Marriage and Morals — Chapter-by-Chapter Outline

Author: Bertrand Russell First published: 1929 Edition covered: The 1929 first-edition text, published by George Allen & Unwin (London) and Horace Liveright (New York). The chapter list and titles below follow the 1929 Liveright printing as verified against the proofread Wikisource text (transcribed from the 1929 Liveright printing) and the Internet Archive scan of the State Library of Pennsylvania copy (320 pp., H. Liveright, 1929). The book has 21 chapters. Note on title variants: in texts derived from the Allen & Unwin line (including the 1976 Unwin Books paperback and the Routledge Classics edition, 2009, ISBN 9780415482882), Chapter II appears as "Matrilineal Societies" and Chapter III as "Patriarchal Systems" instead of the Liveright titles "Where Fatherhood Is Unknown" and "The Dominion of the Father"; all other chapter titles agree across editions. The Routledge Classics edition reprints the same 21 chapters with a new introduction. This outline follows the Liveright titles and notes the variants.

Central thesis

Russell argues that the sexual morality of Western civilization is not a coherent system but a potpourri of two incompatible legacies: a pre-Christian ethics built on the need for certainty of fatherhood, which demanded the subjection and "virtue" of women, and a Christian ethics built on asceticism, which treated sex itself as sin. Neither part survives rational scrutiny, and together they have produced enormous, unnecessary cruelty. Because the two decisive modern developments — contraceptives and the emancipation of women — have destroyed the material basis of the old code, the old code can no longer be enforced and should no longer be defended. What is needed is a genuinely new sexual ethic, derived from first principles rather than from taboo.

Russell does not argue for license. His two governing principles are, first, that deep, serious love between man and woman is among the greatest goods in human life and should be interfered with as little as possible, and second, that the care of children is the only legitimate social stake in sex, so the stability that children need is the one ground on which society may restrict freedom. The book's method is to examine sexual ethics from every relevant point of view — personal, conjugal, familial, national, international — before judging any institution. Its recurring conclusions are that instinct should be trained rather than thwarted, that morality consists of consideration for others rather than obedience to taboo, and that no system whose survival requires ignorance can be good.

What should sexual morality become when the fear of pregnancy — the true engine of female virtue — has been removed by contraceptives, and when the State is steadily taking over the functions of the father?

Chapter 1 — Why a Sexual Ethic Is Necessary

Central question

Why is a sexual ethic necessary at all, and on what grounds can any sexual ethic be justified or condemned?

Main argument

Two systems, neither primary. Russell opens with the claim that a society is characterized by two interconnected elements: the economic system and the family system. Marx derives everything from economics, Freud from sex; Russell accepts neither, arguing that the two are so interwoven that neither can claim causal primacy. Puritan sexual virtue was a part-cause of the industrial revolution as much as the industrial revolution reshaped sexual morals. Economics is about food, but food is obtained for families, so as the family changes, economic motives change: if the State raised children as in Plato's Republic, private saving and life insurance would nearly cease, and the State would become the sole capitalist.

Three layers of morality. The sexual morals of any community consist of layers: positive institutions embodied in law (monogamy or polygamy), a layer governed by public opinion, and a layer left to individual discretion. Russell's historical claim is that no country or age, except Soviet Russia, has determined its sexual ethics by rational considerations; elsewhere they are the outcome of superstition and tradition. The best sexual morality, he insists, varies with circumstances — industrial versus agricultural societies, high versus low death rates.

The five standpoints. Any sexual ethic must be judged from five points of view: the personal (the effects studied by psycho-analysis, including the indirect effects of early taboos); the relation of men and women (a sex relation is better when it has a large psychical element; love should be an equal relation, which rules out polygamy as an ideal); the family; the nation; and the international order. A system may be good in some of these respects and bad in others.

The family as the true ground of morality. The primary motive of Western sexual ethics since pre-Christian times has been to secure the degree of female virtue without which the patriarchal family collapses, since paternity is uncertain. Christianity added the demand for male virtue, out of asceticism, later reinforced by female jealousy. Even among animals, quasi-constancy arises where male help is needed to rear the young — "most birds are models of virtue" — but the State is increasingly taking over the father's role, so a father may cease to be biologically advantageous, at least in the wage-earning class; if that happens, there will be no reason for a mother to wish her child's paternity indubitable, and traditional morality will break down.

The law's two proper concerns. Law protects individuals in two ways: against assault and harmful exploitation (where "hysterical campaigns about the White Slave Traffic" produce evadable laws and blackmail opportunities) and against venereal disease (where the view that disease is a just punishment for sin blocks effective medical measures, and shame causes concealment).

The twofold task. The book's program: eliminate the elements of superstition, which are often subconscious, and take account of the entirely new factors — medicine, hygiene, the State's role in education — that make the wisdom of past ages the folly of the present. Reformers and reactionaries alike err by considering one or two aspects of the problem; it is especially rare to combine the private and the political points of view.

Key ideas

• Economics and sex are causally interlocked; neither Marx nor Freud has priority.
• Sexual morality has three layers: law, public opinion, individual discretion.
• Every sexual ethic must be judged from personal, conjugal, familial, national, and international points of view.
• The patriarchal family, and the female virtue that props it up, is the historical root of Western sexual morality.
• The State's growing role in education is making the father biologically dispensable, which undermines traditional morality from within.
• Law should protect against assault and disease; moralistic panic defeats both purposes.
• The task of criticism is to eliminate superstition and adapt ethics to genuinely new conditions.
• Reformers and reactionaries alike consider only one or two aspects of the problem; both the private and the political views must be taken together.

Key takeaway

No sexual ethic can be justified or condemned until it is examined from all its points of view, private and public at once, and the current Western code, a survival of superstition, fails that test.

Chapter 2 — Where Fatherhood Is Unknown

Central question

What does a society in which the biological fact of fatherhood is unknown reveal about how much of our sexual morality is "instinctive"?

Main argument

Instinct is vague. Marriage customs are a blend of instinctive, economic, and religious factors that cannot be sharply separated. Russell's central anthropological claim is that human instinct in sexual matters is extraordinarily vague and easily turned aside. Practices a European would call contrary to instinct — official defloration of virgins by priests, lending one's wife to a guest as an act of hospitality, polyandry, even infanticide where it seems economically advantageous — have persisted widely without conflict. In the strict psychological sense the only fully instinctive act in the whole realm is sucking in infancy; civilized people must learn the sexual act, and doctors are sometimes consulted by married couples of years' standing who have never discovered how to perform intercourse.

The Trobriand evidence. Following Bronisław Malinowski's three books — Sex and Repression in Savage Society, The Father in Primitive Psychology, and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia — Russell describes a people among whom paternity is unknown: a man returning from a year's voyage is delighted by his wife's new-born child and cannot understand European hints about his wife's virtue; a man with a superior breed of pigs castrates all the males, unable to see that this deteriorates the breed. Spirits insert children into mothers; virgins cannot conceive because the hymen presents a physical barrier to the spirits; unmarried girls live in free love yet seldom conceive, and it is considered disgraceful when they do, though nothing they did is held responsible. Descent is traced through the female line; authority over children belongs to the maternal uncle, affection to the father — "the maternal uncle has the power and the father has the love." The brother-and-sister taboo is so severe that the uncle, who has the right to order the children about, has not the right to be on the spot.

Paternity as a learned sentiment. Two distinct motives can attach a man to a child: he may believe it is his child, or he may know it is his wife's child; only the second operates where generation is not understood. The Trobrianders deny even the most obvious physical resemblance between child and mother, insisting children resemble the mother's husband — which, Malinowski thinks, stimulates the father's affection. Russell generalizes: affection arises from tending; anyone who has the care of a child tends to love it, and this, not blood, is the basis of paternal feeling. Malinowski's conclusion, which Russell accepts, is that all mankind passed through a stage when paternity was nowhere recognized.

Consequences for religion. Christianity is a patriarchal religion that cannot be made intelligible to people who do not recognize fatherhood: instead of "God the Father" one would have to speak of "God the Maternal Uncle." The idea that men are God's children cannot be conveyed to the Trobriand Islanders; missionaries must tackle the facts of physiology before they can preach the Gospel, and Russell reports they have had no success in that initial task.

Key ideas

• Marriage customs blend instinct, economics, and religion; the distinctions blur in practice.
• Human sexual "instinct" is vague and easily deflected; the sexual act itself has to be learned.
• In matrilineal Melanesia, descent runs through women, authority through the maternal uncle, affection through the father.
• Paternal affection is generated by tending a child, not by knowledge of biological paternity.
• Jealousy and morality as we know them rest on the recognition of fatherhood, a comparatively late acquisition.
• The absence of the Oedipus complex among the Trobrianders shows how much of Freudian family psychology depends on the patriarchal form.
• Christianity presupposes the fact of fatherhood and cannot be conveyed without it.

Key takeaway

Because humanity long lived, and some peoples still live, without knowing fatherhood, the "instinctive" foundation of our sexual code is an illusion: paternity is a belief, and the virtues built on it are conventions.

Chapter 3 — The Dominion of the Father

Central question

What happened to sexual morality and to women when the physiological fact of paternity was discovered?

Main argument

The discovery of paternity. Once a man recognizes that the child is, as the Bible says, his "seed," paternal feeling is reinforced by two factors: the love of power and the desire to survive death. Ambition extends beyond the grave through descendants — Abraham's satisfaction at learning that his seed shall possess the land of Canaan. Matrilineal society could not feed this ambition, since women do not fight; the discovery of fatherhood made society more competitive, energetic, and dynamic.

Female virtue as the price of paternity. The new and all-important reason for insisting on wives' virtue was the fear of falsified descent. The purely instinctive element in jealousy is not nearly so strong as most moderns imagine; its extreme strength in patriarchal societies is due to the fear of falsification of descent. Russell's test: a man tired of his wife and devoted to his mistress is more jealous over his wife than over his mistress, because a legitimate child is a continuation of his ego, while a child he does not know to be his would trick him into lavishing care on a child with no biological connection. Hence the subjection of women — first physical, then mental — as the only means of securing their virtue, a subjection that reached its height in the Victorian age.

The ruin of companionship. From the subjection of women followed the absence of genuine companionship between husbands and wives; their relation was condescension on one side, duty on the other. Women were kept artificially stupid and therefore uninteresting — hence Plato's dialogues treat men as the only proper objects of serious love, and the same held in China and in Persia in the great days of Persian poetry. "Love as a relation between men and women was ruined by the desire to make sure of the legitimacy of children," and the whole contribution women can make to civilization was stunted for the same reason.

Patriarchal power and its decay. Fathers exploited the discovery everywhere: ancestor worship, absolute power over children (in Rome extending to life and death), fathers deciding their daughters' marriages, and the despotic mother-in-law under whose persecution young married Chinese women were still being driven to suicide. Christ's saying that he came to set the son against the father and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law presupposes just such households. Religion reinforced the system — religion "may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government" — and Genesis shows how advantageous a numerous progeny was: "That was why in those days Yahveh ordered men to increase and multiply."

The automatic correction. As civilization advanced, the economic circumstances changed and the old precepts grew irksome: prosperous Rome saw the patrician stocks die out despite the moralists' exhortations, divorce became easy, women in the upper classes reached a position almost equal to men, and the patria potestas weakened — a development "in many ways very much like that of our own day." Christianity and the barbarian invasion destroyed the Greco-Roman system, but the individualism of Christian theology worked against paternal authority in the long run: the promise of personal immortality diminished men's interest in the survival of their progeny, and modern men seek greatness through the State rather than through numerous offspring. Modern society attaches infinitely less importance to paternity than ancient societies did.

Key ideas

• Knowledge of paternity fused paternal feeling with love of power and desire for posthumous survival.
• Jealousy in its extreme patriarchal form is fear of falsified descent, not pure instinct.
• Securing female virtue required the physical and then mental subjection of women, which destroyed love and companionship.
• Patriarchal power peaked early in civilization (Rome's patria potestas, ancestor worship) and has decayed since.
• Religion sanctified paternal authority; the gods are on the side of the Government.
• Christianity's individualism of the soul and promise of immortality undermined the family's claim on men's ambitions.
• Modern society is still patrilineal but cares far less about paternity, which is why traditional morals have lost force.

Key takeaway

The entire apparatus of female virtue and masculine authority grew out of the discovery of paternity, and the same historical forces that built it have been dismantling it ever since.

Chapter 4 — Phallic Worship, Asceticism and Sin

Central question

How did religion come to contain both pro-sexual and anti-sexual elements, and what psychological causes produce the horror of sex?

Main argument

The sacredness of fertility. From the time the fact of paternity was discovered, sex has been a matter of great interest to religion, which concerns itself with everything mysterious and important. In the agricultural and pastoral stages, crops did not always flourish and intercourse did not always produce pregnancy, so religion and magic were invoked; by sympathetic magic, promoting human fertility was thought to encourage the fertility of the soil. In early Egypt the sexual element in religion concerned the female genitalia — the cowry shell was held to have magic powers and served as currency — and later turned into phallic worship proper. Russell quotes Robert Briffault's chapter in Sex in Civilization: the agricultural festivals of the world show the most conspicuous examples of sexual license — the agricultural populations of Algeria resent restrictions on their women's licentiousness lest agriculture suffer; the Athenian Thesmophoria preserved the magic of fertility; the Saturnalia were the Roman feasts of sowing, succeeded by the carnival of southern Europe.

The moon as father. In many parts of the world the moon, regarded as masculine, is the true father of all children — the Maori say "the moon is the permanent husband or true husband of all women." Russell digresses on the conflict between lunar and solar priesthoods and calendars (England clung to the inaccurate calendar until the eighteenth century because the Gregorian was papistical), noting that Christ's birth at the winter solstice and his resurrection at the Paschal full moon show sun- and moon-worship surviving in Christianity.

Survivals and sacred prostitution. Phallic elements existed in all the pagan religions of antiquity and supplied the Fathers with polemical weapons, yet traces survived throughout the Middle Ages — ithyphallic saints in Flanders and France such as St. Foutin of Embrun, whose phallus was rescued from the Huguenots' destruction, stained red from libations of wine drunk as an infallible remedy against sterility and impotence. Sacred prostitution was widespread: respectable women went to temples for intercourse with a priest or a stranger, or the priestesses themselves were sacred harlots — all arising from the attempt to secure the fertility of women through the favour of the gods.

The anti-sexual reaction. Anti-sexual elements existed side by side from very early times and, wherever Christianity or Buddhism prevailed, won the victory. Westermarck documents "the curious notion that there is something impure and sinful in marriage, as in sexual relations generally": the Essenes considered all intercourse impure; asceticism spread through the Roman Empire, Stoicism replacing Epicureanism among cultivated Greeks and Romans, the Neoplatonists almost as ascetic as the Christians; from Persia came the doctrine that matter is evil, bringing the belief that all sexual intercourse is impure. A horror of sex, when it arises, is quite as much a natural impulse as the more usual attraction towards sex, and any workable sexual system must take account of it.

The two causes of asceticism. Beliefs are not the source of the anti-sexual attitude; they perpetuate a mood. The two main causes are jealousy and sexual fatigue. Jealousy makes the sexual act appear disgusting: Shakespeare's men do not desire their wives to be passionate, and the betrayed husband concludes that all sex is beastly; since old men have more weight than the young, the official opinion on sexual matters is that of those past desire. Sexual fatigue is a phenomenon introduced by civilization: it is unlikely in monogamy, since the stimulus of novelty is required for physiological excess, and it was guarded against by courtship — "Nature's safeguard against sexual fatigue" — but the economic factor eliminated courtship, since married women and prostitutes alike make their living by their sexual charms. Excess produces weariness and disgust, which "leads naturally to ascetic convictions"; where jealousy and sexual fatigue cooperate, the anti-sexual passion may become very great, which is why asceticism is apt to grow up in very licentious societies. Celibacy also had religious sources: priests and priestesses dedicated to a divinity are regarded as married to it — nuns remain the brides of Christ. And there are epochs of weariness — the Solomon of the Song of Songs against the Solomon of Ecclesiastes — in which men condemn sex. "Unfortunately it was in this decadent and morbid period that the Christian ethic was formulated."

Key ideas

• Fertility religion treated human sexuality as sacred and magically bound to the crops.
• Phallic worship survived into the Middle Ages in saints' cults; only Protestantism finally extirpated it.
• Sacred prostitution began as worship, and the Christian Fathers' invective marks its fall.
• The horror of sex is itself a natural impulse, produced mainly by jealousy and sexual fatigue.
• Courtship is nature's safeguard against sexual fatigue, and civilization has largely eliminated it.
• Asceticism flourishes in licentious societies and in weary epochs.
• The Christian ethic was formulated in the decadent and morbid later centuries of antiquity.

