Although this movement was found here and there before the war, especially in England, the war accelerated its development and made possible the rapid realization of its goal— the complete equalization of the sexes and the creation of a new sexual morality. Judge Lindsey regards the revolution of youth as the most important consequence of the post-war period, from the moral point of view.
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But we wish to point out that this revolution is confined to modern America and Russia and therefore we regard as much more significant the profound and far-reaching revolution of the modern woman. One might say that the successful rebellion of the female sex against century-old enslavement is the historic act of our century and may serve as the boundary between two ages of the world, that of the enslavement of the women, and that of the equality of the sexes. These two tendencies, erotic emancipation of feminism, point to a third line of development which runs parellel with them and issues from a historical tendency that also came to expression before the war, that is, the economic equalization, the increasing participa- tion of women in production.
Since our whole conception proceeds from the economic elements in human society, we must look upon the transformation in the economic substructure of society as the fundamental factor and as the real explanation for both of the other phenomena. The increasing participation of woman in economic production is due to the nature of industrial capitalism: This increase in labor power, so necessary for the development of indus- trialism, was eked out by working women, both from the city and villages, who deserted the farms and were sucked up by the great industrial centers even at the beginning of the century Verhaeren had spoken of "villes tentaculaires".
We are only interested in the reasons which led women to participate in industry. Modern industrialism creates mass production and needs an ever increasing mass of consumers if it is to get rid of its products.
Needs which had formerly been alien to all the lower classes were artificially created. The laborer's wage, which, in accordance with the law of supply and demand, always circulates around the peak necessary for his own sustenance and scarcely ever goes beyond this, was added to by his wife who left housework to work for wages in industry.
Otherwise, despite the cheapness of manufactured articles, the laborer could not satisfy those new needs. The entry of woman into economic life is quite advantageous for capitalism, because, in all branches of production, woman's labor power is cheaper. And the great participation of woman in production was constantly increased by the technological inventions of the machine age. The stage of early capitalism in which industry in contrast to the guilds was able to get along with cheap and unskilled labor and hence could make great use of women is repeated on a high level of industrial development as the complicated productive processes are now performed by machines —the steel idols of fully-developed industrialism.
The comparative physical weakness of woman and her lack of technical education is of little importance in the twentieth century. In ever greater num- bers women left the home and entered economic life; and parallel to this there went the pauperization of the middle classes, the petit bourgeoisie, which was ground to bits between the two millstones of capitalism Grosskapitalismus and the proletariat, for the society that belonged to this middle class were also unable to gratify the increased needs of industrialization save through the growing par- ticipation of women in business life.
Daughters of the middle class swarmed into the intellectual callings as soon as the way was opened for them. Office girls, saleswomen, doctors, lawyers and civil service officials now entered into competition with men in these fields. A great number of vocations, which had formerly been looked upon as unfit for women, were successively conquered by women.
Even before the war, there was created a situation in the labor market where the old distinction between women's work or professions had disappeared. Everybody knows how the war affected the participation of women in industry. For in every European land the protraction of hostilities meant that greater masses of men would be drawn from work to economically unproductive war.
The first months of the war saw a great rise in the need for labor power. Under such circumstances woman entered practically every branch of produc- tive activity so that she virtually achieved economic emancipation. This economic emanci- pation, achieved so easily, was the ground on which political, legal and social emancipation summarized under the "women's move- ment" Frauenbewegung could flourish. To be sure, much earlier there had been a movement for emancipation on political grounds but it had little influence. The success of any movement for the emancipation of women had to wait for the increasing participation of woman in economic life.
Consequently the struggle for the political enfranchisement of women entered a decisive change in the first decade of our century. As a result of the increased economic equalization, the movement for the political enfranchisement of women was accelerated.
Feminism and the woman's movement are permeated in the most diverse ways with erotic factors. The great suffragettes of earlier days, those who had achieved importance because of their espousal of a new ideal of woman beyond that which was held to be dictated by nature and desired by God, were at the same time the protagonists of freedom from the shackles of conventional morality.
Indeed it is not without its piquancy that these female geniuses were much less protagonists of woman's rights than of erotic free- dom. For that which the nineteenth century termed the emancipa- tion of women, the women who have achieved world fame have done very little.
From Aspasia to Mme. Curie, or Eleanora Duse few women have fought so that the privileges which their own genius assured to them might become the right of every woman. George Sand was perhaps the only one who in her books and in her personal relations was an emancipationist and demanded for all women that right of which she made such frequent use — of acting, living and dressing like a man. However, with regard to George Sand, there is scarcely any doubt that as far as her work was concerned, she was really a disguised man and Weininger has cor- rectly pointed out that in her rich and changeful vita sexualis she always preferred feminine men.
We are indebted to Magnus Hirschfeld for a scientific understanding of the personality of George Sand whom he classifies as a transverstitic metatropist. But as long as economic emancipation of women was absent, freedom was confined to a few exceptional women, who as early as the nineteenth century termed themselves emancipated.
