Sex and Common-Sense

by A. Maude Royden

[Footnote B: The italics are mine.—A.M.R.]

Even so is it with human love. These nomads of the affections give and take so little as they pass from hand to hand that they become cheap and have little left to give at last: nor do they really get what they would take. Men and women claim the right to "experience," but experience of what? We do not live by bread alone, and the physical experience is not really all we seek. It is something, however? Yes—certainly something: but by a paradox familiar enough in human affairs, to snatch the lesser is to sacrifice the greater. The experimental lover, the giver whose small and careful gift is for a time, claims in the name of "experience," of the "fulfilment of his nature," what really belongs only to a greater giving. Such lovers are like a rich man who sets out tramping with nothing in his pocket. He may suffer temporary inconvenience, but is within safe distance of his banking account. He plays with a risk he can never really know, since knowledge and experience are not for those "whose sails were never to the tempest given." The prudent lover whose love is lightly given for as long as it lasts is as wise—and as futile.

I think, too, that those who offer this little price for so great a thing have nothing left at last. To taste love, to use the great passion of sex is on a par with the exploitation of genius on a series of "pot-boilers." Genius may outlast a few such meannesses, but they will murder it at last, and the man who by pot-boiling has gained the opportunity to create a real work of art finds there is no more art left in him. He has now the leisure, the opportunity, the public: but not the power. So is it with those who lightly use so great a thing as sex. Yielded to every impulse, given to each "new-hatched, unfledged companion," it loses its capacity for greatness, and the experience desired passes for ever from the grasp.

It is this which, to my mind, rules out the "experimental marriage." Much may be said for it—and has been, and is being said by people whose judgment must command respect. But love is impatient of lending. If it is not given outright in the belief that the gift is final, can the "experiment" be valid? Is not this very sense of finality—this desire to give and burn one's ships—of the very essence of love? One cannot experiment in finality.

It is true that many marriages would not have taken place, and had much better not have taken place, if there had been greater knowledge: but we have yet to learn what greater knowledge can do even without experiment. Hitherto we have gone to the opposite extreme and buried all that belongs to sex not in a fog of ignorance only, but under a mountain of hypocrisy and lies. Let in the light, and see if we cannot do better! And though it is true that some things cannot be known by any amount of teaching, and wait upon experience, yet I submit that the essential experience is realized only when it is believed to be the expression of an undying love—a gift and not a loan.

Let me say one last word on the solution to our moral difficulties proposed by those who affirm for every woman "the right to motherhood." This claim is based on the belief that the creative impulse is more, or more consciously, present in the sexual nature of a woman than of a man, and that, in consequence, the satisfaction of that impulse is to a great extent the satisfaction of a need which makes the disproportionate number of women in any country a real tragedy. It is impossible to generalize with any degree of confidence about the sexual nature of either man or woman in our present state of crude and barbarous ignorance; but I am inclined—very tentatively—to agree that this generalization is correct, and that the creative impulse is an even stronger factor in the sexual life of women than of men. I realize the cruelty of a civilization in which war and its accessories create an artificial excess of women over men, and in consequence deprive hundreds of thousands of women of motherhood. I do not think I underestimate that cruelty or its tragic consequences. I admit the "right" of women to the exercise of their vocation and the fulfilment of their nature.

But I affirm that those who base upon this claim the right to bring children into the world, where society has made marriage impossible, are not moved to do so by the instinct of motherhood. No, no, for motherhood is more than a physical act; it is a spiritual power. Its first thought is not for the right of the mother but of the child. And what are a child's rights? A home—two parents—all that makes complete the spiritual as well as the material meaning of "home." I do not believe that there is any woman who is the mother of young children, and a widow, who does not daily realize how irreparable is the loss sustained by the fatherless. War perhaps has inflicted that loss upon them; it is one of the iniquities of war. And though the mother tries all she can—yes, and works miracles of love to make herself all she can be to her child, that loss cannot wholly be made up. I speak with intensity of conviction on this point, for I have myself a little adopted child—orphaned of both parents—in my home. I never see other children with their parents without realizing what she has lost not only in her mother but her father. There is needed the different point of view, the different relationship, bringing with it a fuller and a richer experience of life. What woman that hast lost her husband does not realize the truth of what I say?

It is beside the mark to say that a bad father is worse than no father, or that accident may take the father even from happily circumstanced homes. This is true. But a woman does not deliberately choose a bad father for her children, or choose that he shall be taken away from them by death. It is the deliberate infliction beforehand of this great loss upon a child that seems to me the very negation of that motherhood in whose name this "right" is enforced. And for what purpose is a child to be brought into the world under conditions so imperfect? To "fulfil the nature" of its mother; to complete her experience; to meet her need. Is there any mockery of motherhood more complete than this sacrifice of the child to the mother? Why, our physical nature itself is less selfish! When a woman conceives, her child receives first all the nourishment it needs; whatever it does not demand, the mother has. A woman herself undernourished can, if the process has not gone too far, bear a well-nourished and a healthy child, because she has given all to that child. It is the epitome of motherhood! And now it is affirmed that a woman, to satisfy her own need, has a right to bring into the world a child on whom she—its mother—has deliberately inflicted a grave disadvantage. I do not speak of such lesser disadvantages as may be involved in illegitimacy. I trust the time is at hand when we shall cease to brand any child as "illegitimate" or despise one for another's defect. But though children are never illegitimate, parents may be so; and none more than the woman who sacrifices her child to herself.

For this disadvantage is not a mere cruelty of society which may be "civilized" away; it is inherent in the case. A child should have a father and a mother and a home.

It is no defence to say that the unmarried mother proposes to give her child a better home than many a child of married parents has. If her concern is for the child, there are, alas! only too many waifs already in the world to whom such a home, though imperfect, would be a paradise to what it has. Real motherhood could and often does rescue such children with joy. That so few children are adopted in a world of women clamouring for motherhood proves the essential selfishness of the claim. It is not the child—it is herself—that the woman who demands motherhood as a "right" is concerned with. What an irony! For to satisfy herself first is the negation of motherhood.