
things over, they still remain of the opinion that they can make a
successful marriage, then it is up to the elders to wish them luck. I
have known of young couples who have refused to heed warnings, and
regretted it; but I have known of others who went ahead and had their
own way and proved they were right. There is a form of wisdom called
experience and there is another form called love.</p>
<p>I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of "young love,"
and I can see the truth in what they say; but also I can see the deeper
truth in the magic dreams of the young soul. Here is a youth who adores
a girl, and you know the girl, and it is comical to you, because you
know she is not any of the things the youth imagines. But who are you
that claim to know the last thing about a human soul? Look into your
own, and see how many different things you are! Look back, if you can,
to the time when you were young, and remember the visions and the hopes.
They have lost all reality to you now; but who can say how many of them
you might have made real if there had been one other person who believed
in them, and loved them, and would not give them up?</p>
<p>I write this; and then I think of the other side—the fools that I have
known in love! The trusting women, marrying rotten men to reform them!
The pitiful people who think that fine phrases and sentimentality can
take the place of<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_074" id="vol_ii_page_074"></SPAN> facts! I implore my young couples to sit down and
face the realities of their own natures, to decide what they are, and
what they want to be—and if there is going to be any change, let it be
made and tried out before marriage! I implore them to begin now to
control their desires by their reason and judgment; to begin, each of
them at the very outset, to carry their share of the burdens and do
their share of the hard work. I implore them to value independence and
self-reliance in the other, and never above all things to marry from
pity, which is a worthy emotion in its place, but has nothing to do with
sex, which should be an affair between equals, a matter of partnership
and not of parasitism. I think that, on the whole, the most dreadful
thing in love is the use of it for preying, for the securing of favors
and advantages of any sort, whether by men or by women.<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_075" id="vol_ii_page_075"></SPAN></p>
<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_XLII" id="CHAPTER_XLII"></SPAN>CHAPTER XLII<br/><br/> EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE</h2>
<div class="blockquot"><p>(Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that we have the
right and the duty to teach it.)</p>
</div>
<p>I assume now that our young couple have definitely made up their minds,
and that the wedding day is near. They are therefore, both the man and
the woman, in position to receive information as to the physical aspects
of their future experience. This information is now for the most part
possessed only by pathologists—who impart it too late, after people
have blundered and wrecked their lives. The opponents of birth control
ask in horror if you would teach it to the young; I am now able to
answer just when I would teach it; I would teach it to these young
couples about to marry. I would make it by law compulsory for every
young couple to attend a school of marriage, and to learn, not merely
the regulation of conception, but the whole art of health and happiness
in sex.</p>
<p>Perhaps the words, "a school of marriage," strike you as funny. When I
was young I remember that Pulitzer founded a school of journalism, and
all newspaper editors made merry—they knew that journalism could only
be learned in practice. But nowadays every city editor gives preference
to an applicant who has taken a college course in reporting; they have
learned that journalism can be taught, just like engineering and
accounting. In the same way I assert that marriage can be taught, and
the art of love, physical, mental, moral, and even financial; I think
that the day will come when enlightened parents would no more dream of
trusting their tender young daughter to a man who had not taken a course
in sex, than they would go up in an aeroplane with a pilot who knew
nothing about an engine.</p>
<p>The knowledge which I possess upon the art of love I would be glad to
give you in this book; but unfortunately, if I were to do so, my book
would be suppressed, and I should be sent to jail.</p>
<p>Some ten or twelve years ago I received a pitiful letter<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_076" id="vol_ii_page_076"></SPAN> from a man who
was in state's prison in Delaware, charged with having imparted
information as to birth control. Under our amiable legal system, a
perfectly innocent man may be thrown into jail, and kept there for a
year or two before he is tried, and if he is without money or friends,
he might as well be buried alive. I went to Wilmington to call on the
United States attorney who had caused the indictment in this case, and
had an illuminating conversation with him. The official was anxious to
justify what he had done. He assured me that he was no bigot, but on the
contrary an extremely liberal man, a Unitarian, a Progressive, etc. "But
Mr. Sinclair," he said, "I assure you this prisoner is not a reformer or
humanitarian or anything like that. He is a depraved person. Look, here
is something we found in his trunk when we arrested him; a pamphlet,
explaining about sex relations. See this paragraph—it says that the