But, aside from the fact that these attributes are by no means constant, as appears in the change from type of modern women since every period creates its own types , such a conception of the historical transformation of feminism is without ground. Nor is he right in assuming that the rise of the women's movement is to a large part due to the activities of homosexual women; rather must one say that the women's movement, which became active through the economic transformation, in certain cases, drew women with homo- sexual inclinations into the camp of the suffragettes from purely erotic motives.
In his work on homosexuality in , Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld says the following concerning this point: As a matter of fact, we need the homosexual woman in all women's groups, social or professional, and they are of extreme importance in fighting for emancipation and independence. Naturally we must not assume that the latter are based entirely, or even primarily, on homosexual elements, but, none the less, the connections between it and female homosexuality are so numerous because the female yearnings, in accordance with their natural capacities, participate as the pioneers in the struggle for the independence of woman from man.
This may be psychologically true, but it is historically false. Neither the desire for power, nor sadism, nor other erotic motives of the female psyche can be re- garded' as the "cause" of this movement. They are only incentives, subjective motivations, illusions, desires and passions, through which a historic-economic necessity comes to expression, in this case the equalization of the sexes. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the erotic freedom thus sought after was frequently of a tribadic or sadistic kind.
The progress of feminism and the participation of women in production resulted in a masculinization of the contemporary type of woman. Even sadistic moments which here point back to the fundamental antipathy of the sexes came to clearer expression in the economic competition which woman offered to man in profes- sional and industrial life.
As women displaced men more and more during the war, Dr.
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Stekel asserted that they were using the war to capture the positions of men and perhaps to keep them forever. The wild outbreaks of certain suffragettes against the male sex are notorious and Eberhard has collated curious examples of this in his book; but, of course, it was primarily the homosexual wing of the women's movement which expressed this antipathy to men.
In other ways, also, the women's movement was connected with the problems of sexual life. Free love, or at least the bursting of bourgeois morality barriers, as far as love and marriage are con- cerned, was from the start one of the important points of the women's movement. To be sure, the political and erotic liberation which, in their turn, are based on economics first became clear after the changes had taken place in the economic substructure of society. The majority of the women did not wish to become free in much the same way that in the American Civil War a large number of Negro slaves were hostile to abolition of slavery.
In the same way, the fundamental participation of woman in production, which first made possible political-social as well as erotic liberation, the purely economic grounds of which we have just considered above — grew up without the efforts of women and, to a large extent, in spite of them. The new forms of capitalist production eventu- ated in a political transformation which reached its pinnacle in the emancipation of women; and corresponding to these new forms and connected no less strongly with the economic basis , there took place an erotic revolution which spread over the whole realm of morality.
What the twentieth century accomplished in changes in the erotic realm is nothing more than a new stage of capitalist development initiated in economic life and accelerated by the war. This erotic liberation expresses itself most strongly in the changed erotic position of woman.
The first herald in the struggle for the liberation from sexual prejudices was, as is well known, Krafft- Ebing who was soon followed by men like Havelock Ellis, Forel, Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, etc. No one wishes to deny that there had been protagonists of erotic liberation at an earlier period, brave souls who had felt the constriction of bour- geois morality and had sought to overcome them, as "Young Germany" which had fought for "The emancipation of the flesh.
Our generation is well acquainted with how these changes in- fluenced woman, not only in public life, but in the erotic realm. The bourgeois morality of the whole nineteenth century sentenced the woman to passivity which was the highest female virtue in love but which, in reality, as Calverton has well said, was the price of her economic subservience to man.
In this way there was attrib- uted to women a need to lean upon someone for support, which really corresponded to actual life at least so far as the women of the higher social classes were concerned. All the female types of the past century, from Balzac to Ibsen, are, with slight exceptions, constituted of such traits of character. At the turn of the century, however, a change began to take place. Female types are generally created by art and literature which make use of their privilege of idealization in such a way that they clearly express the demands which man makes upon the woman of his period.
Every age has one or more such female types just as, according to Taine, every period has its own ideal of man.
Jimmie Rich
The various types of women are the erotic ideal-forms of a period, equipped with all the erotic advantages and merits which appear to the males of that time as worthy of adoration and desire but which, as a matter of fact, no woman, not even the "representative woman," actually possesses. In the nineteenth century all the female types, until the very last decades, reflect the solid bourgeois morality. But Ibsen's Nora and her sisters feel the constriction of bourgeois morality and yearn for liberation from the compulsions and repressions of marriage.
At the beginning of our century the attitude of woman became more revolutionary and more threatening to the still regnant bour- geois morality as can be seen from the new female types. That fine historian of morals, Moreck, has listed three such types of the pre- war period: A fourth type, that of the suffragette, he regards as a variation of the half virgin— which, we think, is incor- rect because the suffragette was not essentially an erotic type, but one serving the social and economic emancipation even though, as we have seen above, she might have been moved by various erotic impulses.
Naturally these three types do not exhaust the change in the nature of woman in the decade and a half before the war but are just a few examples, which might be increased at will. Frequently found in literature of the first decade of the twentieth century, is the type fo the modern adulteress, whom the dramatists, and especially writers of French farces, have represented in the most varied triangle comedies.
For this type, the limitations of bourgeois morality, which come to expression in marriage, are no longer sacrosanct but, none the less, still worthy of attention and regard. These prohibitions are broken without qualms of conscience yet the appearance of the old form is anxiously maintained and the social consequence of adultery, divorce, is carefully avoided. This type of adulteress indicates that the bourgeois woman for mostly we are concerned with the woman of this class and her moral attitudes which influenced women of the other classes too, although not greatly, as the working woman and the aristocratic woman were living under different economic circumstances was beginning to carry the institution of marriage ad absurdum, without economically being able to do without her husband.
What is decisive in the case of these women is the frivolous lightness with which the woman transgressed the command of marital fidelity. Adultery, which in Mme. Bovary's time had still been a tragic problem, now became more and more a sex game. These sex games are also indulged in by half virgins, whom one might designate paradoxically as unmarried adulteresses. The demi- virgin abides by the barriers of bourgeois morality, continues to live with her bourgeois family and anxiously guards her physical intactness as the insurance policy protecting her for marriage.
Corresponding to this type of demi-vierge, created by Prevost, there are a number of similar literary types, the Nixchen, the stisse U'ddel, and others who reflect a similar stage in the erotic develop- ment of modern woman. The last pre-war type mentioned by Moreck, the "Lulu" type, is the literary personification, as her creator Wedekind says, of one perfectly free from inhibitions.
Another type of woman whose literary exemplars are much more rooted in reality and who has been of tremendous importance in the erotic liberation of woman, is the woman nihilist, the Russian co-ed, the precursor of emancipation in Europe. Her influence upon the development of a new type of woman in Europe was already felt before the war, but became more important later. Significantly enough, she was the first to wear bobbed hair— symbolic of eco- nomic, political and erotic emancipation of women.
That the increasing participation of woman in industry, her entry into the struggle for existence, and her insight into material prob- lems of vocational life had to change the erotic type of woman will certainly not surprise the reader. It is obvious that economic independence had to change woman's character. The wage-earner or professional woman has more before her than the sole possibility of marriage.
No longer is she economically dependent on man, but can now choose not only to whom she will be married but whether she wishes to marry at all, or earn her own bread. As a result, the passivity, which distinguished her character for centuries, was now lost. Economic independence gave woman courage for sexual freedom and the increase in extra-marital intercourse went hand in hand with the demand for the unmarried woman's right to a child, long ago enunciated by feminism.
In this way there arose the greater freedom of sex life among girls and women, economically independent. The female types which the war brought forth, must be judged from the erotic realm, even though they seem to draw life from the economic and social status only. Besides the women who went into industry during the war there were also the war wife, war bride, the nurse, the halting-station girl, etc. We shall return later to the transformations which the female psyche underwent during the war and as a result of it.
Woman, who, now convinced that she was able to substitute for man, could perform work which men had hitherto performed, now swept off the prejudice that woman needs someone to lean upon. She began to stand upon her own feet and claimed her rights in the erotic realm as well. Perhaps its greatest im- portance lies in the fact that in addition to the girls and women of the proletariat whose moral deportment had of old deviated from the prescriptions of bourgeois morality, it now affected other classes of society the women of which had remained untouched by the slow change of morality before the war.
In this way the moral trans- formation of the war became general and affected all classes. In an essay, entitled "Women of the Present," Ernst Fischer has said the following concerning the women of the war period: Now suddenly the men were snatched away from them and against their will they were 'emancipated. The demands of the suffragettes, which had for- merly been mocked and jeered at, were now fulfilled in the name of the 'great period' the war.
Everywhere we see the same phenomenon: The war burst upon humanity like a hurricane and together with mil- lions of human lives it swept away prejudices which had already been tottering. The dammed-up instincts, which had frequently broken through the moral repressions that were no longer regarded as sacred, rushed out in a veritable moral chaos which reached its peak, curiously enough, not during the war but in the first post- war years. The war created nothing new in the realm of morals no matter how greatly it accelerated the tempo of the evolution.
The new forms of industrial capitalism which no longer could permit the female half of mankind to remain economically unpro- ductive, the political and social equalization of both sexes, the disintegration of the bourgeois morality and the consequent moral and erotic liberation were tendencies that had been active since the turn of the century.
Was it necessary that millions of lives had to be paid for this? What the war brought was nothing more than spiritual and moral emptiness and brutalization, a sudden unchain- ing of atavistic impulses which for five years stormed through the world unimpeded and constituted the terrible forms in which the historical necessity of a moral transformation came to expression. The masses poured through the streets jubilantly, aroused to a blazing hatred, an enormous beast ready to hurl itself upon the enemy and bring it death and disaster. It was only a very extraordinary poet who was able to say that the summer in which the war broke out saw man at his lowest.
Not much good is done to the cause of pacifism by attributing the mass paroxysm of the first days of the war to motives that are all too practical. Undoubtedly there were among the myriads, who in Paris demanded a march upon Berlin, in Berlin, the destruction of France, in Vienna and Budapest the death of Serbia, paid agents of the war propaganda who bellowed vociferously their pro-war in- clinations.