Key takeaway

Sexual morality oscillates between worship and horror of sex, and the anti-sexual pole — rooted in jealousy, fatigue, and weariness — is a natural mood, not a divine revelation, which is why it hardened into the Christian code at a decadent moment in history.

Chapter 5 — Christian Ethics

Central question

What exactly did Christianity contribute to sexual ethics, and can its condemnation of all sex outside marriage survive rational examination?

Main argument

St. Paul's revolution. Westermarck's dictum — "Marriage is rooted in family rather than family in marriage" — was a truism before Christianity but became a proposition needing emphasis after it, for St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view: marriage exists not primarily for the procreation of children but to prevent the sin of fornication. Russell prints I Corinthians vii. 1–9 in full. Paul makes no mention of children; the biological purpose of marriage is wholly unimportant to him because he imagined the Second Coming imminent and the only thing of real importance was to be found among the sheep. His recommendation of marriage is in the spirit of the doctor who advised Russell to suck an acid drop instead of smoking: "It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake." The condemnation of all fornication was a novelty: the Old Testament forbids adultery, meaning intercourse with a married woman — an offence against property, as the story of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt shows — and a man was free otherwise.

The ascetic extreme. Paul's views were emphasized and exaggerated by the early Church: celibacy became holy, hermits retired to the desert to wrestle with Satan, the Church attacked the bath on the ground that whatever makes the body attractive tends toward sin, and dirt was praised. St. Paula said "The purity of the body and its garments means the impurity of the soul"; lice were called the pearls of God. Russell quotes W. E. H. Lecky's History of European Morals at length: St. Abraham, who refused for fifty years to wash his face or feet; St. Ammon, who had never seen himself naked; Silvia, who refused to wash any part of her body but her fingers; St. Euphraxia's convent of one hundred and thirty nuns who never washed their feet; and the abbot Theodosius' miracle of the stream that dried up when his monks built a bath. Where such views prevailed, sexual relations became brutal, "like drinking under Prohibition"; the art of love was forgotten and marriage was brutalized. Lecky describes the patristic view of marriage: St. Jerome's end of the saint was to "cut down by the axe of Virginity the wood of Marriage"; St. Nilus left his wife, St. Ammon harangued his bride on the evils of the married state, St. Melania laboured to desert her husband's bed, St. Abraham ran away on his wedding night, St. Alexis lived unrecognized in his father's house.

The Church's compromise. The Catholic Church did not remain so unbiological as Paul: marriage has two purposes, the Pauline one and the procreation of children, and intercourse becomes a sin unless it is hoped to lead to pregnancy — the desire for legitimate offspring is the only motive that justifies it, no matter what cruelty accompanies it: a man may insist on his conjugal rights over a wife who hates intercourse, who is likely to die of another pregnancy, or who would bear a diseased or insane child, provided he hopes to beget a child. The sacramental doctrine makes marriage indissoluble, granting at most separation a mensa et toro. Yet the Church tolerated sin through confession and absolution, which increased the power of the clergy, the sole dispensers of absolution.

Protestantism. Luther, impressed by "It is better to marry than to burn" and in love with a nun, abandoned the praise of celibacy, rejected the sacramental character of marriage, and tolerated divorce in certain circumstances — but Protestants were more shocked by fornication and more rigid in condemnation, having abolished confession and absolution and left the sinner in a much more hopeless position. Russell sees this double attitude in modern America: divorce exceedingly easy, adultery condemned with far more severity than in most Catholic countries.

The method of criticism. The whole system needs re-examination without the preconceptions a Christian education implants, which "have a hold even over the unconscious." The attitude that sex is essentially impure is superstition, and "in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible" — the Pelew Islanders' belief about the perforation of the nose and European baptism stand on the same footing. Russell recommends imitating Jeremy Bentham's table of the springs of action: every blame-word has a praise-synonym ("adultery" and "fornication" versus "gallantry"), and clear thinking requires dull neutral phrases such as "extra-marital sexual relations."

The degradation of women. Christian ethics, through its emphasis on sexual virtue, degraded women: since the moralists were men, woman appeared as the temptress; respectable women were hedged about with restrictions while the unrespectable were treated with contumely. The Fathers' invective made woman "the door of hell"; a sixth-century provincial Council forbade women, on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Women's freedom, largely recovered in the Roman Empire, was curtailed after Constantine under the pretence of protecting them from sin, and the laws of property and inheritance were altered against women until the freethinkers of the French Revolution restored daughters' rights of inheritance.

Key ideas

• St. Paul refounded marriage as a remedy for fornication, with no interest in children or the family.
• The Old Testament's adultery is an offence against property; the Christian ban on all extra-marital intercourse is a novelty.
• Early Christian asceticism made cleanliness suspect and marriage a degraded state (Lecky's evidence).
• Catholic doctrine allows intercourse only with procreation in view, whatever cruelty results, and makes marriage indissoluble.
• Protestantism rejected celibacy and the sacrament but was harsher on fornication and left sinners hopeless without absolution.
• Loaded language ("fornication" vs "gallantry") prevents clear thought; neutral terms are needed.
• The ethic of female temptation and the property laws made Christianity a force degrading to women.

Key takeaway

Christian sexual ethics rests on the view that all sex is regrettable — a "morbid aberration" against biological facts — and its two parts, the Pauline anti-fornication rule and the ascetic hatred of sex, survive only as superstition lodged in the unconscious.

Chapter 6 — Romantic Love

Central question

How did romantic love arise, and what is its proper relation to marriage?

Main argument

The medieval invention. With the victory of Christianity and the barbarians, the relations of the sexes sank to a pitch of brutality unknown in the ancient world, which "was vicious, but not brutal." In the Dark Ages religion and barbarism combined to degrade the sexual side of life: bishops lived in open sin with their own daughters, and clerical celibacy was only rigidly enforced towards the end of the thirteenth century — Abelard could still regard marriage with Heloise as possible though scandalous. Russell quotes Lecky on the depravity of the clergy: Pope John XXIII condemned for incest, the abbot-elect of St. Augustine's at Canterbury with seventeen illegitimate children in a single village, an abbot of St. Pelayo with seventy concubines, Bishop Henry III of Liège deposed for sixty-five, nunneries "like brothels," and the confessional used for debauchery. The Church, given its ascetic outlook, could not beautify love; that had to be the work of the laity. There arose the curious division between the Greco-Roman traditions of the Church (learning, philosophy, canon law) and the Teutonic traditions of the aristocracy (common law, chivalry, poetry, romance), and the laity's contribution that concerns Russell is romantic love.

Difficulty as the essence. Romantic love was not unknown before the Middle Ages, but only then did it become a commonly recognized form of passion. Its essence is that the beloved object is regarded as very difficult to possess and very precious; great efforts — poetry, song, feats of arms — are made to win it. "I think it may be laid down that when a man has no difficulty in obtaining a woman, his feeling towards her does not take the form of romantic love." Medieval romantic love was directed at women of the highest respectability, separated from the lover by insuperable barriers of morality and convention; the Church had made sex so impure that love had to be Platonic. Dante's love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova is not a literary convention but "an emotion more passionate than any known to most moderns." Russell quotes Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages: the troubadours of Provence placed unsatisfied desire at the centre of the poetic conception of love — a turn in the history of civilization, for antiquity had sung only of happiness enjoyed and tragically lost; the dolce stil nuovo of Dante and his friends ended by attributing to love the gift of piety and holy intuition.

The two streams. In France and Burgundy the Roman de la Rose dealt with knightly love without insisting on its remaining unsatisfied — a virtual pagan assertion of love's rightful place in life, refined, gallant, and gentle, though only for the aristocracy, which presupposed leisure and emancipation from ecclesiastical tyranny. Tournaments, in which motives of love were prominent, were abhorred by the Church, which was powerless to suppress them; "in our democratic age we are apt to forget what the world has owed at various times to aristocracies." The Renaissance kept love poetic but stopped making it Platonic — Don Quixote and Dulcinea show what the Renaissance thought of the medieval convention; Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and Shakespeare's Sonnets retain its influence; the characteristic love poetry of the Renaissance is cheerful and straightforward ("Do not mock me in thy bed / While these cold nights freeze me dead"). Before the Middle Ages there was very little courtship poetry, because men had so little difficulty in securing the women they desired; "from the point of view of the arts, it is certainly regrettable when women are too accessible; what is most to be desired is that they should be difficult but not impossible of access."

Shelley and the unstable equilibrium. Romantic love reached its apogee in the romantic movement, with Shelley as its chief apostle. But Shelley's argument that love should never be restrained rested on bad psychology: it was the obstacles that made him write — Epipsychidion would not exist if Emilia Viviani had not been carried off to a convent, nor The Recollection if Jane Williams had not been a fairly virtuous wife. Romantic love depends on a state of unstable equilibrium: where the barriers are rigid (the Chinese system, in which a man never meets a respectable woman except his wife and never has occasion for courtship) or absent (complete freedom, where charm makes imaginative effort unnecessary), romantic love and love poetry do not flourish. Russell still calls romantic love "the source of the most intense delights that life has to offer," though it can only be an ingredient in life, not its main purpose.

Romantic marriage and its costs. Since about the period of the French Revolution, marriage has been expected to be the outcome of romantic love — a revolutionary innovation within living memory, the theme of the novels and plays of a hundred years ago. Russell doubts the effect has been as good as the innovators hoped: there is something to be said for Mrs. Malaprop's principle that love and aversion both wear off in matrimony, so it is better to begin with a little aversion. Each partner, marrying without previous sexual knowledge under romantic illusion, imagines the other possessed of more than mortal perfections; in America, where the romantic view of marriage has been taken more seriously than anywhere else, "the result has been an extreme prevalence of divorce and an extreme rarity of happy marriages." Marriage is something more serious than the pleasure of two people in each other's company; through children it forms part of the intimate texture of society. The kind of love that will enable a marriage to remain happy is not romantic but "something more intimate, affectionate, and realistic"; the view that romantic love is essential to marriage is "too anarchic, and, like St. Paul's view, though in an opposite sense, it forgets that children are what makes marriage important."

Key ideas

• Romantic love is a medieval, aristocratic invention, born of the Church's success in making sex impure.
• Its essence is difficulty: the beloved is precious because unattainable, so love becomes Platonic and poetic.
• The clergy's depravity and the lay ideal of courtly love grew up side by side (Lecky, Huizinga).
• The Renaissance kept love poetic but made it straightforward again.
• Shelley's revolt proves the point: the social barriers were part of the stimulus to his best poetry.
• Love poetry and romantic passion require an unstable equilibrium between convention and freedom.
• Marrying for romantic love is a recent idea, and where taken most seriously it produces divorce and unhappy marriages.
• The love that sustains marriage is affectionate, intimate, and realistic, not romantic illusion.

Key takeaway

Romantic love is a historically specific product of barriers — women "difficult but not impossible of access" — and it is the wrong foundation for marriage, which children make a serious social institution.

Chapter 7 — The Liberation of Women

Central question

What has the emancipation of women done to sexual morality, and where must equality between the sexes lead?

Main argument

The two causes of the transition. The transitional condition of sexual morals is due mainly to two causes: the invention of contraceptives and the emancipation of women. The emancipation of women is part of the democratic movement beginning with the French Revolution, which altered the laws of inheritance in favour of daughters. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women carried the claim; Russell's own mother, a disciple of Mill, caused him to be brought into the world by the first woman doctor, Dr. Garrett Anderson, then only a certificated midwife. The Married Women's Property Act (1882) was the great early success of the movement.

Why it happened so fast. Two causes: democratic theory, which made it impossible to find any logical answer to women's demands, and the increasing number of women earning their own living outside the home — a process that reached its height during the war, after which women received the vote for their share in "the bloody work." The idealistic pioneers who expected women to raise the moral tone of politics were disappointed; "it seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals." The rights of women never depended on any belief that women were morally superior; they depended solely on their rights as human beings.

The mental prison and the new morality. Social emancipation matters more than political. The East secured female virtue by segregation; the West educated respectable women from their earliest years to have a horror of sexual intercourse outside marriage, and the Victorian woman lived in a "mental prison" of subconscious inhibitions. The pioneers of women's rights were for the most part rigid moralists who hoped to impose men's fetters on men; since 1914 young women have taken a different line: "Their predecessors sought equality in moral slavery, whereas they seek equality in moral freedom." The motives of female virtue in the past were chiefly the fear of hell-fire and the fear of pregnancy; the one was removed by the decay of theological orthodoxy, the other by contraceptives, and the shock of the war caused the barriers to fall.

The double standard exposed. Men have always been allowed in practice what women are denied, and the possibility of this system has depended on prostitution — which no one proposes to duplicate for women. Every conventional moralist who thinks it out is committed in practice to the double standard; the demand for men's continence cannot be enforced, since it is easy for men to sin secretly. Given that many men cannot marry early for economic reasons and many women cannot marry at all, "equality as between men and women demands a relaxation in the traditional standards of feminine virtue," and in countries with an excess of women it is an obvious injustice that those who by arithmetical necessity must remain unmarried should be wholly debarred from sexual experience.

The satire of restoration. Russell's prescription for restoring the old morality is deliberately absurd: education of girls to make them stupid and superstitious (already fulfilled in church-controlled schools), severe censorship, chaperons, prohibition of motor-cars for unmarried women under fifty, monthly medical examinations by police doctors, eradication of contraceptives, and castration of all men except ministers of religion — with a footnote confessing that since reading Elmer Gantry, "I have begun to feel that even this exception is perhaps not quite so wise." The point: the old morality cannot be reestablished against human nature; "we must be content to let the world go forward rather than back."

The two futures. If the chastity of girls and the faithfulness of wives is no longer demanded, either new methods must safeguard the family — extra-marital intercourse rendered sterile by contraceptives, husbands learning to be as tolerant "as Orientals are of eunuchs" — or the State must take over the father's duties, with all children in the position of illegitimate children of unknown paternity. The new system, no more than the old, should involve an unbridled yielding to impulse; obligations and duties will still have to be recognized, though different ones. "The whole problem of sexual morality needs thinking out afresh."

Key ideas

• Contraceptives and the emancipation of women are the two causes of the present transition in sexual morals.
• Women's emancipation is part of the democratic movement; economic independence, not theory alone, drove it.
• Victorian women lived in a mental prison of subconscious inhibitions, not overt force.
• Modern feminism seeks equality in moral freedom, where the old feminism sought equality in moral slavery.
• The conventional moralist is logically committed to the double standard and to prostitution as the safety valve for men.
• Equality, given late marriage and surplus women, demands relaxation of the traditional standards of feminine virtue.
• The old morality can only be "restored" by absurd coercion; the new morality still imposes obligations.
• The new system means either contraceptive-sterile freedom with the family intact, or the State replacing the father.

Key takeaway

Once women demand equality in freedom rather than slavery, the old code cannot stand; the choice is between sterilizing extra-marital relations with contraceptives and letting the State take the father's place.

Chapter 8 — The Taboo on Sex Knowledge

Central question

Is it good that men, women, and children should be kept in artificial ignorance of facts relating to sexual affairs?

Main argument

Ignorance as the first question. The first question of a new sexual morality is not how relations should be regulated but whether ignorance of sexual facts is desirable. Russell's wider doctrine: "right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge." Ignorance serves only the interest of someone who wants another to act against his own interest — well understood on the Stock Exchange, and it covers much governmental concealment. Reticence about sex began as a means of masculine domination — at first only females were to be kept ignorant — and passed, as women acquiesced in the view that ignorance is essential to virtue, into "the region of irrational taboo."

The Dennett case. Russell takes as his text a Manchester Guardian report (April 25, 1929) of the trial of Mrs. Mary Ware Dennett, found guilty by a Federal jury in Brooklyn of sending obscene literature through the mails — a pamphlet giving the elementary facts of sex to children, endorsed by leading physicians, clergymen, and sociologists, and used in the Bronxville school system. The judge, Warren B. Burrows, ruled out all expert testimony; the jury of elderly Brooklyn married men was chosen by the prosecuting attorney for having never read H. L. Mencken or Havelock Ellis. English law is practically the same. The law "declares bluntly that children and young people must not know the facts of sex, and that the question whether it is good or bad for them to know these facts is entirely irrelevant."

