MORAL STANDARDS

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 194, 18 May 1928, Page 11

MORAL STANDARDS

THOSE OF YESTERDAY AND THOSE OF TO-DAY

POSITION OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION

ADDRESS BY MISS MAUDE ROYDEN

Standards of morality for men and women, and. how they were regarded by both the older generation and. the young people of to-day. formed the subject for an address delivered by Miss Maude Royden to a crowded audience at the Town Hall last night. Miss Royden condemned the condition of affairs whereby there was one moral code for man and another for woman, and declared that the latter would never again accept a double standard of morality.

■Miss Royden, who was greeted with applause, said she; had been asked by several women in Wellington to take the opportunity of referring to the work of ,Mrp. Josephine Butler, whom she regarded as one of the greatest women the world had ever produced, and whose centenary was now. being celebrated tri.England.' Hers was a wonderful crusade, for. it' had to remembered: that for a long-time it was taken for granted that a boy to be guilty of . some, -moral lapse in regard to sex was a matter' of no importance whatsoever.' Indeed, it was thought that a boy who had any virile feeling was absolutely certain to be guilty of such-lapses very frequently, but that for a woman it was. absolutely unpardonable. -. The man; was.born to go wrong.. The woman could never be forgiven if she did. What was the result?—necessarily the creation of a class of outcasts. There must, be women for. the .needs of man, but those women had committed an unpardonable sin; They were, therefore; cast out: from society- The gulf between what was called the virtuous and the unvirtuouH woman • could not be spanned. The virtuous .woman ■ Stood on the body of the prostitute in order to preserve her, own chastity, and despised, beer, while ■ she did it, '' . ’ Increasing Woman’s Burden. . Who :it was discovered that-this plan resulted in the incidence 'of terrible diseases it was held that -the only guard was to sacrifice the woman a little further. There were'' passed certain Acts of Parliament;, called the Contagious Diseases Acts, which enacted that women of the outcast class should be licensed, examined,' . and brutalised, beyond the. pitch of what had gone before. They were treated not as human beings, but: "as' being without any right to citizenship or any right over their, own persons. Those acts were passed in British countries, but' no one had dared actu-ally-to place these things on the Statute Book until England did so. Those Acts still disgraced the Statute Book of New Zealand. She did not know-whether it had ever been more than a dead letter. Certainly it was an. absolutely dead let-, ter now. but it stood to, show the moral standards of the older generation. No sooner had the Act been passed by the. British Parliament than Mrs. Butler plunged into her great, crusade to get it repealed. Mrs. Butler, after heroic, desperate attempts,- was successful ■in her efforts. She left it as her expressed wish that when'she died no one should write a story of her life, 1 which had been such an agony of misunderstanding. Old Standards Passing. “It is unjust,” continued Miss- Royden, “to say that women can easily, and without the slightest effort, live celibate lives; but for men it is impossible. If it is impossible for- * men - then -it ■ is' logically' impossible for women.” You are not unchaste alone. It was only when I began to realise that this injustice was not a necessary part of our social organisation that it seemed to me worth while to go on at all. You cagnot divide the spirit and the body. To do 'so is to disregard your own nature. No one. would be more outraged than a.jnan who was described as an animal; yet to affiirm, as. this older teaching did, that a man was at liberty to. exploit a woman was to write himself down as an animal. There is surely some deep and unexplored connection between the violation of a man’s or - a woman’s nature. You will never again get women to accept a double standard of morality. Those who do are dying out. Those-who don’t, are growing up. Are we going to choose the highest standard dr.- ..the, lowest? The Younger Generation. “I don't know what, the standards of the"-younger;generation; are. It is a subject on which all of -us are slow to discuss unless we are extraordinarily glib and shallow. It is a subject on which a gulf has opened between the older and the - younger -people;: ■ The older people have refused ;to discuss the question with the-young. The .resii.lt is-that it is extraordinarily difficult to know what people really do think. -I can’t tel IwhatLhe young people here -in New. Zealand think; I know what many yoting people think, because they are my friends and they tell 'me. '/ But when I. talk about -the rising generation I do not know vyhat they think. , I know they will not accept our older standards, without a\ reason. The Sex Instinct. “Even to-day• there ate thousands of young' people growing- up >’iose parents tell them nothing -at all. If you don't tell'them, how can they think anything but that the tiling is Vile',’Or-that if is a matter of no importance?' The result is. generally one of two things. Either they accept the fact that it is vile, are ashamed of their curiosity and try heroically to repress their desires, or else they go and get the knowledge where they can, and that "knowledge—that lovely and divine mystery—will be given to them smirched and grimy and .. with everything that is secretive from the very beginning. Both those courses are tragic. The first is just as bad as the second, Sex is a universal quality. Some of us are more developed than others, but a human being must be a poor.creature indeed if-he; or she has no sex instinct nt nil. -Sex. is not connected with the lowest but . with the highest things. ' The young people of to-day who reject flio buying and selling,--and who, perhaps, fake instead what wc call promiscuity are on a : higher level. • because even in-this there is some kind of mutual- attraction, of glamour. . . . How ■ can Christian people-degrade the-idea of sex? It is not. a grimy secret ; it is a-Divine niysjtefy.- ; We talk so much about the battle of life and the struggle for existence. . ,

Why, not one genci-atibii could survive were it not for the sacrifice' of the parents for their child. Sex instinct is; not disgusting; it is. sacred. It is .not' unimportant : it is vital.” .'