pleasure of intercourse is increased if it is prolonged."</p>
<p>I looked at the pamphlet, and then I looked at the attorney. "Do you
think you have stated the matter quite fairly?" I asked. "Apparently the
purpose is to explain that the emotions of women are more slow to be
aroused than those of men, and that husbands failing to realize this,
often do not gratify their wives."</p>
<p>"Well," said the other, "do you consider that a subject to be
discussed?"</p>
<p>"Pardon me if I discuss it just a moment," I replied. "Do you happen to
know whether the statement is a fact?"</p>
<p>"No, I don't. It may be, I suppose."</p>
<p>"You have never investigated the matter?"</p>
<p>The legal representative of our government was evidently annoyed by my
persistence. "I have not," he answered.</p>
<p>"But then, suppose I were to tell you that thousands of homes have been
broken up for lack of just that bit of knowledge; that tens of thousands
of marriages are miserable for lack of it."</p>
<p>"Surely, Mr. Sinclair, you exaggerate!"</p>
<p>"Not at all. I could prove to you by one medical authority after
another, that if the desire of a woman in marriage is roused, and then
left ungratified, the result is nervous strain, and in the long run it
may be nervous breakdown."</p>
<p>The above covers only one detail of the pamphlet in question. I read
some pages of it, and argued them out with<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_077" id="vol_ii_page_077"></SPAN> the attorney. It was a
perfectly simple, straightforward exposition of facts about the
physiology of sex; and one of the reasons a man was to be sent to jail
for several years was—not that he had circulated such a pamphlet, not
that he had showed it to young people, but merely that he had it in his
trunk!</p>
<p>There is an honest and very useful book, written by an English
physician, Dr. Marie C. Stopes, entitled "Married Love," published by
Dr. Wm. J. Robinson of New York, a specialist of authority and
integrity. The book deals with just such vital facts in a perfectly
dignified and straightforward manner; yet Dr. Robinson has been hounded
by the postoffice department because of it; he was convicted and forced
to pay a fine of $250, and the book was barred from the mails!</p>
<p>I have so much else of importance to say in this Book of Love that it
would not be sensible to jeopardize it by causing a controversy with our
official censors of knowledge. Therefore I will merely say in general
terms that men and women differ, not merely as a sex, but as
individuals, and every marriage is a separate problem. Every couple has
to solve it in the intimacy of their love life, and for this there are
needed, first of all, gentleness on the part of the man, especially in
the first days of the honeymoon; and on the part of both at all times
consideration for the other's welfare and enjoyment, and above all,
frankness and honesty in talking out the subject. Reticence and shyness
may be virtues elsewhere, but they have no place in the intimacies of
the sex life; if men and women will only ask and answer frankly, they
can find out by experience what makes the other happy, and what causes
pain.</p>
<p>We are dealing here with the most sacred intimacy of life, and one of
the most vital of life's problems. It is here, in the marriage bed, that
the divorce problem is to be settled, and likewise the problem of
prostitution; for it is when men and women fail to understand each
other, and to gratify each other, that one or the other turns cold and
indifferent, perhaps angry and hateful—and then we have passions
unsatisfied, and ranging the world, breaking up other homes and
spreading disease. So I would say to every young couple, seek knowledge
on this subject. Seek it without shame from others who have had a chance
to acquire it. Seek it also<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_078" id="vol_ii_page_078"></SPAN> from nature, our wise old mother, who knows
so much about her children!</p>
<p>Be natural; be simple and straightforward; and beware of fool notions
about sex. If you will look in the code of Hammurabi, which is over four
thousand years old, you will see the provision that a man who has
intercourse with a menstruating woman shall be killed. In Leviticus you
will read that both the man and the woman are to be cast out from their
people. You will find that most people still have some such notion,
which is without any basis whatever in health. And this is only one
illustration of many I might give of ignorance and superstition in the
sex life. I would give this as one very good rule to bear in mind; your
love life exists for the happiness and health of yourself and your
partner, and not for Hammurabi, nor Moses, nor Jehovah, nor your
mother-in-law, nor anybody else on the earth or above it.</p>
<p>Great numbers of people believe that women are naturally less passionate
than men, and that marital happiness depends upon men's recognizing
this. Of course, there are defective individuals, both men and women;
but the normal woman is every bit as passionate as a man, if once she
has been taught; and if love is given its proper place in life, and
monkish notions not allowed to interfere, she will remain so all through
life, in spite of child-bearing or anything else. I say to married
couples that they should devote themselves to making and preserving
passionate gratification in love; because this is the bright jewel in
the crown of marriage, and if lovers solve this problem, they will find
other problems comparatively simple.<SPAN name="vol_ii_page_079" id="vol_ii_page_079"></SPAN></p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />