Page:Fielding - Sex and the Love Life.pdf/114
surely as the night follows the day. Woman's independence has given her a constantly increasing degree of freedom of choice and of action, and has tended to put love on a basis of equality and mutuality.
In commenting upon the extra-marital tendency of love in the past, and the prospect of realizing love in marriage, Jean Finot,[1] a Continental philosopher, many years ago expressed his ideas on the subject as follows:
"Future unions will accomplish, perhaps, what seems to us the paradoxical work of having love born and endure in marriage. This is because love, in its turn, will benefit by the evolution of woman. It has been volatile, egotistical, brutal, tyrannical, so long as it was mainly an expression of the sexual instinct. But the advent of the new woman will secure for love a broader basis, embracing the comprehension of souls founded upon common interests often protected in common. This will also be the source of friendship, a serious and stable feeling, which will reign in a more frequent and more lasting fashion between the husband and the wife. Love, idealized by spiritual principles, will gain in depth and in duration. Perhaps it will not be so rapturous, but it will be more human, if not more divine."
With the advent of woman's intellectual liberation, there has come a reversal or modification, at least, of all the old social dogmas. Whereas suppression was once the rule, now woman is expressing herself in more ways, and even more furiously than she can, in many instances, comfortably manage to direct into constructive form. But this is inevitable in a process of large individual adjustment and social adaptation.
The essential point is that true love can survive only in
- ↑ Problems of the Sexes, New York, 1913.