What the taboo does to children. The traditional course — the stork and the gooseberry bush, "Hush, hush" in a shocked tone — means children learn the facts in garbled form from other children as something "dirty," infer that their parents do something nasty of which they themselves are ashamed, and discover they have been systematically deceived by those they trusted. "Their attitude towards their parents, towards marriage, and towards the opposite sex was thus irrevocably poisoned." Russell states the orthodox moralist's position and parodies its methods: white lies that masturbation invariably leads to insanity and intercourse with prostitutes invariably to venereal disease, silence even in marriage, sex as a disagreeable duty "in the same spirit in which one submits to a surgical operation" — adding that it is illegal in England to state in print that a wife can and should derive sexual pleasure from intercourse.

Intellectual and moral damage. The gravest consequence is the hampering of scientific curiosity: the child's "What-is-it?" reflex (Pavlov's phrase), the source of all scientific knowledge, is checked in one direction and therefore in all — if it is wicked to ask how babies are made, it may for aught the child can tell be wicked to ask how airplanes are made. Children are "rendered artificially stupid," and women who have had a conventional education are on the average stupider than men, largely because their curiosity was choked off. The moral damage is grave: the fables are disbelieved (as Freud first showed), parents' authority is destroyed, children learn deceit and concealment, and the threats about masturbation are a very frequent cause of nervous disorders in childhood and adult life. The effects are to "make people stupid, deceitful and timorous, and to drive a not inconsiderable percentage over the border line into insanity or something like it."

The remedy of openness. Mystery enormously increases curiosity; "sexual curiosity, like every other kind, dies down when it is satisfied," so the best way to prevent obsession is to tell children just as much as they care to know. Russell reports from his own school and his own children: children brought up with no idea of decency show a natural and healthy interest in where babies come from, "but not so much as in engines and railways"; children arriving at six or seven already taught that sex is improper enjoy a temporary release in indecent conversation, but weary of it when it is not checked — "by letting fresh air on to the subject, it has become disinfected." The taboo on nakedness is an obstacle: parents' unwillingness to be seen naked gives children a sense of mystery, and "there is only one way to avoid indecency, and that is to avoid mystery." Nudity out-of-doors in the sunshine is also a matter of health, and "in this respect the practice of the Greeks was to be commended."

Obscenity law. The legal situation: Lord Campbell's Act of 1857 lets magistrates order "obscene" books destroyed, with the word undefined and expert evidence inadmissible. The consequences: serious works are destroyed while the salacious slip through; Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex was prosecuted and its later volumes not published in England; the condemnation of the Well of Loneliness made any treatment of homosexuality in fiction illegal — the law on male homosexuality is "the effect of a barbarous and ignorant superstition, in favour of which no rational argument of any sort or kind can be advanced"; technical words like "coitus" are permissible where the monosyllable is not (the Sleeveless Errand case); Mrs. Sanger's pamphlet for working women was declared obscene because working women could understand it, while Marie Stopes's books were legal because only the educated could follow them — "it is permissible to teach birth control to the well-to-do" but criminal to teach it to wage-earners, a fact Russell commends to the Eugenic Society. Censorship is used against works of serious merit (Mrs. Warren's Profession, The Cenci, Horace Liveright's campaign over The Captive), and even frank pornography would do very little harm if sex education were rational: "Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young." Russell's conclusion: "I am firmly persuaded that there ought to be no law whatsoever on the subject of obscene publications."

Key ideas

• Right conduct is never promoted by ignorance; the taboo on sex knowledge served domination first, then pure superstition.
• The law prohibits sex information while making the question of its desirability legally irrelevant (the Dennett case).
• The taboo makes children stupid, deceitful, and timorous, and drives some into nervous disorder.
• It destroys parental authority and poisons the child's attitude to marriage and the opposite sex.
• Mystery creates obsession; open, matter-of-fact sex education prevents it (evidence from Beacon Hill).
• Obscenity law, undefined and closed to expert evidence, suppresses serious work while the salacious evade it.
• The appeal of pornography is mostly manufactured by the moralists' own teaching of indecency.
• Nudity among children and parents, and in the sun, is wholesome; "there is only one way to avoid indecency, and that is to avoid mystery."

Key takeaway

Ignorance is not the guardian of virtue but its destroyer, and any sexual morality that must be preserved by keeping people ignorant — of facts, of contraception, of their own bodies — is by that fact condemned.

Chapter 9 — The Place of Love in Human Life

Central question

What place should love occupy in human life, and what are its true enemies?

Main argument

The twofold attitude. Most communities treat love in a curiously twofold way: it is the chief theme of poetry, novels, and plays, yet completely ignored by serious sociologists and absent from schemes of economic or political reform. Russell regards this as unjustifiable: love is one of the most important things in human life, and "any system as bad which interferes unnecessarily with its free development." Love, properly used, does not denote every relation between the sexes but one involving considerable emotion, psychological as well as physical — the emotions expressed in Tristan und Isolde are in accordance with the experience of countless men and women. It is commoner in some societies than others, and this depends on conventions and institutions: in China it is rare and appears in history as a characteristic of bad emperors misled by wicked concubines, for traditional Chinese culture objected to all strong emotions.

Love's enemies. The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love; love is extra-rational but not anti-rational — a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence. The antagonism between religion and love is not unavoidable; it is due to the fact that the Christian religion, unlike some others, is rooted in asceticism. But love has a more dangerous enemy in the modern world: "the gospel of work and economic success." Russell's portrait of the typical business man, especially in America: all his best energies go to financial success; in youth he satisfies his physical needs from time to time with prostitutes; he marries but never becomes really intimate with his wife; he comes home late and tired, gets up before she is awake, plays golf on Sunday to keep fit for the money-making struggle. His wife remains sexually cold, which is not to be wondered at since he never has time to woo her. His dissatisfaction is drowned in work, in the sadistic pleasure of watching prize-fights, and in persecuting radicals; hers, in second-rate culture and "upholding virtue by harrying all those whose lives are generous and free." "In this way the lack of sexual satisfaction in both husband and wife turns to hatred of mankind disguised as public spirit and a high moral standard."

Love as escape from loneliness. Love is far more than desire for intercourse; it is "the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives." There is a deep-seated fear of the cold world and the possible cruelty of the herd; passionate mutual love "breaks down the hard walls of the ego, producing a new being composed of two in one." Those who have missed this experience have missed the best thing life has to give; unconsciously they feel this, and the disappointment inclines them toward envy, oppression, and cruelty. Giving due place to passionate love is therefore a proper concern of the sociologist.

Obstacles within. Three internal obstacles. First, the difficulty of distinguishing passionate love from mere sex hunger — especially for well-brought-up girls, who may be "trapped by a transient and trivial sex attraction" because virginity prevents the experience by which love is recognized. Second, the sense of sin that poisons even real love: Parnell's adultery was a genuine sin because it postponed the hopes of Ireland for many years, but unfounded guilt poisons love just as much, making men brutal, clumsy, and unsympathetic in love-making and women proud of coldness. Third, the modern fear of not preserving one's individuality — a foolish and rather modern terror, for "an individuality which is kept in a glass case withers, whereas one that is freely expended in human contacts becomes enriched." Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the world; love must not be merely possessive, any more than work must be merely pecuniary.

The new danger. Among emancipated people love faces a new danger: when people no longer feel any moral barrier against intercourse on every trivial impulse, they get into the habit of dissociating sex from serious emotion — Aldous Huxley's novels are the best illustration, where sex is viewed, as St. Paul viewed it, merely as a physiological outlet. "From such an attitude it is only a step to the revival of asceticism." Sex intercourse apart from love has little value, and is to be regarded "primarily as experimentation with a view to love."

The limits. Love is an anarchic force which, left free, will not remain within any bounds set by law or custom. While children are not involved, this may not greatly matter; but as soon as children appear, love is no longer autonomous but serves the biological purposes of the race, and a social ethic connected with children must exist, which may override the claims of passionate love. A wise ethic will minimize this conflict, because love is good in itself and good for children when their parents love each other.

Key ideas

• Love is central to human life yet ignored by sociology and reform — a failure of seriousness.
• Its modern enemies are the gospel of work and economic success, more than religion.
• The business-man portrait shows how sexual starvation turns into cruelty disguised as morality.
• Love is the principal escape from loneliness and breaks down the walls of the ego.
• The sense of sin, the virginity trap, and the cult of individuality all cripple love from within.
• Dissociating sex from emotion (the Huxley type) is a step back toward asceticism.
• Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact with the world.
• Once children exist, a social ethic rightly overrides love, but a wise ethic minimizes the conflict.

Key takeaway

Love is a supreme good that society must permit and protect, yet it is anarchic; the moment children appear it must serve the biological purposes of the race, and the art of a wise ethic is to minimize that conflict.

Chapter 10 — Marriage

Central question

What can marriage be, considered apart from children, as a relation between men and women?

Main argument

Marriage as a legal institution. Marriage differs from other sex relations by being a legal institution, and in most communities a religious one, but the legal aspect is essential. It embodies a practice found among animals wherever male cooperation is needed to rear the young; animal marriages are as a rule monogamic, and among the anthropoid apes instinct suffices to produce virtue — "sin is unknown." The Bushmen are said to be strictly monogamous, the Tasmanians (now extinct) were invariably faithful, and faint traces of a monogamic instinct survive in civilized mankind — surprisingly little, given the influence of habit, but human beings have the power of imagination, "from which spring both their vices and their intelligence," which breaks up habits and initiates new lines of conduct. What first broke up primitive monogamy was the economic motive, which "wherever it has any influence upon sexual behaviour, is invariably disastrous, since it substitutes relations of slavery or purchase for relations based upon instinct." Wives and children became economic assets; polygamy became the prerogative of chiefs and rich men; the wife's primary function came to be that of "a lucrative domestic animal." Divorce was easy for men, impossible for women. Russell recalls Mungo Park's account of Mumbo Jumbo, the pretence demon invented by the men of the upper Niger to terrify women who had sinned — suppressed by modern anthropologists who "cannot bear the intrusion of rational scoundrelism into the doings of savages." Christianity changed blame from grounds of property to grounds of taboo: all intercourse outside marriage became an offence against God, and marriage, as a sacrament, became lifelong.

Was the change a gain? Among barbarous peoples a woman is old at twenty-five; the view of woman as a domestic animal was pleasant for men but meant a life of nothing but toil for women. Christianity made the position of women worse in the well-to-do classes but recognized their theological equality and refused to regard them as absolutely the property of their husbands — a married woman could at least leave her husband for a life of religion.

Conditions of marital happiness. The curious conclusion: "the more civilized people become the less capable they seem of lifelong happiness with one partner." Marriage is easiest where people are least differentiated — the Irish peasants, whose marriages were decided by their parents, were said to be happy and virtuous; where a man differs little from other men there is no particular reason to regret not having married someone else. Happiness also comes from paucity of unowned women and the absence of social occasions where husbands meet other women — "a marriage is likely to be what is called happy if neither party ever expected to get much happiness out of it." None of these conditions exists among civilized moderns, and very few marriages after the first few years are happy.

The removable causes. Bad sexual education is far commoner among the well-to-do than among peasants, whose children early become familiar with the facts of life and are "saved from both ignorance and fastidiousness." "The triumph of Christian teaching is when a man and woman marry without either having had previous sexual experience. In nine cases out of ten where this occurs, the results are unfortunate": sexual behaviour among human beings is not instinctive, the inexperienced bride and bridegroom are overwhelmed with shame and discomfort, and most men do not realize that a process of wooing is necessary after marriage. The belief that women were morally superior because they had less pleasure in sex made frank companionship impossible; "failure to enjoy sex, so far from being virtuous, is a mere physiological or psychological deficiency, like a failure to enjoy food."

The irremovable cause. Uninhibited civilized people, whether men or women, are generally polygamous in their instincts: sexual familiarity dulls the edge of passion, and they begin to look elsewhere for the revival of the old thrill. With the growth of women's freedom, "the opportunity gives rise to the thought, the thought gives rise to the desire, and in the absence of religious scruples the desire gives rise to the act." Women's emancipation has made marriage more difficult in various ways — wives are unwilling to adapt beyond a point while men hanker after masculine domination — and where mutual faithfulness is not demanded, the instinct of jealousy nevertheless survives and often proves fatal to intimacy. And love is killed by the thought that it is a duty: "To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him or her." Marriage as a combination of love with legal bonds falls between two stools (Russell quotes Shelley's lines against the "one chained friend"). To close one's mind on marriage against all approaches of love from elsewhere is to diminish receptivity and sympathy; restrictive morality tends to promote "a policeman's outlook upon the whole of human life."

The positive ideal. Easy divorce is not the solution: where a marriage is childless, divorce may often be right, but where there are children, the stability of marriage is a matter of considerable importance. Where a marriage is fruitful and both parties are reasonable and decent, the expectation ought to be that it will be lifelong — "but not that it will exclude other sex relations." A marriage begun with passionate love and leading to children who are desired and loved ought to produce so deep a tie that the partners feel something infinitely precious in their companionship even after sexual passion has decayed. The mellowing of marriage has been prevented by jealousy, which, though an instinctive emotion, "can be controlled if it is recognized as bad, and not supposed to be the expression of a just moral indignation." The conditions of happiness: complete equality on both sides; no interference with mutual freedom; the most complete physical and mental intimacy; and a certain similarity in regard to standards of values. Given these, "I believe marriage to be the best and most important relation that can exist between two human beings." If it has not often been realized, it is chiefly because husband and wife have regarded themselves as each other's policeman: "whatever the law may say, in their private lives they must be free."

Key ideas

• Marriage as a legal institution codifies a practice animals already have; the economic motive, not instinct, broke up primitive monogamy.
• Christianity converted marital offences from property violations into offences against God and made marriage lifelong.
• Civilized people are less capable of lifelong happiness with one partner; marriage is easiest where people are least differentiated.
• Bad sexual education, not wickedness, ruins most marriages: inexperience, no post-marital wooing, and the "moral superiority" myth.
• Polygamous instincts and women's freedom make fidelity a matter of control, not absence of impulse.
• Duty kills love; jealousy can and should be controlled rather than sanctified.
• Easy divorce is not the solution; with children, stability matters, but it need not exclude other sex relations.
• The conditions of good marriage: equality, mutual freedom, complete intimacy, shared values.

Key takeaway

Marriage can be the best relation between two human beings, but only on condition that husbands and wives stop acting as each other's policeman and that jealousy — not love — is the impulse put under control.

Chapter 11 — Prostitution

Central question

What function does prostitution serve in the conventional moral order, and why is it both indefensible and inevitable under that order?

Main argument

The safety valve. So long as the virtue of respectable women is regarded as a matter of great importance, the institution of marriage has to be supplemented by another institution which may really be regarded as a part of it — prostitution. Lecky's famous passage on prostitutes as safeguards of the sanctity of the home is true, however the moralists denounced it: the moralist truly says that if men followed his teaching there would be no prostitution, but he knows quite well that they will not follow it, so the consideration of what would happen if they did is irrelevant. Society sets apart a certain class of women for masculine needs "which it is ashamed to acknowledge yet afraid to leave wholly unsatisfied": the prostitute is available at a moment's notice, can remain hidden, and the man can return to his wife, his family, and his church with unimpaired dignity — while she, "poor woman," is universally despised, an outcast. This "blazing injustice" began with the victory of the Christian religion. The prostitute's real offence is that she shows up the hollowness of moralistic professions; like the thoughts repressed by the Freudian censor, she must be banished into the unconscious. "Thence, however, as such exiles will, she wreaks an unintended vengeance" — Russell quotes Blake's London: "How the youthful harlot's curse / Blasts the new-born infant's tear / And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse."

The lofty origin. Prostitution began as worship: originally the prostitute was a priestess dedicated to a god, and in serving the passing stranger she performed an act of worship, treated with respect — "while men used her they honoured her." The Christian Fathers filled many pages with invective against this system, the temples were closed, and prostitution became everywhere a commercialized institution run for profit — not, of course, for the profit of the prostitutes, who until fairly recent times were mostly in brothels, the virtual slaves of their employers. In India the transition from religious to commercial prostitution is not yet complete, and Katherine Mayo's Mother India uses the survival of religious prostitution as one of the counts of her indictment of that country.

