But that was how the society of the time liked its young girls—innocent and ignorant, well brought up and knowing nothing, curious and bashful, uncertain and impractical, destined by an education remote from real life to be formed and guided in marriage by a husband, without any will of their own. Custom and decency seemed to protect them as the emblem of its most secret ideal, the epitome of demure feminine conduct, virginal and unworldly. But what a tragedy if one of these young girls had wasted her time, and at twenty-five or thirty was still unmarried! Convention mercilessly decreed that an unmarried woman of thirty must remain in a state of inexperience and naivety, feeling no desires—it was a state not at all suitable for her at her present age—preserving herself intact for the sake of the family and ‘decency’. The tender image of girlhood then usually turned into a sharp and cruel caricature. An unmarried woman of her age had been ‘left on the shelf’, and a woman left on the shelf became an old maid. The humorous journals, with their shallow mockery, made fun of old maids all the time. If you open old issues of the Fliegende Blätter or another specimen of the humorous press of the time, it is horrifying to see, in every edition, the most unfeeling jokes cracked at the expense of aging unmarried women whose nervous systems were so badly disturbed that they could not hide what, after all, was their natural longing for love. Instead of acknowledging the tragedy of these sacrificial lives which, for the sake of the family and its good name, had to deny the demands of nature and their longing for love and motherhood, people mocked them with a lack of understanding that repels us today. But society is always most cruel to those who betray its secrets, showing where its dishonesty commits a crime against nature.
If bourgeois convention of the time desperately tried to maintain the fiction that a woman of the ‘best circles’ had no sexuality and must not have any until she was married—for anything else would make her an immoral creature, an outcast from her family—then it was still obliged to admit that such instincts really were present in a young man. And as experience had shown that young men who had reached sexual maturity could not be prevented from putting their sexuality into practice, society limited itself to the modest hope that they could take their unworthy pleasures extramurally, outside the sanctified precincts of good manners. Just as cities conceal an underground sewage system into which all the filth of the cesspits is diverted under their neatly swept streets, full of beautiful shops selling luxury goods, beneath their elegant promenades, the entire sexual life of young men was supposed to be conducted out of sight, below the moral surface of society. The dangers to which a young man would expose himself did not matter, or the spheres into which he ventured, and his mentors at school and at home sedulously refrained from explaining anything about that to him. Now and then, in the last years of that moral society’s existence, an occasional father with ‘enlightened ideas’, as it was put at the time, put some thought to the matter and, as soon as the boy began to show signs of growing a beard, tried to help him in a responsible way. He would summon the family doctor; who sometimes asked the young man into a private room, ceremoniously cleaning his glasses before embarking on a lecture about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, and urging the young man, who by this time had usually informed himself about them already, to indulge in moderation and remember to take certain precautions. Other fathers employed a still stranger method; they hired a pretty maidservant for their domestic staff, and it was this girl’s job to give the young man practical instruction. Such fathers thought it better for a son to get this troublesome business over and done with under their own roof. This method also, to all appearances, preserved decorum and in addition excluded the danger that the young man might fall into the hands of some ‘artful and designing person’. One method of enlightenment, however, remained firmly banned in all forms and by all those in authority—the open and honest one.
What opportunities were open to a young man of the bourgeois world? In all other classes of society, including the so-called lower classes, the problem was not a problem at all. In the country, a farm labourer of seventeen would be sleeping with a maidservant, and if there were consequences of the relationship it was not so very important. In most of our Alpine villages the numbers of illegitimate children far exceeded those born in wedlock. In the urban proletariat, again, a young working man would ‘live in sin’ with a woman of his class when he could not afford to get married yet. Among the Orthodox Jews of Galicia, a young man of seventeen who had only just reached sexual maturity was given a bride, and he could be a grandfather by the time he was forty. Only in our bourgeois society was the real solution to the problem, early marriage, frowned upon, because no paterfamilias would have entrusted his daughter to a young man of twenty-two or twenty. Someone so young was not thought mature enough. Here again we can detect dishonesty, for the bourgeois calendar was by no means synchronised with the rhythms of nature. While nature brings a young man to sexual maturity at sixteen or seventeen, in the society of that time he was of marriageable status only when he had a ‘position in society’, and that was unlikely to be before he was twenty-five or twenty-six. So there was an artificial interval of six, eight or ten years between real sexual maturity and society’s idea of it, and in that interval the young man had to fend for himself in his private affairs or ‘adventures’.
Not that he was given too many opportunities for them at that time. Only a very few and especially rich young men could afford the luxury of keeping a mistress, meaning renting an apartment for her and providing for her keep. Similarly, a few particularly lucky young men matched a literary ideal of the time in the matter of extramarital love—for extramarital love was the only kind that could be described in novels—and entered into a relationship with a married woman. The rest managed as best they could with shop girls and waitresses, affairs that provided little real satisfaction. Before the emancipation of women, only girls from the very poorest proletarian background had few enough scruples and sufficient liberty to engage in such fleeting relationships when there was no serious prospect of marriage. Poorly dressed, tired out after working at a poorly paid job for twelve hours a day, neglectful of personal hygiene (a bathroom was the privilege of rich families in those days), and reared in a very narrow social class, these poor girls were so far below the intellectual level of their lovers that the young men themselves usually shrank from being seen with them in public. It was true that convention had found a way of dealing with this awkward fact in the institution of chambres séparées, as they were known, where you could eat supper with a girl in the evening unobserved, and everything else was done in the small hotels in dark side streets that had been set up exclusively for this trade. But all these encounters were bound to be fleeting and without any real attraction; they were purely sexual rather than erotic, because they were always conducted hastily and surreptitiously, like something forbidden. At best, there was the possibility of a relationship with one of those hybrid beings who were half inside society, half outside it—actresses, dancers, women artists, the only ‘emancipated’ women of the day. In general, however, the basis of eroticism outside marriage at that time was prostitution, which in a way represented the dark vaulted cellar above which rose the magnificent structure of bourgeois society, with its immaculately dazzling façade.