It is also true that, in the street-brawls directed against foreigners who were nationals of enemy countries, more than patriotism was at stake for property was very frequently stolen. It is also true that in these mobs which tore through the streets, shrieking their hurrahs, there were youths, irresponsible elements who are not absent in any metropolitan mob, who took delight in rows as they had nothing to be afraid of. But to regard all the enthusiasm for war as due to paid agents, pilferers or rowdies is a contradiction of the facts.
The truth is that in those days there were only a few who were immune to the mass psychosis and practically everyone was enthusiastic for war. It was an outbreak of mass insanity, an explosion that had been experienced earlier in world's history and even been described by Zola, for example but which had never fanned such a world conflagration. It was a sudden release from a tension that had been felt for years. The leader of the Austrian social democracy, Viktor Adler, who until the last moment fought for peace, declared at an international convention of his party, shortly after the outbreak of the war, that despite all the propaganda against it, war was still popular among the proletariat.
Millions of men shouted the heartfelt "At last" almost rapturously expressed by Count Appanyi in the Hun- garian Parliament when he learnt that war had been declared. During the days of mobilization, a merchant made a speech in the streets of Vienna and expressed the opinion that without the war everything would have collapsed, that peace was no longer tolerable. This man spoke from his soul; and a great many others spoke of an unbearable burden which had pressed upon the world and which had suddenly been lightened at the outbreak of the war. What was this pressure and why was it unbearable?
In order to answer this question we must descend into the dark realm of the war-instinct, for it was primarily that which came to expression in the joy of war, which permitted these same instincts fulfillment. Particularly must we talk about the instinct of struggle, the lust for blood, which is an ancient heritage of mankind. Nicolai has shown us how this is connected with war.
After the eighteenth century there was no longer any method of killing men legitimately. There were a few remainders of the ancient bloody games, such as in bullfights in Spain, duels among the students in Germany, or certain sects in Russia which killed some of their communicants, but aside from these stray relics of an earlier day, the French revolution had put an end to the possibility of gratifying the instinct for blood so deeply rooted in human beings.
The only device that remained was war, and hence all these primitive im- pulses concentrated upon it; and it was this instinct for struggle which celebrated the possibility of fulfillment in the ensuing combat. We have now to point out certain relationships between the outbreak of the war and eroticism. Attempts have been made to explain war as such from the sexual impulse. Two years before the World War the Italian Gallo undertook to do this in a work which omitted any consideration of the economic and social con- ditions of war and attributed it directly to sex factors following Horace who had said that, even before the times of Helen, sexual lust had been the cause of grievous wars.
Of course, the sub- jective and the erotic factors must not be overlooked but they do not call forth any war; they merely determine the forms under which the economic social necessity of war and the economic transformation caused by it will come to expression. It is doubtful whether there was ever a war for a purely sexual reason. The ancient saga of the Trojan war may, in reality, have been due to the expansion of Greek commerce into Asia Minor. Of course, there have been and remain individual combats for a woman; among certain animals, particularly the deer, bloody struggles for the female of the species are very common, but these have nothing to do with war, certainly not with modern capitalist war.
This does not mean that at the outbreak of the war eroticism was not intimately bound up with the war-enthusiasm. For example, the attempt was made to arouse a combination of the feeling of vengeance with erotic undertones by representing to the Austro- Hungarian soldiers the wife of Franz Ferdinand, who had been assassinated with her husband, as a sort of saint of the war whose innocent blood would have to be avenged. All war propaganda used such slogans with an erotic undertone. It may be asked whether all ideas for which one can become enthusiastic to the point of making the last sacrifice are not ultimately erotic, that is, colored by the unconscious with a libidinous streak.
Psycho-analysis has taught this very doctrine in its concept of sublimation; but with- out going into further detail it is clear that the outbreak of the war was not evaluated logically but emotionally. Another question in this regard is how far and to what degree did the outbreak of the war and the enthusiasm for war affect eroticism? Fehlinger, the outbreak of the war induced a weakening of the sexual impulse. Had Fehlinger, in the early days of the war, visited the brothels of his merry South German native city he would certainly not have concluded that the sex impulse had been diminished, for these institutions were filled with all kinds of soldiers.
His assumption that the great enthusiasm for war might have the effect of weakening the sexual drive just didn't work out in the realm of fact. The opposite was true, particularly as far as women were concerned. Among other witnesses of this is the French physician, Dr. Huot, who pointed to the numerous French women who, out of patriotism, had given themselves promiscuously to soldiers departing to the field of battle.
These cases can much less be regarded as patriotism than as a sort of war nymphomania which was observed in every land. This circumstance goes to prove that woman reacted to the war with an increase of her libido. There are numerous examples of this but we will quote one article of the journalist, E. Erdely, concerning Budapest and its women: It seemed natural that the same emotional experience which expressed itself, among men, in the lust for murder, in women showed itself in the madness of corporeal surrender.
