The other day I listened to a conversation on marriage and divorce
between a well-known feminist, her daughter, and an Episcopal
clergyman. The celibate cleric and the younger woman were in fair
accord: the institution of marriage was invaluable to society and had
to be protected. Let there be no divorce, said the cleric, on any
ground, at least within the church; children should be cared for by
both parents, divorce being sought only as an ultimate recourse, said
the girl, who was two years married and had a son.
The feminist was biding her time. Finally she said: “So much for the
institution. What of the actual sex life? No divorce and continence or
no divorce and intimacy with another?”
“The first, of course,” said the cleric.
“Not at all; the second,” said the girl. “And you, mother?”
“Oh, on the whole I’m for the brittle marriage as against the lax, the
American way against the European. But most of all I am for tolerance
in sex relations and for respecting privacy. Why not all kinds of
relations for all kinds of persons? Just as there are now, but with
respect or tolerance for the individual and without hypocrisy.”
“Even if we did not agree,” the cleric said later to the feminist, “we
could talk about it as twenty years ago we could not. So much to the
good.”
“So much to the bad,” said the girl’s father, still later; “better for
all of us the old reserve.” The speaker was a lawyer with divorce cases
in his practice.
Had we not here a mingling of currents from law, the church, feminism,
and the younger generation which illustrates what divergency of
attitude on sex and sex institutions or practices may exist to-day,
even within the same cultural and local circle? Include circles of
different education and locality and although the range of difference
would be no larger the expressions of opinion would vary. Is the
variation in opinion due to variation in experience or is it due
to that contemporaneous lifting of the taboo on discussion which
characterizes not only our talk about sex but about other interests as
well? A remarkable and indisputable change of attitude, this release
from verbal taboo, which often gives us a sense of change in general
greater perhaps than the facts themselves warrant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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