Healthy, honest women will confess that they thoroughly enjoy every moment of motherhood; but inasmuch as to-day it is the fashion to speak of self-sacrifice in regard to these functions, they will only admit in secret, and with the feeling that they are making a guilty admission, that they have enjoyed them. It has become the custom in modern Europe, and particularly in England, to represent women as performing some mysterious personal “sacrifice” in marriage. In all modern novels and plays this view of women is taken for granted. But it is only another of the sentimental myths created by modern Western women for their own ends. Where it is true, it ought to be a subject of shame, as showing marked physiological inferiority; and where it is not true, it is never anything more than a hoax for exercising moral power over a foolish husband. For thousands of men nowadays are convinced that whether a woman be healthy or unhealthy, well or badly formed, there is something sweetly and edifyingly “unselfish” about motherhood. Western Civilization has not produced a greater lie, or a more pernicious lie than this; for it makes abnormality a virtue, and physiological inferiority a claim upon our admiration!
Unfortunately the number of women to-day who really do suffer from maternity shows such a large annual increase, and men’s taste in women is so much vitiated by ignorance and false values, that the morbid association of “self-sacrifice” with motherhood is now regarded as almost inevitable, and doctors who thrive on it are the first to proclaim it as a necessary and even natural association.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] I feel I must offer some explanation here in regard to the precise relationship of the social instinct to order. Some will object, and quite rightly, that all order is not social order, and that all rhythm is not gregarious rhythm. There is the natural rhythm (and therefore the natural order) of birds’ songs, of insects’ buzzing, of horses’ and most animals’ movements, of fish in water, of corn waving in the wind. Whatever be the strength or weakness of our social tendencies, therefore, we must, as animals, feel instinctively and deeply akin to the phenomenon of rhythm and its charm. This affinity will reside deep down in our natures, and will hark back to an age far more remote than that in which the first human society was formed. All this is perfectly true. But this very phenomenon of natural rhythm, extended into the general notion of order, is the only origin to which we can possibly trace the power of rhythmic or orderly arrangement in the creative human being. Extended into the notion of order and applied creatively by a superior human being to Nature, whereby chaos becomes arrangement, and confusion is unravelled, this rhythm constitutes the birth not only of all human society, but of each separate civilization that has ever existed. In this way I conceive of the social instinct having, as a product of natural rhythm and order, engulfed and absorbed the source of its existence, in the human kind, and established itself in humanity as the developed and highly extended form of that source.
[24] 1 Corinthians vii. 1.
[25] Ibid., vii. 7.
[26] Ibid., vii. 8.
[27] Ibid., vii. 9. “But if they cannot contain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.”
[28] For the connexion between man’s social instinct and the Arts, see my Introduction to The Letters of a Post-Impressionist (Constable & Co., 1912).
[29] I know of only one woman who has recognized this and given man full credit for his self-mastery in regard to the consequences of his sexual lust. See Arabella Kenealy (Op. cit., pp. 178-9). The passages are too long to be quoted, but they should be read by all those who may be tempted to conclude that my views, as expressed above, have been prompted by masculine bias alone.