No statistics were made on this subject, but the consequences prove that the enthusiastic girls jumped in an almost insane way into the arms of the men departing for the battlefield. For in those early weeks, every man who wore a uni- form seemed to be the exalted betrothed of death; and who had the power to resist the supplicating word and the pleading glance of such a one?
Never did women commit so many sins as in that autumn of the mass delirium. This is rather surprising in view of the fact that society has made so much progress. Orthodox psychology has paid little atten- tion to the spiritual determinance of war but psychoanalysis has provided us with numerous insights on this subject.
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At the begin- ning of the war, Freud wrote a book in which he treated the problem of war and death. On the basis of his investigation of neuroses, he came to the conclusion that, in reality, civilization had not removed the evil inherent in human nature. At its core, human nature consists of instinctive impulses which are the same in all men, and are directed toward the satisfaction of certain primitive needs.
Under the influence of internal factors and ex- ternal ones as well, these evil desires are sublimated or refined. Whoever is com- pelled to live in accordance with rules that are not his instinctive inclinations is living, from the psychological point of view, as a hypocrite.
It is undeniable that our contemporary culture has furthered the development of such hypocrisy. War is an opportunity for throwing off, for a while, all the irksome repressions which culture imposes and for satisfying temporarily all the repressed desires. The psychoanalyst, Ernest Jones, has pointed to the fact that ultimately the sublimation of our thoroughly egoistic and anti- social instincts into ethical and social aspirations and achievements, in other words, the domestication of our primitive instincts, are the precondition for any cultural development.
It is as though indi- viduals came to an agreement against their will— to behave properly for otherwise punishments of various sorts will be imposed upon them. Like Nietzsche's cultural philistine they obey an ideal which is not their own and hence it is understandable that their obedience is never perfect. Hence they harbor a greater or less internal conflict although this is, to a large extent, unconscious. It may be difficult to distinguish between man who has sub- limated his instincts, and the majority of men who abide by the prescriptions of civilization against their will and constantly feel the weight of civilization upon them.
However, as soon as the social pressure is removed, the difference between them becomes exceedingly plain; the attitude of the first type remains practically unchanged whereas that of the second rapidly becomes worse. The experience of psychoanalysis agrees perfectly with the testimony of war that refinement of primitive impulses has progressed far less than we flatter ourselves into thinking; and that the great majority of mankind belongs to the second groups, whose sub- limation is more apparent than real.
This enables us to understand why during war man can express certain psychological traits which otherwise are repressed. The impulsive character of man, his faulty sublimation, and the possibility of slipping back or regressing to earlier stages of his development, give us the means of understand- ing psychologically what happens during the war. The question that must be asked is whether men really wanted the World War and actually affirmed it; and our answer to that question is "Yes.
But mass psychology and the personality of the hero are two aspects of one phenomenon: We have already seen that the single soul has within it the inclination to warlike conduct, the potentialities for warlike tendencies are latent within it; and we now must take into consideration the role of mass factors. In his description of the characteristics of crowds, Le Bon has shown that they have certain characters which are different from that of single personalities, particularly increased affectivity and diminished rationality.
But why this should be so remained a mystery until Frued pointed out that the peculiar phenomena of mass psychology were the manifest unconscious of the mass come to expression. Freud showed that every artificial mass, as an army or church, by the identification of all the members of the mass with one another and the setting up of the leader in the place of the ego ideal, produced a libido relationship which was the real cement of the mass. The mass is the resurrection of the primitive horde, just as in every man the primitive is retained unconsciously.
So in every group of men the primeval horde may come to expression. Insofar as mass formations habitually control men, we recognize the continuation of the primeval horde within it. Furthermore, the leader of the mass is always the feared primi- tive father; the mass always wants to be ruled with unlimited power and desires to submit to such authority.
Freud's consideration of this subject culminated in the statement that mass phenomena are, so to speak, legitimized forms of indulg- ing instincts which otherwise must be punished. In the mass phenomena the repressed instincts come to expression. Despite all restrictions and limitations which are placed upon the ego we find that human societies have made provision for a periodic breaking through of these prohibitions as is shown by the institution of festivals which originally were nothing more than excesses en- joined by the law, and to this liberation they owe their merry character.
The Saturnalia of the Romans and our present carnivals are in this respect identical with the festivals of the primitives which would be characterized by excesses of every kind and the transgression of commandments normally held to be sacred. From this point of view, war was a horrible equivalent, an out- break of instinct in sanctioned form. That which the state pro- hibited to the individual, it permitted to the mass. There is undoubtedly a profound insight in this view, War, like alcohol, will maintain its psychological function until another social struc- ture will be found to provide human beings with more possibility of satisfying their wishes.
Even if man is by his nature "evil," he is, none the less, susceptible to change through social and individual transformations of life as has been proved in the cases of many individuals. Dissatisfaction with peace gives birth to war. Those who, disappointed and desperate, decay in the treadmill of life will always greet war as a salavation from dullness and misery. We know that every war mobilizes all the impulses of cruelty; war, taken as a whole, is one great act of cruelty.