The three objections. Prostitution, except in South America, appears to be on the decline, partly because other means of livelihood are more available to women and partly because more women are now willing to have extra-marital relations from inclination rather than commerce. But it cannot be wholly abolished: sailors coming ashore after a long voyage cannot be expected to have the patience to woo, and men unhappy in marriage and afraid of their wives will seek release free from psychological obligations. Prostitution is open to three grave objections. First, the danger to the health of the community: venereal disease spreads mainly through prostitutes; registration and State inspection give the police a hold over women and have not been very successful medically, while the view of disease as a just punishment for sin blocks effective precautions and shame delays treatment. Second, the psychological damage to women: the life is idle, demoralizing, despised even by its clients, "quite as much against instinct as the life of a nun." Third, the psychological damage to men: habitual association teaches that it is not necessary to please, breeds contempt for women, and infects marriage in two opposite ways — some men cannot desire intercourse with a woman they deeply respect (attributed by Freudians to the Oedipus complex, but often simply the effort to place as wide a gulf as possible between such women and prostitutes), leaving wives "psychologically virginal"; others assimilate their wives to prostitutes and are rough and brutal. In Japan, by contrast, prostitution is recognized and respected as a career, sometimes a method of earning a marriage dowry, and its sordidness is correspondingly less: "the more strict the standard of morality in any country, the more degradation will attach to the life of a prostitute."

The economic intrusion and the moral core. "The intrusion of the economic motive into sex is always in a greater or less degree disastrous. Sexual relations should be a mutual delight, entered into solely from the spontaneous impulse of both parties." Where that is not the case, everything that is valuable is absent. Russell's most quoted sentence: "Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution." Morality in sexual relations, when free from superstition, "consists essentially of respect for the other person, and unwillingness to use that person solely as a means of personal gratification, without regard to his or her desires." It is because prostitution sins against this principle that it would remain undesirable even if prostitutes were respected and the risk of venereal disease eliminated.

The cure is freedom. Havelock Ellis's argument for prostitution — that it serves the purpose of the orgy as an outlet for anarchic impulses — is really the same as Lecky's. Once women's sexual life is liberated, men can find satisfaction without professionals; "wherever the older morality has decayed, prostitution also has decayed." The new freedom between young people is "wholly a matter of rejoicing, and is producing a generation of men without brutality and women without finicky fastidiousness." Those who oppose the new freedom should face frankly the fact that they are in effect advocating the continuance of prostitution as the sole safety valve against the pressure of an impossibly rigid code.

Key ideas

• Prostitution is a necessary complement of conventional marriage so long as female virtue is demanded of respectable women.
• The prostitute's offence is exposing the hollowness of moralistic professions; she is the community's repressed thought.
• Originally a sacred office, prostitution became commercialized with the victory of Christianity.
• Its three objections: venereal disease, the damage to women's lives, and the damage to men's psychology.
• The economic motive in sex is always disastrous; morality is respect for the other person.
• Undesired sex is probably commoner in marriage than in prostitution.
• Prostitution would remain undesirable even if respected and disease-free, because it sins against respect for persons.
• Wherever the old morality decays, prostitution decays; opposition to freedom is advocacy of the safety valve.

Key takeaway

Prostitution is the hidden cost of the double standard — the safety valve that lets conventional morality function — and it declines naturally as women's sexual liberation makes professionals unnecessary.

Chapter 12 — Trial Marriage

Central question

What should be done about the gap between the sexual behaviour of the young and the morality preached by the old?

Main argument

A rational starting point. In a rational ethic, marriage would not count as such in the absence of children: a sterile marriage should be easily dissoluble, for it is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society and worthy of legal cognizance. The Church, under St. Paul's influence, still views marriage as the alternative to fornication rather than the means to procreation. Since the war, a great change has taken place in America, England, Germany, and Scandinavia: many girls of respectable families have ceased to think it worth while to preserve their "virtue," and young men have had affairs with girls of the kind they would wish to marry instead of resorting to prostitutes.

The American situation. The change has gone further in the United States than in England, "owing, I think, to Prohibition and automobiles": Prohibition makes tipsiness de rigueur at parties, and girls with cars can escape from the eyes of parents and neighbours. The facts are described in Judge Ben B. Lindsey's books (The Revolt of Modern Youth, 1925; Companionate Marriage, 1927); the old accuse him of exaggeration, but the young do not, and Russell says his own questioning of young men confirmed the facts. Where complete relations do not occur, there is so much "petting" and "necking" that the absence of complete intercourse "can only be viewed as a perversion."

Bootlegged sex. Russell does not view the present state of affairs as satisfactory — "Bootlegged sex is in fact as inferior to what it might be as bootlegged alcohol." The sense of daring acts as an aphrodisiac; sex relations tend to take the silliest possible form, entered into from bravado and at times of intoxication; the young are compelled to take "sex neat, divorced from daily companionship, from a common work, and from all psychological intimacy"; the more timid content themselves with prolonged states of sexual excitement without satisfaction, which are nervously debilitating. There is the risk of occasional disaster — a scandal-mongering guardian of morality, unintended pregnancies dealt with by abortion, which is dangerous, painful, illegal, and hard to keep secret — and the complete gulf between the morals of the young and the old destroys the possibility of real intimacy between parents and children. "How much more civilized are the Trobriand Islands, where a father will say to his daughter's lover: 'You sleep with my child; very well, marry her.'" Still, the emancipation has great advantages: the young are freer from priggery, less inhibited, and likely to prove less cruel and violent — American life had taken out in violence the anarchic impulses that could not find an outlet in sex.

Companionate marriage. Judge Lindsey, formerly of the juvenile court at Denver, proposed a new institution, "companionate marriage," distinguished from ordinary marriage by three characteristics: no intention of having children for the time being, with the best available birth-control information given to the couple; divorce by mutual consent so long as there are no children and the wife is not pregnant; and no alimony in the event of divorce. Lindsey held, and Russell agrees, that university students and other young people would enter comparatively permanent partnerships with a common life, free from the Dionysiac characteristics of their present relations; married students do better work than unmarried. Russell has "not the faintest doubt" that the proposal, embodied in law, would have a very beneficent influence. The reception was a howl of horror from middle-aged persons and most of the newspapers — it was said that the proposals would not have been approved by Christ, and, more weightily, that they were not approved by eminent divines of the present day; Russell never heard any argument even pretending to show that the proposals would diminish human happiness.

Going further. Russell does not think companionate marriage goes far enough: all sex relations that do not involve children should be regarded as a purely private affair. Nor should anyone enter the serious business of a marriage intended to lead to children without previous sexual experience — the sexual act is not instinctive, and "it seems absurd to ask people to enter upon a relation intended to be lifelong, without any previous knowledge as to their sexual compatibility. It is just as absurd as it would be if a man intending to buy a house were not allowed to view it until he had completed the purchase." The proper course, if the biological function of marriage were adequately recognized, would be to say that no marriage should be legally binding until the wife's first pregnancy — just as marriage is now null if intercourse is impossible, so it should not be regarded as consummated until there is a prospect of children. Contraceptives have altered the whole aspect of sex and marriage: there are now three distinguishable kinds of relation — sex alone (prostitution), companionship involving a sexual element (companionate marriage), and the rearing of a family — "and no morality can be adequate to modern circumstances which confounds them in one indiscriminate total."

Key ideas

• In a rational ethic, childless marriage should be easily dissoluble; children alone make sex socially important.
• Prohibition and automobiles accelerated the sexual emancipation of American youth (Lindsey's evidence).
• "Bootlegged sex" is inferior to what it might be — bravado, intoxication, secrecy, and nervous strain.
• The gulf between the morals of young and old destroys parent-child intimacy.
• Judge Lindsey's companionate marriage: childless, birth control provided, divorce by mutual consent, no alimony.
• Opposition to it never produced an argument about human happiness, only appeals to Christ and divines.
• Russell goes further: childless sex is nobody's business; sexual experience should precede serious marriage.
• No marriage should be legally binding until the wife's first pregnancy; contraceptives have split sex from procreation.

Key takeaway

The rational reform is not to enforce chastity but to separate the three kinds of sexual relation — sex, companionship, and family-rearing — and to treat marriage as consummated only by the prospect of children.

Chapter 13 — The Family at the Present Day

Central question

What degree of stability in sex relations do the interests of children demand, and what is the family's present and future role?

Main argument

The family as the ground of restriction. The family affords the only rational basis for limitations of sexual freedom: the subject is the degree of stability in sex relations demanded by the interests of children. Whether a child gains from membership in a family depends on the alternative — there might be foundling institutions so admirable as to be preferable to most families — and whether the father plays an essential part is doubtful, since it is only on his account that female virtue has been thought essential. The theological argument against divorce as contrary to children's interests is not genuine: those who use it will not tolerate divorce or contraceptives even when one parent is syphilitic; "the appeal with a sob in the voice to the interests of little children, when pushed to an extreme, is only an excuse for cruelty."

Recapitulation. The family is a prehuman institution whose biological justification is the father's help during pregnancy and lactation; in primitive conditions the father helps because the child is his wife's child, not his. With the development of intelligence, man becomes aware that the child springs from his seed and must secure his wife's virtue; wife and child become his property; religion is brought in to make them feel duty toward him — and since the time will come when he is decrepit while they are in the vigour of manhood, it is vitally necessary that they should reverence him. "The Commandment on the subject is deceitfully phrased. It should run: 'Honour thy father and thy mother that their days may be long in the land.'" The horror of parricide in early civilization shows how great was the temptation to be overcome. Economic conditions brought the family to its fullest fruition — the easiest way to acquire labourers was to breed them; primogeniture extended family unity to collateral branches; kingship, aristocracy, and even divinity (Zeus, father of gods and men) depend upon this order of ideas.

The decay. From that point onward the family declined: commerce emancipated men from tribal prejudice (the seafaring Greeks, Venice, Holland, Elizabethan England); the influx of rural populations into towns weakened it; slavery degraded the family relations of the lower strata; Christianity, at first a religion of slaves and proletarians, formulated an ethic in which the family had less place than in any previous ethic except Buddhism. Buddhism warns against purely economic causation: it was a religion for princes, yet contempt of the world left the family subordinate. The great religions of historical times have been individualistic — "Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" — and Protestantism brought the anarchic principle that we ought to obey God rather than man, that is, one's own conscience. "In early civilization the father was God; in Christianity God is the Father, with the result that the authority of the merely human parent is weakened." The decay in recent times is due in the main to the industrial revolution, but it began earlier with individualistic theory: young people asserted the right to marry according to their own wishes; sons left home; the Factory Acts put an end to child labour, and children changed from a means of livelihood into a financial burden; contraceptives became known, and the fall in the birth rate began. "There is much to be said for the view that the average man in all ages has had as many children as it paid him to have, no more and no less" — true, roughly, of Australian aborigines, Lancashire cotton operatives, and British peers.

The State and the father. The State has weakened the family even in its last stronghold: children spend most of their time at school; the British father, unlike the Roman, is liable to prosecution for cruelty; the State provides medical and dental care and feeds the child if the parents are destitute. "The functions of the father are thus reduced to a minimum." The economic function of the father can be performed, in the well-to-do classes, more efficiently if he is dead, since he can leave his money to his children; among wage-earners his utility is being continually diminished by humanitarian sentiment. Only in the middle classes is the father still of most importance, through expensive education and life insurance. In the modern world most fathers are too hard-worked to see their children — one hears of children who know their father only as "that man who comes for the week-end"; in the poorer quarters of London fathers may be seen on Sundays rejoicing in the brief opportunity of getting to know their children, but from the child's point of view this is a play relation without serious importance. In the upper classes, nurses and boarding-schools replace intimacy. At adolescence there is apt to be a conflict in which parental solicitude is "often a disguise for love of power," and most parents are not much use.

What remains strong. The family still matters through the emotions with which it provides parents. Parental emotions are perhaps more important than any others in their power of influencing action: children cause ordinary men and women to act unselfishly — life insurance is the most definite and measurable instance; W. H. R. Rivers suggested that all private property is derivative from family feeling. There is a curious misunderstanding between fathers and children — the father who has slaved all his life "for the benefit of his children" versus the son who would rather have a small cheque now; the son is unjust, for he does not realize the obscure unconscious forces that formed his father's habits. For the young child, parents provide an affection given to no one else. In aristocratic societies the family is a mark of historical continuity: "people whose name is Darwin do better work in science than they would do if their name had been changed to Snooks in infancy" — family tradition, not heredity alone (Galton overstates heredity; Samuel Butler's quarrel with Darwin, and Shaw's Methuselah, illustrate the force of family tradition). Perhaps the greatest importance of the family, in these days of contraceptives, is that it preserves the habit of having children: a man with no property in his child and no affectionate relation with it would see little point in begetting it. The father may be completely eliminated before long except among the rich; women would then share their children with the State. This would eliminate from men's lives "the only emotion equal in importance to sex love," would make sex love more trivial, diminish interest in anything after one's own death, make men less active, and eliminate the most fierce and savage passion to which civilized men are liable — "the fury which is felt in defending wives and children from attacks by coloured populations" — probably making men less prone to war and less acquisitive. The balance cannot be struck, but the effects would be profound and far-reaching; the patriarchal family is still important, though it is doubtful how long it will remain so.

Key ideas

• The family is the only rational basis for limiting sexual freedom; children's interests are the sole legitimate ground.
• The theological "interests of the child" argument is an excuse for cruelty when it forbids divorce and contraceptives even against syphilis.
• Paternal authority was reinforced by religion because fathers would one day be decrepit while children were vigorous.
• The family decayed through commerce, towns, slavery, Christianity, and above all the industrial revolution.
• Children changed from an economic asset into a financial burden; people have roughly as many children as it pays them to have.
• The State has taken over the father's functions: education, medical care, protection.
• The family still matters through parental emotions — life insurance, acquisitiveness, and the habit of having children.
• Eliminating the father would profoundly change male psychology: less war, less acquisitiveness, but also thinner emotional life.

Key takeaway

The family, the only rational ground for sexual restriction, is decaying fast as the State takes over the father's functions; its loss would change male psychology profoundly, and whether for good or bad is not clear.

Chapter 14 — The Family in Individual Psychology

Central question

How does family life affect the character of children, mothers, and fathers respectively?

Main argument

The Freudian picture. If we are to believe Freud, the emotions of a young child toward his family have a desperate character: the boy hates his father as a sexual rival, feels toward his mother emotions abhorrent to traditional morality, and hates his brothers and sisters for absorbing parental attention; the effects in later life range from homosexuality to mania. The doctrine caused less horror than one might expect — professors have been dismissed for believing it, and the British police deported Homer Lane, "one of the best men of his generation," for acting upon it — because Christian asceticism made people more shocked by Freud's insistence on sex than by his picture of infantile hatreds. Russell confesses that experience with young children has led him to think there is much more truth in Freud's theories than he formerly supposed — but they represent only one side of the truth, a side which can easily, with a little good sense on the part of parents, be rendered very unimportant.

Children. Infantile sexuality is undoubtedly stronger than anyone thought before Freud, but heterosexuality is stronger in early childhood than Freud's writings suggest. An unwise mother can unintentionally centre her young son's heterosexual feelings upon herself, with the evil consequences Freud describes — but this is much less likely if the mother's sexual life is satisfying, for then she will not look to her child for emotional satisfaction that ought to be sought from adults; "a happy woman is likely to be a better mother than an unhappy one." The heterosexual emotions of young children find a natural, wholesome outlet with other children; after the age of three or four a child needs the company of contemporaries of both sexes, for the modern small family is "too stuffy and confined for healthy development" as a sole environment. Servant girls, nurses, and school teachers are quite as dangerous as mothers — indeed more so, since they are as a rule sexually starved, and the education authorities' preference for unhappy spinsters "shows gross psychological ignorance." Jealousy of brothers and sisters is common and sometimes causes homicidal mania; it is preventable by meticulous justice, no favouritism, and care at the birth of a new sibling. Given these conditions, the bad effects feared by Freud are very unlikely to occur. Parental affection of the right sort furthers development: children whose mothers do not feel warm affection are apt to be thin and nervous, not infrequently kleptomaniacs; affection makes infants feel safe and bold in experimentation. A wise father and mother can also introduce their children to the facts of sex in the best possible way — as the relation to which they owe their own existence — instead of leaving them to ribald jokes.

