As in birth control so in other matters of sex intimacy the growth of cities and the complexity of our economy may be the more potent factors of change. In very large communities there is an ignorance of the personal relations of others, an inevitable ignoring which contributes unconsciously to tolerance toward experiment and variation in sex relations. Indifference to the private life of others is almost an exigency of our economic organization. Attention is directed to the efficiency of the personality encountered and away from the individual means taken to induce that efficiency. What difference does it make to an employer how clerk or stenographer lives after hours provided he or she is competent, alert, and responsive to the business need? In office or in factory one may be but a cog in the machine and yet left larger personal freedom than in a more independent job in a small place or than in a household. Out of such urban influences--negatively, of indifference, and positively, of attention to personality _per se_--come opportunities for personal freedom that will set men and women to ordering their sex life to please themselves rather than to please society. That is, ordinary men and women; certain outstanding figures will have to continue to forego freedom. The President of the United States, presidents of banks or colleges, cinematograph stars, “society ladies,” now and again a clergyman or a prize-fighter--all these will continue to be observed closely in their private life, and, like the gods and goddesses of other cultures or times, will have to conform to popular preconceptions of marriage or celibacy, chastity or libertinism. For them, as for other personages in folk-lore, individual adjustment or variation would be out of the picture. FOOTNOTES: [1] Dr. Ogburn informs me that his recent and still unpublished analysis of the census of 1920 shows that in localities where birth control is presumedly practiced the marriage rate mounts. He states also that in the country at large there has been a higher marriage rate in the last census decade and that the age at marriage is earlier. Toward Monogamy By Charlotte Perkins Gilman Charlotte Perkins Gilman _feminist, philosopher, writer was born at Hartford, Conn., July 3rd, 1860. Editor of the_ Forerunner _1909-1916; Author of “Women and Economics,” 1898; “In This, Our World,” 1898; “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 1899; “Concerning Children,” 1900; “The Home, Its Work and Influence,” 1903; “Human Work,” 1904; “What Diantha Did,” 1910; “The Man-Made World,” 1910; “The Crux,” 1911; “Moving the Mountain,” 1911; “His Religion and Hers,” 1923._ TOWARD MONOGAMY BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN