A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (best novels for teenagers .TXT) 📕

cause of the modern young man or the modern young lady, is apt to

impress these remarkable consequences merely as an arrangement of

quaint, comical or repulsive proceedings.

But there emerges to the modern inquirer certain ideals and

desiderata that at least go some way towards completing and

expanding the crude primaries of a Utopian marriage law set out

in section 4.

The sound birth being assured, does there exist any valid reason for

the persistence of the Utopian marriage union?

There are two lines of reasoning that go to establish a longer

duration for marriage. The first of these rests upon the general

necessity for a home and for individual attention in the case of

children. Children are the results of a choice between individuals;

they grow well, as a rule, only in relation to sympathetic and

kindred individualities, and no wholesale character-ignoring method

of dealing with them has ever had a shadow of the success of the

individualised home. Neither Plato nor Socrates, who repudiated the

home, seems ever to have had to do with anything younger than a

young man. Procreation is only the beginning of parentage, and even

where the mother is not the direct nurse and teacher of her child,

even where she delegates these duties, her supervision is, in the

common case, essential to its welfare. Moreover, though the Utopian

State will pay the mother, and the mother only, for the being and

welfare of her legitimate children, there will be a clear advantage

in fostering the natural disposition of the father to associate his

child’s welfare with his individual egotism, and to dispense some of

his energies and earnings in supplementing the common provision of

the State. It is an absurd disregard of a natural economy to leave

the innate philoprogenitiveness of either sex uncultivated. Unless

the parents continue in close relationship, if each is passing

through a series of marriages, the dangers of a conflict of rights,

and of the frittering away of emotions, become very grave. The

family will lose homogeneity, and its individuals will have for the

mother varied and perhaps incompatible emotional associations. The

balance of social advantage is certainly on the side of much more

permanent unions, on the side of an arrangement that, subject to

ample provisions for a formal divorce without disgrace in cases of

incompatibility, would bind, or at least enforce ideals that would

tend to bind, a man and woman together for the whole term of her

maternal activity, until, that is, the last born of her children was

no longer in need of her help.

The second system of considerations arises out of the artificiality

of woman’s position. It is a less conclusive series than the first,

and it opens a number of interesting side vistas.

A great deal of nonsense is talked about the natural equality or

inferiority of women to men. But it is only the same quality that

can be measured by degrees and ranged in ascending and descending

series, and the things that are essentially feminine are different

qualitatively from and incommensurable with the distinctly masculine

things. The relationship is in the region of ideals and conventions,

and a State is perfectly free to determine that men and women shall

come to intercourse on a footing of conventional equality or with

either the man or woman treated as the predominating individual.

Aristotle’s criticism of Plato in this matter, his insistence upon

the natural inferiority of slaves and women, is just the sort of

confusion between inherent and imposed qualities that was his most

characteristic weakness. The spirit of the European people, of

almost all the peoples now in the ascendant, is towards a convention

of equality; the spirit of the Mahometan world is towards the

intensification of a convention that the man alone is a citizen and

that the woman is very largely his property. There can be no doubt

that the latter of these two convenient fictions is the more

primitive way of regarding this relationship. It is quite unfruitful

to argue between these ideals as if there were a demonstrable

conclusion, the adoption of either is an arbitrary act, and we shall

simply follow our age and time if we display a certain bias for the

former.

If one looks closely into the various practical expansions of these

ideas, we find their inherent falsity works itself out in a very

natural way so soon as reality is touched. Those who insist upon

equality work in effect for assimilation, for a similar treatment of

the sexes. Plato’s women of the governing class, for example, were

to strip for gymnastics like men, to bear arms and go to war, and

follow most of the masculine occupations of their class. They were

to have the same education and to be assimilated to men at every

doubtful point. The Aristotelian attitude, on the other hand,

insists upon specialisation. The men are to rule and fight and toil;

the women are to support motherhood in a state of natural

inferiority. The trend of evolutionary forces through long centuries

of human development has been on the whole in this second direction,

has been towards differentiation. [Footnote: See Havelock Ellis’s

Man and Woman.] An adult white woman differs far more from a white

man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent male. The

education, the mental disposition, of a white or Asiatic woman,

reeks of sex; her modesty, her decorum is not to ignore sex but to

refine and put a point to it; her costume is clamorous with the

distinctive elements of her form. The white woman in the materially

prosperous nations is more of a sexual specialist than her sister of

the poor and austere peoples, of the prosperous classes more so than

the peasant woman. The contemporary woman of fashion who sets the

tone of occidental intercourse is a stimulant rather than a

companion for a man. Too commonly she is an unwholesome stimulant

turning a man from wisdom to appearance, from beauty to beautiful

pleasures, from form to colour, from persistent aims to belief and

stirring triumphs. Arrayed in what she calls distinctly “dress,”