The alternatives. To decide whether family life is desirable one must consider the practical alternatives: the matriarchal family and public institutions. Under a matriarchal system children would know only one parent; the psychological use of a father lies mainly in connecting sex with married love and procreation, and in giving boys contact with a masculine outlook — but the gain is not very profound: children whose fathers died in infancy do not turn out worse on the average, and "many fathers are so far from ideal that their non-existence might be a positive advantage to children." Convention is the complicating factor: children suffer through being odd, which is why divorce, while the biparental family is the norm, can be destructive of a child's whole sense of security and productive of phobias; "a society in which fathers have no place would be better for children than one in which divorce is frequent though still regarded as exceptional." Plato's proposal to separate children from both parents is not attractive: parental affection is essential to a child's development. From the point of view of sexual morals, the question is the utility of the father, and the case for fathers from the point of view of children's psychology "is not therefore a very strong one."

Mothers. During pregnancy and lactation a woman has an instinctive tendency to desire a man's protection, inherited from the anthropoid apes; without it she tends to become unduly combative and self-assertive, though these feelings would be weakened if the State gave adequate care to expectant and nursing mothers. The chief harm of abolishing the father's place in the home would be the diminution of intimacy between women and men: each sex has much to learn from the other, and cooperation in the serious business of rearing children brings about a relation more important than any that would exist without responsibility. On the other side, a woman actively unhappy in her marriage could be a better mother quit of the father. "We are thus led to the entirely trivial conclusion that happy marriages are good, while unhappy ones are bad."

Fathers. Much the most important question is the effect upon the father. Paternal feeling is a powerful passion — it built the patriarchal family and subjected women — yet it is not nearly so strong in highly civilized communities (upper-class Romans ceased to feel it; many intellectualized men are nearly destitute of it). It is for this reason, rather than for the sake of sex, that men marry, and Russell suspects the desire for children is commoner among men than among women — in many modern marriages the children are "a concession on the part of the woman to the man's desires." Would men beget children if they were not going to enjoy the rights paternity confers? Russell believes not: "A man who desires a child desires the responsibilities which it entails." If children belonged to the mother alone, women would feel that anything approximating to marriage was an infraction of their independence, and men would not often persuade them to concede rights legally guaranteed to them. The elimination of paternity as a recognized social relation would tend to make men's emotional life trivial and thin, "causing in the end a slowly growing boredom and despair, in which procreation would gradually die out, leaving the human race to be replenished by stocks that had preserved the older convention." The diminution of population could be guarded against by paying women for the profession of motherhood — "This will presumably be done before long, if militarism remains as strong as it is at present."

Key ideas

• Freud's picture of infantile hatreds is one side of the truth; sensible parents can make it unimportant.
• A happy mother does not demand emotional response from her child; sexually starved nurses and teachers are the greater danger.
• Sibling jealousy is preventable by justice; children need contemporaries of both sexes after the age of three or four.
• The father's psychological value to children is limited; a society without fathers might be better than frequent exceptional divorce.
• Parental affection is essential to a child's development; its absence shows in nervousness and kleptomania.
• For women, the father's place sustains intimacy with men; an unhappy marriage is worse than none.
• Men marry for children rather than sex; children are often a concession to the man's desires.
• Eliminating paternity would trivialize men's emotional life and let procreation die out among the civilized.

Key takeaway

The family's psychological effects divide into a trivial conclusion — happy marriages are good, unhappy ones bad — and a serious one: paternity, the strongest of paternal passions, is what gives men's emotional life its depth, and its elimination would trivialize the species' most civilized stock.

Chapter 15 — The Family and the State

Central question

What are the consequences of the State's increasing substitution for the father, and of women's economic independence, for the family?

Main argument

The State as family-breaker. The family, though biologically originated, is in civilized communities a product of legal enactment; marriage is regulated by law and the rights of parents minutely determined. But although the law means to uphold the family, it has in modern times increasingly intervened between parents and children and is gradually becoming "one of the chief engines for the break-up of the family system" — because bad and very poor parents cannot be relied upon to take the care of children that the community considers necessary. The early nineteenth-century resistance to the Factory Acts defended the sacred right of parents to drain their children of life by "a slow agony of toil"; the Acts passed anyway. Compulsory education was a more serious interference: for large numbers of hours the children learn what the State considers necessary, and what the parents think is legally irrelevant. The State cares for children's health even if their parents are Christian Scientists, sends the mentally deficient to special schools, feeds the necessitous, supplies boots, and penalizes ill treatment; parents have lost the right to their children's earnings; one of the few rights remaining to wage-earning parents is having their children taught "any brand of superstition that may be shared by a large number of parents in the same neighbourhood."

Two castes. No clear limit can be set to this process. The State has taken over the functions of the father rather than the mother, since it performs services the father would otherwise have to pay for; in the upper and middle classes the process has hardly taken place, so the father remains more important and the family more stable among the well-to-do. Russell quotes the English Socialists who foam at the mouth at the suggestion that all children should go to elementary schools — "What? My children associate with the children of the slums? Never!" — failing to realize how profoundly the division between classes is bound up with the educational system. The result is two castes: the rich preserving the family in its old form, the poor looking more and more to the State to perform the economic functions traditionally belonging to the father. Humanitarian sentiment will continue: the rickets of poor London children calls for public action; the well-to-do band together to keep down the rates — when the Poplar local authorities took effective measures to diminish infant mortality they were put in prison (infant death rates: Poplar 60 against Kensington 70 in 1923; after the restoration of legality, 71 against 61 in 1926) — but the resistance of the rich is continually being overcome. "The biological purpose of the father is to protect children during their years of helplessness, and when this biological function is taken over by the State, the father loses his raison d'être." In Soviet Russia, with eighty per cent peasants, the opposite holds: an upper class dispensing with the family and a lower class retaining it.

Women's economic independence. The desire of women for economic independence is another force working toward the elimination of the father. The wrongs of married women in England are at present more serious than those of unmarried women: the teacher who marries is treated like the teacher who lives in open sin; even public maternity doctors, if women, have to be unmarried — "the whole motive for the non-employment of married women is a masculine desire to preserve economic power over them." Now that women are a majority of the electorate, they will not submit forever. Two ways of acquiring economic independence: married women may remain employed, giving children over to creches and nursery schools — the logical consequence being the elimination of the mother as well as the father from the child's psychology — or women with young children may receive a State wage for devoting themselves to the care of their children, supplemented by provisions enabling them to return to ordinary work. The State wage would recognize that having a child, formerly a mere consequence of sexual gratification, is now a task deliberately undertaken that redounds to the advantage of the State and should be paid for by it — the point behind family allowances, though not yet recognized that the payment should be made to the mother alone. If the allowance were withheld for illegitimacy or adultery, the local police would have to make an inquisition into every married woman's moral status; the demand would presently arise that even the mothers of illegitimate children receive the allowance, and then "the economic power of the father in the wage-earning class would be completely at an end, and the family would probably cease after a time to be bi-parental, the father being of no more importance than among cats and dogs." Russell suspects most women would prefer to continue their pre-marriage work rather than be paid to care for their own children.

What women feel. The revolt of women is politically completed but in its wider aspects in its infancy. Women's supposed emotions have been a reflection of men's interests: male novelists write that women find physical pleasure in suckling their young, but "you can learn by asking any mother of your acquaintance that this is not the case, and until women had votes no man ever thought of doing so." Maternal emotions have been slobbered over by men who saw in them subconsciously the means to their own domination; civilization, at any rate as it has existed, tends greatly to diminish women's maternal feelings, and a high civilization may not in future be maintainable unless women are paid such sums for the production of children as to make it worth while as a money-making career. The one point that seems fairly certain: feminism in its later developments is likely to break up the patriarchal family, "which represents man's triumph over woman in prehistoric times."

The dangers of the State. The substitution of the State for the father, so far as it has gone, is in the main a great advance: it has improved health and education, diminished cruelty to children, and made impossible such sufferings as those of David Copperfield. But there are grave dangers. Administrators never see the children whose lives they control and regard human beings as material for construction; the administrator likes uniformity, so institutional children will tend to be all alike, while the few who cannot conform will suffer persecution — "many of those who have the greatest potentialities will be harried and tortured until their spirit is broken." Above all, so long as the world remains divided into competing militaristic states, the substitution of public bodies for parents means an intensification of patriotism — "a willingness to indulge in mutual extermination without a moment's hesitation." "Undoubtedly patriotism, so called, is the gravest danger to which civilization is at present exposed." Young people now have a divided loyalty, to parents and to the State; if their sole loyalty were to the State, the world would become even more bloodthirsty. If an international government were established, it could decree that nationalism in its more insane forms be no part of the curriculum, and the control of the super-State over education would be a positive safeguard against war. The conclusion: the substitution of the State for the father would be a gain if the State were international, but so long as the State is national and militaristic it represents an increase of the risk to civilization from war. "The family is decaying fast, and internationalism is growing slowly. The situation, therefore, is one which justifies grave apprehensions. Nevertheless, it is not hopeless."

Key ideas

• The law, meaning to uphold the family, has become one of the chief engines of its break-up.
• Compulsory education and the Factory Acts transferred the father's functions to the State.
• State substitution proceeds unevenly, producing two castes: the rich with the family, the poor without.
• Women's economic independence — employment or a State wage for child care — will complete the process.
• Married women's employment bars are a masculine device to preserve economic power.
• Maternal feelings have been invented by men; civilization diminishes them, and motherhood may become a paid profession.
• The State's dangers: uniformity, persecution of the exceptional, and intensified patriotism.
• With an international government, State care of children would be a safeguard; with national militaristic states, a danger.

Key takeaway

The State's steady substitution for the father is on balance an advance, but in a world of national militaristic states it magnifies the gravest danger of all — patriotism — and only an international government would make it an unambiguous gain.

Chapter 16 — Divorce

Central question

What grounds of divorce are rational, and why is easy divorce not a solution to the troubles of marriage?

Main argument

The history and the range. Divorce has been permitted in most ages and countries for certain causes; it was never intended to produce an alternative to the monogamic family but merely to mitigate hardships. The law varies extraordinarily: from no divorce in South Carolina to the opposite extreme in Nevada; the Mosaic law allows a husband to give a bill of divorcement; Chinese law allowed divorce provided the wife's property was restored; the Catholic Church, holding marriage a sacrament, allows no divorce, though nullity — as in the case of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, whose marriage was held null because she had been forced into it, in spite of years of cohabitation and children — mitigates the severity. In Christian countries leniency toward divorce has been proportional to the degree of Protestantism: Milton wrote in favour of it; the English Church in its Protestant days recognized divorce for adultery; Scandinavia and the most Protestant parts of America have easy divorce laws; in France anti-clericalism produces easy divorce; in the Soviet Union divorce is permitted at the request of either party.

Law and custom. One of the most curious facts is the difference between law and custom: the easiest divorce laws by no means always produce the greatest number of divorces. In China, before the recent upheavals, divorce was almost unknown in spite of easy law, because it was not considered quite respectable. Sweden allows divorce by mutual consent — a ground not recognized in any American state — yet in 1922 Sweden had 24 divorces per hundred thousand of population and the United States 136. Russell favours a somewhat lenient law but holds that, so long as the biparental family persists as the norm, custom should be against divorce except in somewhat extreme cases — because he regards marriage not primarily as a sexual partnership but as "an undertaking to cooperate in the procreation and rearing of children."

The theological view fails. Neither the Protestant nor the Catholic point of view can be upheld on rational grounds. Take the Catholic position: suppose a husband or wife becomes insane after marriage. It is not desirable that further children should spring from an insane stock, nor that existing children should be in contact with insanity; complete separation is desirable. To decree that the sane partner shall never be permitted any legally recognized sex relations "is a wanton cruelty which serves no public purpose whatever." The three courses open to the sane partner all have grave objections. Continence is very painful for one accustomed to marriage: it leads to premature old age, nervous disorders, a grudging and ill-tempered character, and a grave danger of sudden collapse into brutality, since the man who believes all outside intercourse wicked may feel he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. Surreptitious childless relations are undesirable because everything surreptitious is undesirable, serious sex relations cannot develop their best possibilities without children and a common life, and it is not in the public interest to forbid children to the young and vigorous — the law in effect says "You shall have no more children unless you choose a lunatic for their other parent." Open sin is the least harmful where feasible, but for economic reasons it is impossible in most cases: a doctor or lawyer would lose his patients or clients, a man in the scholastic profession his post; clubs and social penalties deter the rest — it is difficult except for the rich and for artists and writers. England, which refuses divorce for insanity, places the sane partner "in an intolerable position, in favour of which there is no argument whatever except theological superstition." What is true of insanity is true of venereal disease, habitual crime, and habitual drunkenness. Desertion, when genuine, should be a ground, since the decree merely recognizes in law what is already the fact — though any allowed ground will be resorted to for that reason: when English law required cruelty plus adultery, husbands would arrange with their wives to be hit before the servants to manufacture evidence.

Adultery as a ground. Adultery in itself should not be a ground of divorce. Unless people are restrained by inhibitions, they are very unlikely to go through life without strong impulses to adultery, and such impulses do not imply that the marriage no longer serves its purpose: a man away from home for months on business will find it difficult to remain continent however fond he is of his wife. "The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with a serious affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue, yet everybody is liable, under the influence of jealousy, to fall back upon this untrue theory, and make mountains out of molehills." Adultery is a ground only when it involves a deliberate preference for another person on the whole. Where illegitimate children come in, the issue is complicated — a wife's child by another man goes against the biological basis of marriage and involves an almost intolerable instinctive strain — but contraceptives have made it far more possible than it formerly was to distinguish sexual intercourse as such from marriage as a procreative partnership.

The rational grounds and mutual consent. The grounds that may make divorce desirable are of two kinds: those due to the defects of one partner (insanity, dipsomania, crime) and those based on the relations of the husband and wife — incompatibility, work that requires living apart, or a deep attachment to another person, where without legal redress hatred springs up and cases are quite capable of leading to murder. Where a marriage breaks down in this way, there should not be a determination to attach blame; "much the best ground of divorce in all such cases is mutual consent." Framing laws is difficult because judges and juries are governed by their passions and husbands and wives will circumvent the legislators: in New York State it is not uncommon to hire perjured testimony to prove statutory adultery; when the most eminent of all film stars was divorced by his wife for cruelty, one of the counts was that he brought home friends who talked about Kant. "I can hardly suppose that it was the intention of the California legislators to enable any woman to divorce her husband on the ground that he was sometimes guilty of intelligent conversation in her presence." The way out: divorce by mutual consent in all cases where there is no definite and demonstrable reason, such as insanity, to justify a one-sided desire; monetary adjustments settled out of court. Nullity, now decreed where intercourse is impossible, should instead be granted on application whenever the marriage is childless, on production of a medical certificate that the wife is not pregnant: "Children are the purpose of marriage, and to hold people to a childless marriage is a cruel cheat."

The custom of stability. The great frequency of divorce in America comes partly from what people seek in marriage and partly from the fact that adultery is not tolerated: if temporary amours are not tolerated, each has to blossom into a marriage; a woman with a fresh husband every two years and a fresh child by each effectively deprives her children of fathers — "We come back again to St. Paul: marriage in America, as in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, is conceived as an alternative to fornication." Russell answers Walter Lippmann's objection (Preface to Morals, 1929) that "mates who are not lovers will not really cooperate, as Mr. Bertrand Russell thinks they should, in bearing children": cooperation in rearing children, even after passionate love has decayed, is by no means a superhuman task for sensible people capable of the natural affections — parental affection preserves an unbreakable tie long after physical passion has decayed; "one must suppose that Mr. Lippmann has never heard of France," where the family is strong in spite of an exceptional freedom in adultery. Easy divorce, as it exists in America, must be regarded as a transitional stage on the way from the biparental to the purely maternal family, involving considerable hardship for children, since children expect to have two parents and may become attached to their father before the divorce. So long as the biparental family continues to be the recognized rule, parents who divorce each other except for grave cause appear to Russell to be failing in their parental duty — though legal compulsion will not mend matters. What is wanted is, first, a degree of mutual liberty that makes marriage more endurable, and second, a realization of the importance of children, overlaid by the emphasis on sex owed to St. Paul and the romantic movement. In the system Russell commends, men are freed from the duty of sexual conjugal fidelity but have in exchange the duty of controlling jealousy: "The good life cannot be lived without self-control, but it is better to control a restrictive and hostile emotion such as jealousy, rather than a generous and expansive emotion such as love. Conventional morality has erred, not in demanding self-control, but in demanding it in the wrong place."

