Sex and Culture

In Sex and Culture (1934), Professor J.D. Unwin a British social anthropologist, studied eighty primitive tribes and Roman, Greek, Sumerian, Moorish, Babylonian, and Anglo-Saxon civilizations. He found a strong positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the chastity of its women. He said:

'These societies lived in different geographical environments; they belonged to different racial stocks; but the history of their marriage customs is the same. In the beginning each society had the same ideas in regard to sexual regulations. Then the same struggles took place; the same sentiments were expressed; the same changes were made; the same results ensued. Each society reduced its sexual opportunity to a minimum and displaying great social energy, flourished greatly. Then it extended its sexual opportunity; its energy decreased, and faded away.'

Unwin, who was a sort of Freudian, and not writing from a religious or moralistic point of view, offered 'no opinion about the rightness or wrongness' of female chastity or sexual

morality. Nevertheless, he concluded that

'In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.'

He found with no exceptions that these societies flourished during eras that valued chastity in women. Inevitably, according to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous its sexual morality becomes less strict (is this true? Victorian England compared to Regency England and Restoration England?) and as a result loses it cohesion, impetus, purpose and inevitably declines.

Unwin was at a loss to explain the pattern, but he proposed a special class of "Alpha" citizens in Great Britain, men and women of unusual promise, who would take vows of chastity before marriage and observe strict monogamy after marriage, for the sake of society. He also said that after women had become sexually free there is no precedent for their giving this freedom up.

On the other hand, perhaps Unwin may we wrong. A woman anthropologist, Dr. Ruth Benedict, who reviewed his book, said he completely ignored several tribes that were in the immediate area and time frame of other tribes that he did consider and that would have totally destroyed his hypothesis. She concluded,

'It is impossible within the limits of a brief review to criticize the long list of absurdities that are involved in the correlations of this volume.....This volume is an extreme example of the manipulation of anthropological material to support private programs of social reform, in this case, a program of return to the immediate Victorian past. It makes clear, as has already been abundantly demonstrated in anthropological literature, that any thesis, no matter how unlikely, can be upheld by a suitable rearrangement of cultural facts from primitive peoples. Only insistence upon a greater scrupulousness and a greater intelligence can prevent the recurrence of such volumes of special pleading.'

Unwin died shortly after Sex and Culture  was published and his ideas died with him, although they have recently been revived by one or two right-wingers, who have adduced them to argue that feminised, sexually liberated Western societies will be conquered by immigrants from hyper-masculine societies that value chastity.