The investiga- tions of psychoanalysis have made us familiar with the connections between cruelty and sadism. There can be no doubt that the cruelty which war demands and sanctifies was consciously or unconsciously affirmed by those persons who had retained in their instinctive life the primeval sadistic impulse for which they had found no satisfactory activity in peace times. Abnormal sexual attitudes and acts of cruelty, resulting from them, are found in peace times, too; but war, as legalized mass-murder, offers incen- tives and possibilities and even premiums for the evil instincts.
Without the sexual background, the numerous, meaningless acts of cruelty of the World War are incomprehensible. A second motive, also belonging to the realm of sexual forces, is the effect that the war had upon the sexual life of so many people. Here, also, there is reflected the dissatisfaction with the conditions of peace which we have already described. How many there are who live in ties which afford them meager satisfaction from the sexual point of view and demand a repression of their needs! One need think only of the dominant form of contemporary marriage which seldom purveys an erotic harmony for the partner.
The war affords a tremendous opportunity to pull off these shackles temporarily and, at least in anticipation, to indulge infinite erotic desires. Everybody who was acquainted with sexual dissatisfaction or misery of any kind greeted the outbreak of war from this point of view; and from innumerable such dissatisfactions with peace, their issued a psychological attitude which was receptive to war. There are certain inter-relationships between the negative forces of destruction and the positive might of Eros. For every repression and violation of Eros can, under certain conditions, produce an emergence of the destructive sadistic powers.
The sexual misery of peace time, the hypocritical morality of the ruling social classes, pervert the natural impulses and finally bursts out in aberrant reactions. The liberation of violated impulses through the war, the tremendous expression which they had never been able to achieve in peace time, pro- duced a tremendous intoxication which carried men with it beyond all reason.
The primeval combat of the powers of life and death, which is forever being fought anew, came to an armistice. How will the primeval enmity of both these powers end up? Despite all the sobering and disappointing experiences, we have faith in the perseverance of the productive forces in the world. And so we close with the words of Freud: The men who were its cannon fodder had their bodies crippled, burnt, and torn to fragments by bombs and shrapnel; the children went to rack and ruin in vast masses as a result of the blockade, undernourishment and general neglect; and the women— what fearful sufferings and sacrifices did it impose upon them!
The fearful effects of the incredible catastrophe of the World War showed themselves so comprehensively in all walks of life, in individuals and society, that we must restrict ourselves to just a few clearly defined mass phenomena. In the case of women it must be emphasized that these drastic effects touched the women of the higher strata of society hardly at all, or at least very little.
To be sure, there were women for whom the war, not merely at the out- set but during its whole bloody duration, was a unique sensation, a novelty, a nerve titillation, but these women belonged exclusively to the privileged classes. As far as the working woman is concerned, we have every reason to see in her one of the most pitiable, be- cause most helpless, victims of the war. It cannot be denied, of course, that during the first weeks of the mass hypnosis of the war not even the woman of the lower classes escaped the influence of mob suggestion.
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However for her the awakening from this delirium was the more shocking. Then she became aware of clamorous and bitter demands of reality— having to substitute for her husband in the economic field; fighting the battle for existence without any preparation and with very insuffi- cient equipment. In the first period after the outbreak of the war, the patriotic enthusiasm of women frequently went to the most ridiculous extremes. Max Hirsch, has correctly termed paradox reaction. This emotional gush was the more remarkable since it ran counter to what it ordinarily re- garded as the original reaction of women.
In this period women demonstrated the most incredible readiness to part with, nay to send away their beloved ones, husbands and sons. The motives for this reaction were quite diverse: In addition there might have been a form of romantic hero-worship. Whatever the dominant reason, it was these very women who frequently suffered most under the conflict which love and sacrifice imposed upon them.
Conditions of nervous excitation and depression to the point of melancholy were the consequences which reached their highest point in those cases where the given man, who had been virtually pushed into the war by his wife or mother, died in battle and the woman was left to reproach herself with feelings of guilt at having been instrumental in his death. It is well known that women in every land played a large role in the agitation against foreigners, particularly in the large cities, which broke out with the declaration of war.
We might adduce two examples of this sort of thing. In Breslau a British teacher of languages, Harold Whyte, was denounced by his own wife and brought before the martial court because he had written an article for English newspapers on the subject of German mobilization. When the judge inquired why she had done this she replied that as a German she loved her fatherland. Not much credence was placed in the woman's arguments and the man was freed inasmuch as he had written the article before war had been declared against Ger- many. In Vienna, the first days after the declaration of war, brutal attacks were carried out by women on passersby who had the misfortune to look like the citizens of enemy countries.
Thus Chinese were beaten because they resembled Japanese, Americans were mis- taken for Englishmen, and Poles, who unfortunately looked like Russians, were given pretty rough handling by these infuriated women. The conditions under which they had to do this work that was unfamiliar to them were definitely abnormal; and the worse food conditions grew in the central European states, later in France and even in the victorious nations, the more unjust is it to measure their achievements by the gauge of normal, peaceful times.
What- ever our final opinion would be upon this subject, one thing is quite certain— that the undernourished woman who had to work under tbese abnormal conditions for any length of time sustained lasting injuries to her health.