Key ideas

• Divorce was never meant to replace the monogamic family, only to mitigate intolerable hardships.
• Law and custom diverge: easy law (China, Sweden) coexists with rare divorce; restrictive law with frequent divorce (America).
• Marriage is an undertaking to cooperate in the procreation and rearing of children, not primarily a sexual partnership.
• The Catholic position on insanity, disease, and crime is a wanton cruelty serving no public purpose.
• Continence, surreptitious relations, and open sin each have grave objections; only theological superstition forbids divorce here.
• Adultery in itself is no ground for divorce; jealousy falsifies the psychology of adultery.
• Mutual consent is the best ground, with grounds of defect (insanity, crime) justifying a one-sided desire.
• Easy divorce is a transitional stage to the maternal family; the cure is mutual liberty plus children-centered seriousness.

Key takeaway

Divorce law should be lenient in law and strict in custom, with mutual consent as the rational ground and adultery demoted from its central place — because the real error of conventional morality is demanding self-control in the wrong place, over love instead of over jealousy.

Chapter 17 — Population

Central question

What does the population question require of sexual morality, and what dangers follow from leaving it to instinct and nationalism?

Main argument

The purpose of marriage. The main purpose of marriage is to replenish the human population of the globe; some marriage systems perform this task inadequately, some too adequately. Human population is quite out of proportion to that of any other large mammal, and man's intelligence has been employed more to increase his numbers than for any other single purpose — the bow and arrow, the domestication of ruminants, agriculture, and the industrial revolution all increased the number of persons who could subsist on a square mile.

Voluntary restriction. As A. M. Carr-Saunders has pointed out, the usual rule has been for population to be practically stationary, and the nineteenth-century increase is a most exceptional phenomenon. His great merit is showing that voluntary restriction has been practised in almost all ages and places and has been more effective in preserving a stationary population than elimination through high mortality — though in India and China it is mainly the high death rate (infant mortality, plague) that checks increase. The methods of limitation: infanticide, which has existed on a very large scale wherever religion permitted it (the Icelanders stipulated that Christianity should not interfere with it; the Doukhobors, who refused military service because human life is sacred, got into trouble with the Canadian government for infanticide); abstinence during lactation, often prolonged for two or three years; the Australian aborigines' operation diminishing male potency; and at least one definite birth-control method known in antiquity (Genesis xxxviii, disapproved of by the Jews, whose religion "was always very anti-Malthusian"). Starvation has also played a considerable part: the Irish famine of 1846–7 permanently reduced the population; the Russian famine of 1921 and the Chinese famine of 1920 show that population does sometimes increase beyond the limit of subsistence.

Christianity's check. Christianity put an end to all checks upon the growth of population except continence: infanticide, abortion, and all contraceptive measures were forbidden, and the celibate clergy were not statistically important. In the Middle Ages there were probably more deaths from destitution and pestilence. England and Wales contained 26 persons per square mile in 1066, 153 in 1801, 561 in 1901 — the nineteenth-century increase nearly four times as great as the increase from the Norman Conquest to 1801 — attributable not to a rising birth rate but to a declining death rate from medical science and, more, from the prosperity of the industrial revolution. The birth rate was nearly constant from 1841 to 1871–5 (maximum 35.5), then fell from the moment of two events: the Education Act of 1870 (children no longer a lucrative investment) and the prosecution of Bradlaugh for neo-Malthusian propaganda in 1878 (which afforded the means). It fell to 23.6 in 1911–15 and 16.5 in the first quarter of 1929. The fall is due to abortion and contraceptives, and there is no particular reason why it should stop at a stationary population: "It may easily go on until the population begins to diminish, and the ultimate result may, for aught we can tell, be a virtual extinction of the most civilized races."

The optimum. Carr-Saunders' concept of the optimum density — the density giving the maximum income per head — frames the judgment: England, since the war, is probably overpopulated; France and America are not. There is no economic reason to desire an increase of population in Western Europe; those who feel this desire are usually inspired by nationalistic militarism, and their position is in effect "that it is better to restrict population by deaths on the battlefield than by contraceptives." Short of actual diminution, the stationary population brought about by birth control is a ground for rejoicing. If the population actually diminishes, the motives to family limitation are mainly economic, and the birth rate could be raised by diminishing the expense of children — but in the present nationalistic world any such measure would be dangerous, used as a method of securing military preponderance: "One can imagine all the leading military nations adding to the race of armaments a race of propagation, under the slogan: 'The cannon must have their fodder.'" Here again an international government is absolutely necessary: it must pass decrees limiting the rate at which any military nation may increase its population (the hostility between Australia and Japan illustrates the gravity), and insist upon birth-control propaganda in any recalcitrant nation.

The twofold problem. The population question is twofold: guard against too rapid an increase (old; still exists in Portugal, Spain, Russia, Japan) and against a decrease (new; exists only in Western Europe). The new danger has been met by moral homilies and laws against birth-control propaganda, "quite unavailing" — the use of contraceptives has become part of the common practice of all civilized nations and cannot now be eradicated. The proper course in any nation threatened with an actual decrease is "an experimental diminution of the financial burden of children until the point is reached where the birth rate is such as to maintain the existing population." One alteration of the moral code would help: there are in England some two million more women than men, condemned by law and custom to remain childless — to many of them a great deprivation. If custom tolerated the unmarried mother and made her economic situation tolerable, many of these women would have children. "Strict monogamy is based upon the assumption that the numbers of the sexes will be approximately equal. Where this is not the case, it involves considerable cruelty to those whom arithmetic compels to remain single." Increase of population, left to the blind operation of instinct since the introduction of Christianity, will have to be deliberately controlled — and, if the control is to be beneficial, by an international State, not the competing militaristic States of the present day.

Key ideas

• The main purpose of marriage is to replenish the population; some systems do it inadequately, some too adequately.
• Population is usually stationary; voluntary restriction has been more effective than high mortality (Carr-Saunders).
• Christianity abolished every check except continence, substituting destitution and pestilence.
• The nineteenth-century increase came from a falling death rate, not a rising birth rate.
• The Education Act of 1870 and the Bradlaugh prosecution of 1878 bracket the beginning of the English birth-rate fall.
• The optimum density, not mere numbers, is the economic criterion; England is overpopulated, France and America not.
• Nationalistic militarism prefers battlefield deaths to contraceptives; "the cannon must have their fodder."
• Contraceptive use is irreversible; the remedy for decrease is reducing the financial burden of children.
• Surplus women make strict monogamy an arithmetic cruelty; the unmarried mother should be tolerated.

Key takeaway

Population control must replace instinct, and an international authority — not nationalist states — must regulate it, for the alternatives are extinction of the civilized races or war as the only method of disposing of excessive numbers.

Chapter 18 — Eugenics

Central question

What is sound and what is unsound in the eugenic program, and what would a scientific sexual ethic require of procreation?

Main argument

The foundations. Eugenics is the attempt to improve the biological character of a breed by deliberate methods. The ideas are Darwinian (the President of the Eugenics Society was a son of Charles Darwin), the more immediate progenitor Francis Galton, who emphasized the hereditary factor in human achievement. In America heredity has become a party question — conservatives say character is congenital, radicals that education is everything — and Russell accepts neither, nor the shared premise that Italians, South Slavs, and such are inferior as finished products to the native-born Americans of the Ku Klux Klan. No data exist for determining what part of mental capacity is due to heredity and what to education; the decisive experiment — separating thousands of pairs of identical twins at birth — is not practicable. Russell's confessed impression: anyone can be ruined by a bad education, but only people with certain native aptitudes can achieve great excellence; no education would turn the average boy into a first-rate pianist or us all into Einsteins, and Napoleon was superior in native endowment to his schoolfellows at Brienne. Since even the most fanatical opponent of eugenics admits idiocy is congenital, statistical symmetry implies abnormal capacity at the other end. Given that human beings differ in congenital mental capacity and that clever people are preferable, "the foundations are laid for the eugenists' case. We must not, therefore, pooh-pooh the whole position."

Nonsense in the advocacy. There has been a quite exceptional lot of nonsense written on eugenics: that virtue is proportional to income; that the inheritance of poverty is a biological, not a legal, phenomenon; that if the rich breed instead of the poor everybody will be rich. Russell sees no evidence whatever that the rich are superior to the poor, and the differential birth rate is only a lag of a few years — the poor's birth rate is now as small as the rich's was nine years ago. There is one undesirable differential factor: when governments place difficulties in the way of acquiring birth-control information, persons whose intelligence falls below a certain level fail to acquire it while others succeed — so all opposition to the dissemination of contraceptive knowledge "leads to stupid people having larger families than intelligent ones." (Julius Wolf estimates 600,000 artificial abortions annually in Germany.)

Negative eugenics. Eugenics is of two sorts, positive and negative; the latter — discouragement of bad stocks — is at present more practicable, and sterilization of the unfit is within the scope of immediate practical politics in England. The natural objections are not justified in the case of the feeble-minded: feeble-minded women are apt to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all as a rule wholly worthless to the community, and would themselves be happier sterilized, since it is not from any philoprogenitive impulse that they become pregnant. The dangers of the system — authorities may come to consider any unusual opinion a mark of feeble-mindedness — "are probably worth incurring," since the number of idiots, imbeciles, and feeble-minded could be enormously diminished. But sterilization should be very definitely confined to persons who are mentally defective. Russell cannot favour laws such as that of Idaho, allowing sterilization of "mental defectives, epileptics, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sex perverts": the last two categories are very vague — the Idaho law would have justified the sterilization of Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, and St. Paul — and the habitual criminal may be the victim of a functional nervous disorder curable by psycho-analysis. The laws are some thirty years behind the best knowledge of the time, and it is very dangerous to legislate until science has arrived at stable conclusions: "false ideas become embodied in statutes, and therefore endeared to magistrates." Mental deficiency alone is sufficiently definite to be safely made the subject of legal enactment — it can be decided objectively, whereas "the same person whom one man might consider a moral degenerate will be considered by another to be a prophet."

Positive eugenics. Positive eugenics — encouraging desirable parents to have large numbers of children — has more interesting possibilities, though as yet they belong to the future. At present the exact contrary is general: the abnormally clever boy rises into the professional classes, marries at thirty or thirty-five instead of twenty-five, and the expense of education severely limits professional families, whose intellectual average is probably higher than that of most other classes. The simplest measure would be free education up to and including the university for their children — scholarships awarded on the merits of the parents rather than the children, which would incidentally do away with the cramming that damages the cleverest young people of Europe before they reach twenty-one. But democracy stands in the way: "The ideas of eugenics are based on the assumption that men are unequal, while democracy is based on the assumption that they are equal"; it is politically easy to suggest that there is a minority of inferior people (pleasing to the majority) and impossible to suggest a minority of superior people (unpleasing). Yet science may soon measure the differences: imagine the feelings of a farmer who was told that he must give all his bull calves an equal opportunity; all domestic animals have been improved enormously by scientific breeding, and human beings could, by similar methods, be changed in any desired direction. The difficulty is to determine what we desire: breeding for physical strength might diminish brains, for mental capacity might increase liability to disease, for emotional balance might destroy art. "It is not, therefore, desirable to do much in the way of positive eugenics at the present time," though within the next hundred years heredity and bio-chemistry may make it possible to breed a race everybody would admit superior. Thoroughgoing scientific breeding would require a radical upheaval: some two or three per cent of males and twenty-five per cent of females set apart for propagation, an examination at puberty, the unsuccessful sterilized, the father with no more connection with his offspring than a bull — a plan Russell finds exceedingly repugnant, yet objectively capable of remarkable results: suppose Japan adopted it and in three generations most Japanese men were as clever as Edison and as strong as a prize-fighter; no nation that had left matters to nature could stand against them. "Can any one say that a development of this sort in the future is impossible?"

Race eugenics. Race eugenics — the contention that one's own race is superior and ought to use its military power to increase its numbers at the expense of inferior stocks — is very popular with certain politicians and publicists; the most noteworthy example is the Nordic propaganda in the United States, which won legislative recognition in the immigration laws. It appeals to the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest, "yet, oddly enough, its most ardent advocates are those who consider that the teaching of Darwinism should be illegal." In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another — North America, Australia, and New Zealand contribute more to civilization than they would if still peopled by aborigines. The 1929 text adds: "It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable" — a sentence changed in later editions to "There is no sound reason to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men"; Russell later wrote that he never held negroes to be inherently inferior, and that the statement refers to environment conditioning. When it comes to discriminating among the races of Europe, a mass of bad science supports political prejudice, and there is no valid ground for regarding the yellow races as inferior. "In all such cases, racial eugenics is merely an excuse for chauvinism." Julius Wolf's table of excess of births over deaths per 1000 shows France lowest (1.3), Ecuador highest (23.1), and Wolf concludes the Western World will be overwhelmed by Russia, China, and Japan; Russell answers that as the East becomes occidentalized its birth rate will inevitably fall — industrialism brings family limitation — so there is no valid ground for expecting the domination of the East, which would in any case be no great misfortune. "Here again, as on two former occasions, we are confronted by the dangers facing mankind if science advances while international anarchy continues. Science enables us to realize our purposes, and if our purposes are evil, the result is disaster." A wrong sexual ethic and a bad sexual education have brought about much of the malevolence and hate in the world; "the reform of sexual morality [is] one of the vital needs of our time."

The eugenic ethic. From the standpoint of private morals, sexual ethics, if scientific and unsuperstitious, would accord the first place to eugenic considerations: a conscientious man and woman would not enter upon procreation without the most serious consideration of the probable value of their progeny. Contraceptives have made parenthood voluntary; with the father likely to have less importance in the future, women may be able to select the fathers of their children by eugenic considerations while allowing their private feelings free sway in sexual companionship. The twofold conclusion: love apart from children should be free, but the procreation of children should be a matter far more carefully regulated by moral considerations than it is at present. It will no longer be necessary that certain words be pronounced by a priest or a document drawn up by a registrar; what will be considered necessary is that the given man and woman, in themselves and in the heredity they transmit, should be such as are likely to have desirable children. The men with the best heredity may come to be eagerly sought after as fathers, while other men, though acceptable as lovers, may find themselves rejected when they aim at paternity. The seriousness that moralists have attached to marriage will attach only to procreation. This eugenic outlook is likely to grow and to be embodied in the law in the form of pecuniary rewards to desirable parents and penalties to the undesirable. The interference of science with our intimate personal impulses would be much less than the interference religion has tolerated for ages: "I foresee the time when all who care for the freedom of the human spirit will have to rebel against a scientific tyranny. Nevertheless, if there is to be a tyranny, it is better that it should be scientific."

Key ideas

• Eugenics rests on a sound foundation — congenital differences in mental capacity — but most advocacy adds dubious sociology.
• The rich are not demonstrably superior; opposition to birth-control knowledge makes stupid people breed faster than intelligent ones.
• Negative eugenics: sterilization confined to the mentally defective is justifiable; vague categories like "moral degenerates" are not.
• The Idaho law would have sterilized Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, and St. Paul.
• Positive eugenics is blocked by democracy, which can admit inferior minorities but not superior ones.
• The eugenic ethic: love without children free, procreation carefully regulated.
• Race eugenics is "merely an excuse for chauvinism"; the 1929 statement on negroes was revised in later editions.
• Science advancing while international anarchy continues means disaster; a scientific tyranny would still be better than a religious one.

Key takeaway

Eugenics is sound in foundation and defensible only in the narrow form of sterilizing the mentally defective; its real future lies in a private ethic that makes procreation, not sex, the object of moral seriousness.

Chapter 19 — Sex and Individual Well-Being

Central question

How does conventional sexual morality affect individual happiness across childhood, adolescence, youth, and marriage?

Main argument

Childhood. Conventional morality begins by the imposition of taboos in childhood: the child is taught not to touch certain parts of the body while grown-ups are looking, to whisper about excretory desires, to regard certain organs and acts as invested with mystery. Russell knows men, by no means old, who were told with the utmost solemnity when seen touching themselves: "I would rather see you dead than doing that." Threats are used — less often castration than insanity; it is illegal in the State of New York to let a child know that he does not run the risk unless he thinks he does. The result: most children have a profound sense of guilt and terror associated with sexual matters, so deep as to be almost wholly unconscious. Russell wishes a statistical enquiry could determine whether men who believe themselves emancipated would be as ready to commit adultery during a thunderstorm as at any other time: "I believe that ninety per cent of them, in their heart of hearts, would think that if they did so they would be struck by lightning." Both sadism and masochism, normal in their milder forms, are connected in their pernicious manifestations with the sense of sexual guilt — the masochist is acutely conscious of his own guilt, the sadist of the guilt of the woman as temptress. Infraction of sex prohibitions is treated differently from any other breach of rules: stealing fruit from the larder brings annoyance, but masturbation brings a tone of abject terror never heard in any other connection; the child, profoundly believing masturbation wicked and yet persisting in it, regards himself as a sinner, learns to sin in secret, and becomes "a morbidly introverted hypocrite and persecutor." Education has been conceived too much on the analogy of training dancing bears, which are made to dance by a hot floor and then by the tune alone. Children should be happy, gay, and spontaneous; "if they are to grow into upright men and women, intellectually honest, socially fearless, vigorous in action and tolerant in thought, we must begin from the very beginning to train them so that these results may be possible."