scented, adorned, displayed, she achieves by artifice a sexual

differentiation profounder than that of any other vertebrated

animal. She outshines the peacock’s excess above his mate, one must

probe among the domestic secrets of the insects and crustacea to

find her living parallel. And it is a question by no means easy and

yet of the utmost importance, to determine how far the wide and

widening differences between the human sexes is inherent and

inevitable, and how far it is an accident of social development that

may be converted and reduced under a different social regimen. Are

we going to recognise and accentuate this difference and to arrange

our Utopian organisation to play upon it, are we to have two primary

classes of human being, harmonising indeed and reacting, but

following essentially different lives, or are we going to minimise

this difference in every possible way?

The former alternative leads either to a romantic organisation of

society in which men will live and fight and die for wonderful,

beautiful, exaggerated creatures, or it leads to the hareem. It

would probably lead through one phase to the other. Women would be

enigmas and mysteries and maternal dignitaries that one would

approach in a state of emotional excitement and seclude piously when

serious work was in hand. A girl would blossom from the totally

negligible to the mystically desirable at adolescence, and boys

would be removed from their mother’s educational influence at as

early an age as possible. Whenever men and women met together, the

men would be in a state of inflamed competition towards one another,

and the women likewise, and the intercourse of ideas would be in

suspense. Under the latter alternative the sexual relation would be

subordinated to friendship and companionship; boys and girls would

be co-educated—very largely under maternal direction, and women,

disarmed of their distinctive barbaric adornments, the feathers,

beads, lace, and trimmings that enhance their clamorous claim to a

directly personal attention would mingle, according to their

quality, in the counsels and intellectual development of men. Such

women would be fit to educate boys even up to adolescence. It is

obvious that a marriage law embodying a decision between these two

sets of ideas would be very different according to the alternative

adopted. In the former case a man would be expected to earn and

maintain in an adequate manner the dear delight that had favoured

him. He would tell her beautiful lies about her wonderful moral

effect upon him, and keep her sedulously from all responsibility and

knowledge. And, since there is an undeniably greater imaginative

appeal to men in the first bloom of a woman’s youth, she would have

a distinct claim upon his energies for the rest of her life. In the

latter case a man would no more pay for and support his wife than

she would do so for him. They would be two friends, differing in

kind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselves

in a matrimonial relationship. Our Utopian marriage so far as we

have discussed it, is indeterminate between these alternatives.

We have laid it down as a general principle that the private morals

of an adult citizen are no concern for the State. But that involves

a decision to disregard certain types of bargain. A sanely contrived

State will refuse to sustain bargains wherein there is no plausibly

fair exchange, and if private morality is really to be outside the

scope of the State then the affections and endearments most

certainly must not be regarded as negotiable commodities. The State,

therefore, will absolutely ignore the distribution of these favours

unless children, or at least the possibility of children, is

involved. It follows that it will refuse to recognise any debts or

transfers of property that are based on such considerations. It will

be only consistent, therefore, to refuse recognition in the marriage

contract to any financial obligation between husband and wife, or

any settlements qualifying that contract, except when they are in

the nature of accessory provision for the prospective children.

[Footnote: Unqualified gifts for love by solvent people will, of

course, be quite possible and permissible, unsalaried services and

the like, provided the standard of life is maintained and the joint

income of the couple between whom the services hold does not sink

below twice the minimum wage.] So far the Utopian State will throw

its weight upon the side of those who advocate the independence of

women and their conventional equality with men.

But to any further definition of the marriage relation the World

State of Utopia will not commit itself. The wide range of

relationships that are left possible, within and without the

marriage code, are entirely a matter for the individual choice and

imagination. Whether a man treat his wife in private as a goddess to

be propitiated, as a “mystery” to be adored, as an agreeable

auxiliary, as a particularly intimate friend, or as the wholesome

mother of his children, is entirely a matter for their private

intercourse: whether he keep her in Oriental idleness or active

co-operation, or leave her to live her independent life, rests with

the couple alone, and all the possible friendship and intimacies

outside marriage also lie quite beyond the organisation of the

modern State. Religious teaching and literature may affect these;

customs may arise; certain types of relationship may involve social

isolation; the justice of the statesman is blind to such things. It

may be urged that according to Atkinson’s illuminating analysis

[Footnote: See Lang and Atkinson’s Social Origins and Primal Law.]

the control of love-making was the very origin of the human

community. In Utopia, nevertheless, love-making is no concern of the

State’s beyond the province that the protection of