Even today, more than a decade after the outbreak of the war, the consequences of this exploitation of women during the war can be observed in industrial workers, especially the women and the younger generation. Very frequently women substituted for their husbands in quite unwomanly pursuits. Whether this contributed to raise the cultural level of women we will not consider. In France a member of the Chamber protested vigorously against the purveying of military supplies by women of the half-world. He reported that the French military officials had contracted a whole series of agreements with women whose chief occupation before the war had been to visit nocturnal quarters where they had sought liaisons but who, since the outbreak of the war, had by chance been transformed into purveyors of military supplies and saw that the government did not lack for anything, from ammu- nition to trains and condensed milk.
A similar report was made in Germany concerning the strumpets of Munich who for quite a while engaged in nefarious business with food cards until the police intervened. One remarkable consequence of the entrance of women into economic life is the masculinization of the average female type— a fact which has been demonstrated by Exner.
This is a fact of tremendous consequences for the history of morals. It started during the war and in the few post-war years continued energetically, commonly expressing itself in such matters as smok- ing and drinking. Exner has pointed to the remarkable increase in female criminality during and after the war.
Murder, assault and battery, burglary, mayhem, opposition to laws and criminal prac- tices of all kinds have played a far greater role among women during the bellum and post-bellum period than ever before. With regard to theft the same is true. During the war women stole more than men do in normal times. The productive participation of women in industry and the eco- nomic sphere in general was only one of the innumerable causes which we must hold responsible for the general transformation in female morality.
A whole mass of other circumstances, mostly of an economic nature, tended toward the same end. During the Franco- German war a favorable moral effect was expected from the fashion of war marriages which had just become very popular. Such serious savants as Dr. Burchard pointed with pleasure to the fact that in these war marriages it was a general rule that love had conquered reason and that, since these marriages had been contracted not out of any prudential reasons, but sheerly out of love, some very favorable biological consequences might be anticipated.
It is possible that such consequences might result if the war is of short duration, but the actual facts as we follow them give the lie to any such optimistic speculations. War marriages were generally entered into without an iota of any responsibility. In many cases the couple so married was only interested in legiti- matizing a single bridal night before the departure of the man.
There was a complete lack of spiritual or moral community and, as a result, a vast and terrifying number of divorces took place im- mediately after the war. Thus in a single Berlin court issued seven hundred divorces in four months. In London and Paris too the war led to an unprecedented and incredible number of divorces occasioned by the economic and sexual starvation induced by the war as well as by the unreasoned and animal haste of the frivolous war marriage.
Professor Otto Baumgarten has left us a very comprehensive statement on the whole question. The early marriage of the young warrior, which had originally been greeted as a very commendable consequence of the war because it would lead back its generation from the unculture of a sophisticated period to nature and nai'ete, soon appeared as a cause of the dissolution of marriage.
Without any lengthy consideration of the obligations which grew out of the act, without the possibility of rooting the marital relationship cer- tainly and deeply in mutually proven faith, these mass war mar- riages soon became the cause of a continually rising divorce rate. There were so many lonesome instinctive human beings who, after the first blaze of sexuality had been dissipated, had no interest in each other. In France, instead of praising the moralizing and eugenic effect of war mar- riages, they contended themselves with poking fun at the even vaster number of rapid-fire marriages.
Here it appeared that the majority of couples who came to the authorities for these marriages were such as had been living in free union before. At the outbreak of the war, Blasco Ibanez reported that half of Pans ran to get married. Thousands of couples beleaguered the municipal offices, and all the men said the same: At the order ot the government, the magistrates' clerks received them in groups of twenty and performed wholesale marriages.
There were districts in Paris where during the forenoon three hundred marriages would be performed. Very frequently a little patrol of children would run before these couples and look on the proceedings with great amazement, shouting with glee that papa and mama had come to get married. Frequently and in every country, these marriages were entered into for the reason that the woman, as the wife ot a soldier serving on the field of battle, was guaranteed certain eco- nomic privileges.
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The infidelity of war wives constituted for years the mote in the eye of moralists, but life contradicted all predictions and specu- lations At the beginning of the war Germany heard enthusiastic tirades concerning the moral earnestness of German women as contrasted with the frivolity of their enemy sisters m France. The question was there discussed whether women had sexual needs comparable to those of men. German women, he thought, had nothing in common with those degenerate women who even in peace times pursue men.
Similarly it was Dr. Frankel's opinion that the cares and the economic obligations of German women had grown so consider- ably that there was very little time or desire, for that matter, left to her to engage in amorous escapades. For women, erotical desires can become dormant during the illness of the husband, during widowhood, during the long absence of a husband away at war, even when the generative impulse was formerly normal.
Of this Frankel was con- vinced as a result of his conversations with sensible women. And as to the virginal female, unless she has been awakened by false train- ing, friends, pornographic reading or pathological temperament, she does not know the libido or at any rate only very diffusely in the subconscious, and has no nisus sexualis. A similar opinion was entertained by a woman authority on the subject who asserted that for a woman who was ethically on a high level the absence of her husband would not easily lead to infidelity.