Adolescence. Many boys do not know what is happening to them and are terrified by nocturnal emissions; they find themselves filled with impulses taught to be wicked, while the better sort of boy simultaneously feels the most extreme idealism toward beauty and poetry and ideal love thought of as wholly divorced from sex. "Owing to the Manichaean elements in Christian teaching, the idealistic and the carnal impulses of adolescence are apt, among ourselves, to remain wholly dissociated, and even at war one with the other." Russell quotes an intellectual friend's confession: reading Shelley for hours and sentimentalizing over "The desire of the moth for the star," then trying to catch a surreptitious glimpse of the housemaid undressing — the latter impulse causing profound shame. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa reports adolescent disorders unknown in that island, attributed to sexual freedom — though the girls living in the missionary's house practised only masturbation and homosexuality; "our most famous boys' schools are not altogether so very different in this respect from the house of the Samoan missionary, but the psychological effect of behaviour which, in Samoa, is harmless, may in an English schoolboy be disastrous, because he probably respects in his heart the conventional teaching."

Youth. If a young man remains chaste, the difficulty of control makes him timid and inhibited, so that when he finally marries he cannot break down the self-control of past years except perhaps in a brutal and sudden manner; if he goes with prostitutes, the dissociation between the physical and the idealistic aspects of love is perpetuated and his relations with women ever after have to be either Platonic or, in his belief, degrading; if he has affairs with girls of his own class, much less harm is done, but the need of secrecy interferes with stable relations. A sane outlook would expect university students to be temporarily married, though childless, freed from the obsession of sex which greatly interferes with work, and acquiring the experience of the other sex desirable as a prelude to the serious partnership of a marriage with children. For the large class of women who must remain permanently unmarried, conventional morality is painful and harmful: the woman who has considered it important to preserve her virtue has been engaged in a negative reaction tinged with fear, becoming timid while instinctive, unconscious jealousy fills her with disapproval of normal people and a desire to punish those who have enjoyed what she has forgone. "I am inclined to think that the intellectual inferiority of women, in so far as it exists, is mainly due to the restraint upon curiosity which the fear of sex leads them to impose." The existence of a great excess of women affords a very serious argument in favour of modifying the conventional code.

Marriage. Marriage itself suffers from the rigidity of the code: the complexes of childhood, the experiences of men with prostitutes, and the aversion instilled into young ladies all militate against happiness. The well-brought-up girl cannot distinguish serious congeniality from mere sex attraction and may marry the first man who awakens her sexually; everything has been done in education to make her unduly timid and him unduly sudden; both lack knowledge, and initial failures make the marriage ever after sexually unsatisfying. In the most intimate and vital concern of their mutual life they are shy, awkward, even wholly silent: "The wife, perhaps, lies awake unsatisfied and hardly knowing what it is she wants. The man perhaps has the thought, at first fleeting and instantly banished, but gradually becoming more and more insistent, that even prostitutes are more generous in giving than his lawful wife." All this misery results from "our policy of silence and decency." In all these ways the older morality has been allowed to poison love, "separating into two regions the bodily impulse of sex and the spiritual impulse of ideal love, making the one beastly and the other sterile." The animal and the spiritual natures should not be at war: "Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven." The love of man and woman and the love of parents and children are the two central facts in the emotional life of man; conventional morality degraded the one and pretended to exalt the other, but children who are the fruit of joy and mutual fulfilment can be loved in a more healthy way than is possible to starved, hungry parents reaching out to the helpless young for some fragment of the nutriment denied them in marriage — "and in so doing, warping infant minds and laying the foundation of the same troubles for the next generation." "To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

Key ideas

• Childhood taboos implant a deep, largely unconscious sense of guilt and terror about sex.
• Sadism and masochism in their pernicious forms are products of the sense of sexual guilt.
• Sex prohibitions, unlike other rules, are enforced with a tone that creates abject terror and secret sinning.
• The Manichaean dissociation of idealism from carnality torments adolescence.
• Chastity, prostitution, and furtive affairs each damage young men in characteristic ways.
• Prolonged virginity for surplus women breeds timidity, envy, and intellectual timidity.
• Marriage suffers from the mutual ignorance and awkwardness the code produces.
• The two central facts of emotional life are the love of man and woman and the love of parents and children; degrading one degrades the other.

Key takeaway

Conventional morality poisons every stage of life — making children stupid, deceitful, and timorous, adolescents dissociated, and marriages mutually unsatisfying — and the remedy is to let the bodily and spiritual natures of love be united rather than at war.

Chapter 20 — The Place of Sex Among Human Values

Central question

What value does sex have among the goods of human life, and what does it require of a morality?

Main argument

The accusation of obsession. The writer who deals with a sexual theme is always in danger of being accused of undue obsession with his subject — but only if he advocates changes in the conventional ethic. "Those who stimulate the appeals to harry prostitutes and those who secure legislation, nominally against the White Slave Traffic, but really against voluntary and decent extra-marital relations; those who denounce women for short skirts and lipsticks; and those who spy upon sea beaches in the hope of discovering inadequate bathing costumes, are none of them supposed to be the victims of a sexual obsession." Fierce morality is generally a reaction against lustful emotions: "It is notorious that St. Anthony was more obsessed by sex than the most extreme voluptuary who ever lived."

The analogy of food. Sex is a natural need, like food and drink; we blame the gormandizer and the dipsomaniac because an interest with a legitimate place has usurped too large a share, but we do not blame a man for a normal enjoyment of food. The Puritans, in their determination to avoid the pleasures of sex, became more conscious of the pleasures of the table: "Would you enjoy gay nights and pleasant dinners? / Then must you board with saints and bed with sinners." Ascetic deprivation produces obsession — marooned Antarctic explorers reduced to whale's blubber spend their days planning the dinner they will have at the Carlton. So sex should be regarded by moralists as food has come to be regarded: the desire for sex is enormously enhanced by abstinence, temporarily allayed by satisfaction, and enormously stimulated by prohibition — children refuse apples at breakfast and steal unripe ones in the orchard; the desire for alcohol among well-to-do Americans is much stronger than it was twenty years ago; "Christian teaching and Christian authority have immensely stimulated interest in sex." The generation that first ceases to believe in the conventional teaching is bound to indulge in sexual freedom far beyond what is to be expected of those whose views are unaffected by superstition, positively or negatively. "Nothing but freedom will prevent undue obsession with sex," though freedom requires a wise education to have its effect. Russell repeats emphatically that undue preoccupation with sex is an evil, widespread at the present day, especially in America, where the sterner moralists display it by their readiness to believe falsehoods concerning their opponents. The glutton, the voluptuary, and the ascetic are all self-absorbed; absorption in self is a disease brought on by the thwarting of natural impulses, and "healthy, outward-looking men and women are not to be produced by the thwarting of natural impulse."

The restraints that remain. Russell is not suggesting there should be no morality and no self-restraint in regard to sex, any more than in regard to food, where we have restraints of law, of manners, and of health. The analogue of stealing is not adultery but rape, "which obviously must be forbidden by law" — since one human being ought not to have property in another. The questions of health concern venereal disease, best dealt with by the diminution of professional prostitution, which the greater freedom among young people is effecting.

Sex and the greatest goods. A comprehensive sexual ethic cannot regard sex merely as a natural hunger and a possible source of danger; it must remember that sex is connected with some of the greatest goods in human life. "The three that seem paramount are lyric love, happiness in marriage, and art." The impulse to every kind of aesthetic creation is psychologically connected with courtship — profoundly, though not in any direct or obvious way. For the sexual impulse to lead to artistic expression, there must be artistic capacity (which environment largely governs) and a certain kind of freedom — not reward, but freedom from being compelled to form habits that turn the artist into a philistine. Julius II's imprisonment of Michelangelo did not interfere with the artist's freedom; but the artist compelled to kowtow to rich patrons, or compelled by fear of social and economic persecution to go on living in an intolerable marriage, loses the energy artistic creation requires. "Societies that have been conventionally virtuous have not produced great art. Those which have, have been composed of men such as Idaho would sterilize." America imports most of its artistic talent from Europe; the Americanization of Europe is driving art to the negroes, "the last home of art, it seems, is to be somewhere on the Upper Congo, if not in the uplands of Tibet." Art has had a popular basis, depending on joy of life, which depends on spontaneity in regard to sex: "Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing." One of the most dangerous fallacies of the conventional moralists is "the reduction of sex to the sexual act, in order to be the better able to belabour it": no civilized man, and no savage that Russell has heard of, is satisfied in his instinct by the bare sexual act; there must be courtship, love, companionship, or the mental hunger remains unabated. "The sexual freedom that the artist needs is freedom to love, not the gross freedom to relieve the bodily need with some unknown woman."

The limits of sex's empire. Russell does not believe all that is best in human life is connected with sex. Power, sex, and parenthood are the sources of most of the things human beings do, apart from self-preservation. Power begins first and ends last — the child is dominated by the desire to have more — and has very little connection with sex; curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge are a branch of the love of power ("If knowledge is power, then the love of knowledge is the love of power"), so science lies outside the province of sexual emotions — as the Emperor Frederick II would no doubt have decided by castrating an eminent mathematician and an eminent composer and observing the effects; Russell expects the former to be nil and the latter considerable. Power is also the motive to most political activity — a great statesman is a man in whom parental feeling has become widely diffused, but without a considerable love of power he will fail to sustain the labours of political enterprise (Lincoln's "I am the President of the United States, clothed with great power"); an attempt to interpret politics on Freudian lines is a mistake. Most of the greatest men other than artists have been actuated by motives unconnected with sex, and if such activities are to persist it is necessary that sex should not overshadow the remainder of a man's passionate nature: "The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress." It may be that too complete a happiness would let the impulses to knowledge and reform fade — Cobden enlisted John Bright in the free trade campaign by appealing to his sorrow at his wife's death — but it is no part of the duty of human beings to provide others with pain on the off chance that it may prove fruitful: "In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred pain proves merely crushing."

Key ideas

• Only reformers are accused of sexual obsession; the fierce moralists who harry prostitutes and spy on beaches are the truly obsessed.
• Sex is a natural need like food: prohibition stimulates desire; freedom alone prevents obsession.
• Restraints remain — law (rape), manners, health (venereal disease) — but one person must not have property in another.
• Sex is connected with the greatest goods: lyric love, happiness in marriage, and art.
• Art is psychologically connected with courtship; conventionally virtuous societies have not produced great art.
• Reducing sex to the sexual act is the moralists' dangerous fallacy; courtship, love, and companionship are required for satisfaction.
• Power, sex, and parenthood are the three great sources of human action; science and politics belong to power, not sex.
• Pain is not a duty to inflict on others; in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it merely crushes.

Key takeaway

Sex must be given its place among the greatest goods — lyric love, marriage, and art — while the pursuit of knowledge and reform, which belong to power, must not be overshadowed by it; and freedom, not prohibition, is the cure for obsession.

Chapter 21 — Conclusion

Central question

What general principles should a new sexual morality follow, and what should it keep of the old?

Main argument

The two sources. Historically, sexual morality as it exists in civilized societies has been derived from two quite different sources: the desire for certainty as to fatherhood and an ascetic belief that sex is wicked except in so far as it is necessary for propagation. Pre-Christian morality, and that of the Far East down to the present day, had only the former source, except in India and Persia, the centres from which asceticism spread. Where paternity is unknown, women are on the whole much freer. At the patriarchal stage, sexual morality existed only for women: a man might not commit adultery with a married woman, but otherwise he was free. Christianity introduced the motive of the avoidance of sin, and the moral standard became in theory the same for men and women, though in practice men's failings were more tolerated. Early sexual morality had a plain biological purpose — to ensure the young had the protection of two parents — "the purpose was lost sight of in Christian theory, though not in Christian practice."

The two modern factors. Both parts of the old morality are undergoing modification. The Christian part has lost its hold with the decay of orthodoxy. The pre-Christian part is being modified by two factors. First, contraceptives are making it increasingly possible to prevent intercourse from leading to pregnancy, so that assurance of paternity becomes possible without insisting that women have no intercourse outside marriage; deceit as to paternity will be less frequent than deceit as to adultery has been, and husbands' jealousy may adapt itself to the new situation, arising only when wives propose to choose some other man as the father of their children — as Orientals have always tolerated liberties on the part of eunuchs, since they introduce no doubt as to paternity. The biparental family may therefore survive without making such great demands upon the continence of women. Second, the increasing participation of the State in the maintenance and education of children: protection is provided by the police and maintenance may come to be provided wholly by the State, so that the father would cease to serve any obvious purpose. The mother may either continue her ordinary work with her children cared for in institutions, or be paid by the State to care for them; if payment is withheld from the not-virtuous, she will be unable to support her children unless she goes to work, and it will be necessary to put them in an institution. "It would seem probable, therefore, that the operation of economic forces may lead to the elimination of the father, and even to a great extent of the mother, in the care of children whose parents are not rich. If so, all the traditional reasons for traditional morality will have disappeared, and new reasons will have to be found for a new morality." The break-up of the family would not be a matter for rejoicing: the affection of parents is important to children; institutions on a large scale are sure to become very official and rather harsh; there will be a terrible degree of uniformity when the differentiating influence of different home environments is removed; and unless an international government is previously established, children will be taught a virulent form of patriotism that will make it nearly certain they will exterminate each other when grown up. An international government is also required for population, since in its absence the only remaining method of disposing of excessive numbers will be war.

The personal questions are simple. While the sociological questions are often difficult, the personal questions are quite simple: the doctrine that there is something sinful about sex has done untold harm to individual character, beginning in early childhood and continuing throughout life. "By keeping sex love in a prison, conventional morality has done much to imprison all other forms of friendly feeling, and to make men less generous, less kindly, more self-assertive and more cruel." Whatever sexual ethic is ultimately accepted must be free from superstition and have recognizable, demonstrable grounds in its favour. "Sex cannot dispense with an ethic, any more than business or sport or scientific research or any other branch of human activity. But it can dispense with an ethic based solely upon ancient prohibitions propounded by uneducated people in a society wholly unlike our own." Our ethic is still dominated by fears that modern discoveries have made irrational.

Training rather than thwarting. "The general principle upon which the newer morality differs from the traditional morality of puritanism is this: we believe that instinct should be trained rather than thwarted." The morality Russell advocates does not consist of saying to grown-ups or adolescents "Follow your impulses and do as you like": there has to be consistency in life, continuous effort directed to ends that are not immediately beneficial, consideration for others, and certain standards of rectitude. But self-control should not be regarded as an end in itself; institutions and conventions should make the need for self-control a minimum rather than a maximum. "The use of self-control is like the use of brakes on a train. It is useful when you find yourself going in the wrong direction, but merely harmful when the direction is right." The degree to which self-control is necessary depends on the early treatment of instinct: instincts, like the steam in a locomotive, may take the train toward its destination or into a siding where it is smashed; the function of education is to guide instinct into useful directions. If early education has consisted in mere thwarting, the acts to which instinct prompts in later life are partly harmful and have to be continually restrained.

The divided personality. Traditional moralists believe that if sexual impulses were not severely checked they would become trivial, anarchic, and gross — a view derived from observation of those who acquired the usual inhibitions and then attempted to ignore them, with the early prohibitions still operative even when they do not succeed in prohibiting. "What is called conscience, that is to say the unreasoning and more or less unconscious acceptance of precepts learnt in early youth," keeps a man feeling that whatever the conventions prohibit is wrong, producing a personality divided against itself, "one in which instinct and reason no longer go hand in hand, but instinct has become trivial and reason has become anaemic." Russell distinguishes the common degrees of revolt: the man who intellectually accepts the old morality but confesses, with unreal regret, that he is not heroic enough to live up to it — for him little can be said; and the man whose conscious reason has rejected much of the nursery teaching while his unconscious accepts it entirely — he will suddenly change his line of conduct under the stress of any strong emotion, especially fear (a serious illness or an earthquake may cause him to repent), and even at ordinary times his behaviour will be inhibited. "The substitution of a new moral code for the old one can never be completely satisfactory unless the new one is accepted with the whole personality, not only with that top layer which constitutes our conscious thought," and it is therefore impossible to judge a new morality fairly until it has been applied in early education.

