42. Putnam, Emily James. The Lady. 323 pp.
Sturgis & Walton Co. N.Y., 1910.
43. Excellent examples of this literature are
Kenrick’s “The Whole Duty of a Woman,
or A Guide to the Female Sex,” published some
time in the eighteenth century (a copy in the Galatea
Collection, Boston Public Library); and Duties of
Young Women, by E.H. Chapin. 218 pp. G.W.
Briggs. Boston, 1848.
THE DUALISM IN MODERN LIFE: THE INSTITUTIONAL TABOO
The taboo and modern institutions; Survival of ideas
of the uncleanness of woman; Taboo and the family;
The “good” woman; The “bad”
woman; Increase in the number of women who do not
fit into the ancient classifications.
With the gradual accumulation of scientific knowledge
and increasing tendency of mankind toward a rationalistic
view of most things, it might be expected that the
ancient attitude toward sex and womanhood would have
been replaced by a saner feeling. To some extent
this has indeed been the case. It is surprising,
however, to note the traces which the old taboos and
superstitions have left upon our twentieth century
social life. Men and women are becoming conscious
that they live in a world formed out of the worlds
that have passed away. The underlying principle
of this social phenomenon has been called the principle
of “the persistence of institutions."[1] Institutionalized
habits, mosaics of reactions to forgotten situations,
fall like shadows on the life of to-day. Memories
of the woman shunned, of the remote woman goddess,
and of the witch, transmit the ancient forms by which
woman has been expected to shape her life.
It may seem a far cry from the savage taboo to the
institutional life of the present; but the patterns
of our social life, like the infantile patterns on
which adult life shapes itself, go back to an immemorial
past. Back in the early life of the peoples from
which we spring is the taboo, and in our own life
there are customs so analogous to many of these ancient
prohibitions that they must be accounted survivals
of old social habits just as the vestigial structures
within our bodies are the remnants of our biological
past.
The modern preaching concerning woman’s sphere,
for example, is an obvious descendant of the old taboos
which enforced the division of labour between the
sexes. Just as it formerly was death for a woman
to approach her husband’s weapons, so it has
for a long time been considered a disgrace for her
to attempt to compete with man in his line of work.
Only under the pressure of modern industrialism and
economic necessity has this ancient taboo been broken
down, and even now there is some reluctance to recognize
its passing. The exigencies of the world war
have probably done more than any other one thing to
accelerate the disappearance of this taboo on woman
from the society of to-day.