Such a woman is also seduceable but her senses only awake when the soul speaks too, and a whole world separates her from a man who does not captivate her whole interior life. That is why a woman can live for years and even, if necessary, forever in celibacy. Alas for these lofty opinions! We have but to read what was written concerning the soldier's wife and her morality during the war years. People, who as a result of myopic prejudices, were unable to think through the moral consequences of the economic transformation of the tremendously altered conditions of life, took occasion to express their dismay at the moral decay.
A very strong specimen of such an expression is the following: In May, , the Mayor of Vorbach in Alsace-Lorraine issued a proclamation to the effect that morals in that city had suffered a remarkable decline, despite the great difficulties of the time, the poverty and the misery. The most lamentable sign of the demoralization of a certain class of women was that among them there were numerous frivolous married women whose husbands were in the field of battle.
These dishonorable and shameless strumpets, who were undermining the foundations of their whole family, aroused his ire particularly. He asserted that all these malefactors were known to him and to his police officials and that similar trespasses in the future would occasion their arrest and branding. He expressed his great regret at not being able to administer public floggings to these miserable creatures.
In the Catholic magazine Monika Number 24 for June 12, 5 there appeared a long article under the title of Bloody Tears Should Be Shed for These which gives us a vivid picture of this evil. I am tremendously concerned to avoid every bit of scandal; hence I beg those who are concerned by this to please leave by the little door at the right in front of the theater. This must happen at once for the infuriated husband trooper is already at the cashier's win- dow buying his ticket.
It would be a fairly simple matter to fill many volumes with similar anecdotes and stories of the infidelity of soldiers' wives in Germany and Entente lands. We are only interested in the fact that during the war there was no strengthening of civil sexual morality but that, on the contrary, the opposite was true. A sum- mary statement of this was given by Dr. Auer of the Superior Court of Budapest who asserted that from old experience de- rived from peace times it was possible to say that in those places where garrisons were quartered, immorality and illegitimate births increased, and indissolubly connected with these transgressions, pandering and abortion.
These correlations of soldiery and immor- ality were, of course, maintained during the war in increased measure because there were the added factors of the frequent movement of great masses of men, the lack of any ordered family life, the absence of the husband and the increased erotic desire. This development came to expression everywhere towards the end of the war in the increase of illegitimate births.
Now this evil had one favorable consequence for the history of morals— during the war a good deal was done to diminish the difference between children born in and out of wedlock. In accordance with a petition of the Berlin Chapter of the League for the Defense of Mothers, the Reichstag, on August 4, , came to the conclusion that federal war relief would be extended also to illegitimate children. Here was one movement inaugurated during the war which con- tinued after the war and dealt heavy blows against bourgeois morality.
Professor Exner has made the following observations concerning the increase of infidelity and of abortion during the war: One infraction of morality of this period that had a far more destruc- tive effect upon society than anyone, who knew only statistics and no more, could surmise was marital infidelity.
This, however, proves nothing, for the absence of the husband naturally had the consequence of making the discovery and prose- cution of the trespass more difficult. Nothing alters the undenied fact that marital infidelity increased to such a terrific extent that Wulffen could speak of the triumphal march of infidelity. This will not appear remarkable in view of the absence of the husbands and the numerous temptations surrounding the women, among which may be mentioned such items as night work in war industries, and living together with war prisoners, etc.
If it is impossible statistic- ally to assert how many war marriages were rapidly dissolved through infidelity, still the fearful frequency of divorces cast a lurid light on the whole business. He was then given the opportunity to read his speech in front of the entire school at the upcoming 8th grade graduation.
S.W. Vol. 1 (Pt.1): A Book About The Inevitable Battle Of The Sexes. (sEX wARS)
But although his talent for writing had been discovered at the age of 11, it would be a few years before he actually realized the true beauty of being able to write stories. Reason being is because of his terrible upbringing in which his father was deceased, and his mother raised him with a hatred she had for his father. That along with the fact that he was raised in poverty only added to the hardships of having to grow up in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods America has ever seen.
In the process, his talent for writing had been put to a halt as he slowly but surely found himself falling into the temptations of the streets. After almost losing his life as well as his freedom to an to-life prison sentence he decided that it was time for him to figure out and focus on what he believed to be his purpose in life, which is to be a writer. Since then he has written a few books and plans to release many many more. His book " Ways To Die", tells true stories about the way people died within the area code of Cleveland, Ohio where he grew up.
Rich also has plans to release a few auto-biographies that will tell not only his stories of the temptations of the streets, but also the unusual relationship he had with his mother. He cherishes his gift for writing, and even more-so cherishes the freedom to be able to do so. He looks forward to sharing his life experiences as well as his imaginations with the world! Jael is a black boy who is naturally attracted to light-skinned girls, but has a dark-skinned mother who despises them. His childhood crush Layla, a beautiful light-skinned girl, serves as some sort of Angel in his life who helps him to escape the Devilish brain-washing tactics of his Mother, who wants him to only date dark-skinned girls.