The two principles. Sex morality has to be derived from certain general principles. "The first thing to be secured is that there should be as much as possible of that deep, serious love between man and woman which embraces the whole personality of both and leads to a fusion by which each is enriched and enhanced. The second thing of importance is that there should be adequate care of children, physical and psychological." Neither principle is in itself shocking, yet it is as a consequence of these two principles that Russell advocates certain modifications of the conventional code. Since jealousy has the sanction of the moralists, men and women feel justified in keeping each other in a mutual prison; it is a very good thing when a husband and wife love each other so completely that neither is ever tempted to unfaithfulness, "it is not, however, a good thing that unfaithfulness, if it does occur, should be treated as something terrible," nor is it desirable to make all friendship with the other sex impossible. "A good life cannot be founded upon fear, prohibition, and mutual interference with freedom." Mutual jealousy, even where there is physical faithfulness, often causes more unhappiness than confidence in the ultimate strength of a deep affection. The obligations of parents toward children are treated far more lightly than Russell thinks right: given the biparental family, as soon as there are children it is the duty of both parties to do everything they can to preserve harmonious relations, even if this requires considerable self-control — control of jealousy, ill-temper, and masterfulness as much as of impulses to unfaithfulness, since serious quarrels between parents are a very frequent cause of nervous disorders in children. Where one or both parties have not sufficient self-control, it may well be better that the marriage should be dissolved: "it is by no means the case that the dissolution of a marriage is invariably the worst thing possible from the point of view of the children; indeed it is not nearly so bad as the spectacle of raised voices, furious accusations, perhaps even violence."

Freedom learned from the first. Sane freedom must be learnt from the earliest years; adults brought up under the old restrictive maxims cannot simply be left to their damaged impulses — that is a necessary stage, but no more. Nine out of ten of those who have had a conventional upbringing have become in some degree incapable of a decent and sane attitude toward marriage and sex; the best that can be done for them is to make them aware of the damage and persuade them to abstain from maiming their children in the same way in which they have been maimed. One of the most important benefits psycho-analysis has conferred on the world is its discovery of the bad effects of prohibitions and threats in early childhood. The doctrine preached is not one of licence: "it involves exactly as much self-control as is involved in the conventional doctrine. But self-control will be applied more to abstaining from interference with the freedom of others than to restraining one's own freedom." The essence of a good marriage is "respect for each other's personality combined with that deep intimacy, physical, mental, and spiritual, which makes a serious love between man and woman the most fructifying of all human experiences." Such love demands its own morality and frequently entails a sacrifice of the less to the greater — but the sacrifice must be voluntary, "for, where it is not, it will destroy the very basis of the love for the sake of which it is made."

Key ideas

• Western sexual morality is a mixture of two sources: certainty of paternity and ascetic hatred of sex.
• Contraceptives can assure paternity without demanding female continence; jealousy can learn to arise only where paternity is in question.
• The State's growing role may eliminate the father and even the mother from the care of children.
• The break-up of the family would bring uniformity, harsh institutions, and virulent patriotism; it is not a matter for rejoicing.
• The doctrine of sin has made men less generous, less kindly, more self-assertive, and more cruel.
• Instinct should be trained rather than thwarted; self-control is like brakes, useful only when the direction is wrong.
• Conscience is the unconscious acceptance of nursery precepts; a new morality must be accepted with the whole personality.
• Two principles govern: as much deep serious love as possible, and adequate physical and psychological care of children.
• Parents' duty is to control jealousy and quarrels; dissolution can be better for children than raised voices and violence.
• The new morality demands as much self-control as the old, applied to non-interference with others' freedom.

Key takeaway

The new sexual morality keeps the old severity of self-control but redirects it — toward respect for the freedom and personality of others and the care of children — resting on two demonstrable principles: deep love, and adequate child care, rather than taboo.

The book's overall argument

1. Chapter 1 (Why a Sexual Ethic Is Necessary) — establishes the method and the stakes: sexual morality must be judged from all five standpoints (personal, conjugal, familial, national, international), and the existing Western code is a survival of superstition that the new factors of medicine, hygiene, and the State have made obsolete.
2. Chapter 2 (Where Fatherhood Is Unknown) — establishes that sexual "instinct" is vague and learned: the Trobriand evidence shows paternity is a belief, not a fixed instinct, so the virtues built on it are conventions.
3. Chapter 3 (The Dominion of the Father) — establishes the historical origin of the code: the discovery of paternity produced the subjection of women and the demand for female virtue, whose decay is already well advanced.
4. Chapter 4 (Phallic Worship, Asceticism and Sin) — establishes that the anti-sexual element in religion is a natural mood — jealousy, sexual fatigue, weariness — not a revelation, and that the Christian ethic was formulated in a decadent period.
5. Chapter 5 (Christian Ethics) — establishes the Christian contribution: St. Paul's novel view of marriage as a remedy for fornication, the ascetic hatred of sex, and their consequences — brutality, the degradation of women, and indissoluble marriage.
6. Chapter 6 (Romantic Love) — establishes the secular counterweight: romantic love, a medieval aristocratic invention dependent on barriers, is a great good but the wrong foundation for marriage, which children make a serious institution.
7. Chapter 7 (The Liberation of Women) — establishes the present crisis: contraceptives and women's emancipation have destroyed the material basis of the old code, the double standard is indefensible, and a genuinely new morality is needed.
8. Chapter 8 (The Taboo on Sex Knowledge) — establishes the first requirement of reform: ignorance never promotes virtue, the taboo damages children intellectually and morally, and obscenity law serves only superstition.
9. Chapter 9 (The Place of Love in Human Life) — establishes the value at stake: love is one of the most important things in life, threatened by the gospel of work, and is to be protected except where children require otherwise.
10. Chapter 10 (Marriage) — establishes the shape of a reformed marriage: equality, mutual freedom, complete intimacy, and the control of jealousy rather than of love; lifelong when fruitful, but not exclusive of other sex relations.
11. Chapter 11 (Prostitution) — establishes that prostitution is the hidden cost of the double standard, indefensible as a life and as a trade, and decaying wherever freedom grows.
12. Chapter 12 (Trial Marriage) — establishes the reform of youth: companionate marriage is a step in the right direction, childless sex is a private affair, and marriage should not be binding until the first pregnancy.
13. Chapter 13 (The Family at the Present Day) — establishes that the family is the only rational basis for limiting sexual freedom, that its economic functions are being taken over by the State, and that its decay would profoundly change male psychology.
14. Chapter 14 (The Family in Individual Psychology) — establishes the psychological ledger: the Freudian dangers are preventable, parental affection is essential, and paternity is the emotion that gives men's lives depth.
15. Chapter 15 (The Family and the State) — establishes the political danger: State substitution for the father is an advance that becomes a grave danger in a world of national militaristic states, requiring an international government.
16. Chapter 16 (Divorce) — establishes the law of dissolution: rational grounds (defect, mutual consent) and the demotion of adultery; lenient law, strict custom, with children the purpose of marriage.
17. Chapter 17 (Population) — establishes the demographic ground: the purpose of marriage is to replenish the population, birth control is irreversible, and only an international authority can regulate numbers safely.
18. Chapter 18 (Eugenics) — establishes the final seriousness: procreation, made voluntary by contraceptives, should be governed by eugenic considerations — while race eugenics is chauvinism and sterilization must be confined to mental deficiency.
19. Chapter 19 (Sex and Individual Well-Being) — establishes the human cost of the old code: from childhood taboos through adolescent dissociation to unhappy marriages, the code poisons life at every stage.
20. Chapter 20 (The Place of Sex Among Human Values) — establishes the valuation: sex serves the greatest goods — lyric love, happiness in marriage, art — while science and politics belong to the love of power, not of sex.
21. Chapter 21 (Conclusion) — establishes the synthesis: instinct must be trained rather than thwarted, self-control redirected from one's own freedom to non-interference with others', and morality derived from two principles — deep serious love and adequate care of children.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The book is an attack on marriage or a plea for promiscuity. Russell explicitly calls marriage "the best and most important relation that can exist between two human beings" (Chapter 10) and argues for lifelong unions where children exist; his doctrine "involves exactly as much self-control as is involved in the conventional doctrine" (Chapter 21). What he attacks is the code that makes marriage a mutual prison.

Misunderstanding: Russell thought sexual morality could be abolished ("follow your impulses"). He opens the book by arguing that a sexual ethic is necessary and closes it by insisting that "sex cannot dispense with an ethic." The principle is that instinct should be trained rather than thwarted, with self-control applied to refraining from interference with others.

Misunderstanding: "Trial marriage" was Russell's own proposal. The proposal was Judge Ben B. Lindsey's "companionate marriage"; Russell endorsed it as a step in the right direction but said it did not go far enough, proposing instead that no marriage should be legally binding until the wife's first pregnancy.

Misunderstanding: The book caused Russell to lose the Nobel Prize, or was officially honored by it. Russell himself claimed the Nobel Prize in Literature (1950) was awarded for Marriage and Morals, but the Nobel Foundation cited "his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought" generally, not any particular work. The book's actual notoriety lies in the scandal that contributed to the 1940 CCNY appointment case.

Misunderstanding: The book is only about sex; the CCNY scandal defines it. Two-thirds of the chapters concern the family, the State, population, and eugenics. The CCNY episode (1940) turned on Russell's public moral reputation, with a Catholic judge declaring him "morally unfit" to teach; John Dewey protested, and Einstein's "great spirits" aphorism came from his letter in Russell's support.

Misunderstanding: Russell advocated the break-up of the family. He writes that the break-up of the family, if it comes about, "will not be, to my mind, a matter for rejoicing," that parental affection is important to children, and that institutional uniformity and state-taught patriotism are grave dangers. He argues the family is decaying as a matter of fact, not recommending its destruction.

Misunderstanding: Russell was a general supporter of eugenic sterilization. He supported sterilization only for the mentally defective, called the broad Idaho law dangerous (it would have sterilized Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, and St. Paul), and dismissed race eugenics as "merely an excuse for chauvinism."

Misunderstanding: The book contains a settled racial judgment against negroes. The 1929 text says "It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men"; later editions changed this to "There is no sound reason to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men," and Russell later wrote that he never held negroes to be inherently inferior, the statement referring to environment conditioning.

Misunderstanding: "Sex is a natural need like food" means no restraint is needed. Russell draws the analogy precisely to argue for restraint: law (rape must be forbidden), manners, and health apply to sex as to food, and obsession with sex is an evil; prohibition, not freedom, produces the obsession.

Central paradox / key insight

The book's most counterintuitive idea is that the stricter a sexual morality is, the more it manufactures the very evils it denounces. The demand for female virtue creates prostitution as its "safety valve"; prohibition makes sex "bootlegged" and spicy, producing the obsession it claims to prevent; the taboo on knowledge makes children "stupid, deceitful and timorous"; the praise of jealousy turns the most expansive emotion of life into a tool of mutual imprisonment; and the code built to secure paternity has been rendered pointless by contraceptives, which can assure paternity without demanding chastity at all. The whole apparatus of Western sexual morality rests on two pillars — the uncertainty of paternity and the sinfulness of sex — and modern science has knocked out both; what remains is a system whose cruelty is now unnecessary, whose virtues are misplaced, and whose only defensible core is the care of children.

It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.

Important concepts

Patriarchal family. The family in which descent, authority, and property run through the father; the dominant form in Western history, built on the recognition of paternity and on female virtue, and the source of most traditional sexual restrictions.

Female virtue. In Russell's usage, the chastity of women, demanded not by religion but to make the patriarchal family possible — since paternity is uncertain, the woman's virtue is the only guarantee of a man's biological fatherhood.

Matrilineal (Trobriand) society. A society in which descent is traced through women and paternity is unknown; authority over children belongs to the maternal uncle, affection to the father. It demonstrates that paternal sentiment is a learned belief, not a fixed instinct.

Asceticism. The belief that sex is wicked except in so far as it is necessary for propagation; Russell traces it to jealousy, sexual fatigue, and epochs of weariness, and treats it as the psychological source of the Christian insistence on male virtue.

Double standard. The practice, condemned by logic but forced on conventional moralists, of demanding sexual virtue of women while tolerating its absence in men — a system whose possibility depends on prostitution.

Romantic love. The medieval, aristocratic passion that regards the beloved as difficult to possess and precious; a great good, but dependent on barriers and an unstable equilibrium, and the wrong basis for marriage.

Companionate marriage. Judge Lindsey's proposal: marriage without intention of children, with birth-control information provided, divorce by mutual consent while childless, and no alimony; Russell endorses it as a step in the right direction but not far enough.

Bootlegged sex. Sex conducted under prohibition — furtive, bravado-driven, divorced from companionship — analogous to bootlegged alcohol under Prohibition, and inferior to what it would be under freedom.

The taboo on sex knowledge. The refusal to teach sexual facts, which Russell argues makes people "stupid, deceitful and timorous," destroys parental authority, and creates the obsession it pretends to prevent.

Lord Campbell's Act (1857). The English obscenity law that lets magistrates destroy "obscene" publications, with the term undefined and expert evidence inadmissible; Russell argues it suppresses serious work while the salacious evade it, and that there should be no law on obscenity at all.

The policeman's outlook. The habit of restrictive morality, which is always looking for an opportunity to forbid something; Russell's name for the attitude that turns spouses into each other's wardens.

Optimum density of population. Carr-Saunders' concept of the population density that gives the maximum income per head under given economic technique; the criterion by which Russell judges whether a population is too large or too small.

Positive and negative eugenics. Negative eugenics discourages bad stocks (sterilization of the mentally defective); positive eugenics encourages desirable parents to have children. Russell finds the first narrowly defensible and the second impossible under democracy.

Race eugenics. The contention that one's own race is superior and should increase its numbers at the expense of inferior stocks — in Russell's judgment "merely an excuse for chauvinism."

Training versus thwarting instinct. The general principle of the newer morality: education should guide instinct into useful directions, as the steam in a locomotive is guided to the destination; thwarted instinct requires lifelong self-control, "like the use of brakes on a train" — useful only when the direction is wrong.

Extra-marital sexual relations. The deliberately neutral phrase Russell recommends in place of loaded words like "adultery" and "fornication" (praise-words like "gallantry" being equally prejudiced), following Bentham's method of naming desires in blame, praise, and neutral columns.

References and Web Links

Full text (primary sources)

• Wikisource: proofread text of the 1929 Horace Liveright printing, with the complete table of contents and all 21 chapters: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Marriage_and_Morals (chapter pages at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Marriage_and_Morals/Chapter_1 and following; the scanned 1929 Liveright printing used to establish the text: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Bertrand_Russell_-_Marriage_and_Morals_(1929_printing,_Horace_Liveright,_white_pages).pdf)
• Internet Archive: full scan of the 1929 H. Liveright edition (State Library of Pennsylvania copy), with full text download: https://archive.org/details/marriagemorals00russ_0
• russell-j.com (Bertrand Russell portal): full text transcription of the book: https://russell-j.com/beginner/MaM1929-TEXT.HTM — supplement; note that this transcription follows the Allen & Unwin line and uses the variant titles "Matrilineal Societies" and "Patriarchal Systems" for Chapters II and III.

Catalogs and editions

• Open Library work page (editions, LCCN, publisher records): https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1088575W
• Open Library record of the 1929 H. Liveright edition: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6733460M/Marriage_and_morals
• Open Library record of the Routledge Classics edition (2009, ISBN 9780415482882, with recorded table of contents): https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22695818M
• Library of Congress catalog record (LCCN 29021696): https://lccn.loc.gov/29021696

Background and reception

• Wikipedia: "Marriage and Morals" — publication facts, the controversy and CCNY case, the eugenics chapter, and the Nobel Prize question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_and_Morals
• Wikipedia: "The Bertrand Russell Case" — the 1940 City College of New York appointment and the court judgment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bertrand_Russell_Case
• Wikiquote: quotations from and about the book: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marriage_and_Morals

The three primary sources above (Wikisource proofread text, the Internet Archive scan, and the Open Library records) were used to verify the edition and the exact ordered chapter list; study aids and transcriptions such as russell-j.com are supplements, not substitutes.