Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

Of course, it is we of the older generation—the mothers—who are to blame. We have left our daughters in a dangerous position; we did not see where modern education, with its effort to obliterate sex, must inevitably lead.

Education may be either a most helpful or a most dangerous process. And what is most to be feared is the shut-in instincts that tend to twist the nature from its simple fulfilment. There is something essentially harmful in any failure or wrong expression of a special function. Now, we have insisted upon repressions, and what we believed to be a high moral and efficient working character for girls, not knowing that what we so mistakenly were straining for was really something very like an entire absence of any kind of womanly character. The real nature of girls is wild, and our fears have been very great. And for this reason have we held that the nakedness of the adolescent’s new-born womanhood must be clothed with conventionalities and draped with culture.

It is this fear of sex that directs our educational system: there is too much drill and too much strain. Girls’ schools are governed too much, for girls need, not less, but more liberty than boys. The teachers are dull and narrow in their own outlook and in their experience of life; they are not trained to understand the needs of adolescent girls, only to teach them facts that as a rule are of no real service; they do not trouble to train the inner and hidden instincts that really form character, they do not even look for them; they reck nothing of early development or late, of the presence of strong passion or its absence; they have no kind of understanding of the unceasing action of sex, forcing its expression in unconscious acts, which alone give the clue to character; of all this (the only knowledge that matters) the teachers are profoundly ignorant; but they measure out girl-humanity for the conventional standard of efficiency like a dressmaker measures out her material with a yard measure. There is no thought, at least none is betrayed, that the school is a preparation for living. No kind of training is given for the part the girls will have to play in the life of sex for their own health and happiness and the regeneration of the race. The sexual life is persistently ignored.

I recall reading somewhere—I do not remember the exact connection—how an official of a college for girls was questioned by a visitor as to the advantage gained by the students in their after life from a university training. She answered: “One third of the students profit by it, another third gain some little good, while the remaining third are failures.” “And what becomes of the failures?” was the question asked, while the answer given was this: “Oh, they marry!” Now, I do not know if this excellent story can be accepted as a fact, but it does point to a contempt for marriage and its duties—a contempt for woman’s sex and for her own work—which I believe is present in the thought and attitude, even if not acknowledged openly, among the majority of educationalists. This is a very serious matter.

The remedy, then, has to begin in our schools. We must control education with a finer sense of its value to life. And to do this we must accept the extreme importance of sex, and guard those differences which separate the girl from the boy.

As a first movement of reform, I would recommend one to three years’ rest from the usual school work for every girl, during the period when her sexual life is becoming established. This is not, of course, to advocate idleness. I am not upholding any form of invalidism for girls; the adolescent always should have plenty of healthy occupation, but that is a far different thing from the strain of the ordinary school course, foolishly arranged for girls on the same lines as that for boys, and without any regard to the important function of menstruation. There should be attached to every school for girls a special class for adolescents, and this should be the most important class in the school. At the onset of puberty the girls would enter this class, in which they would stay for two years or longer. The sexual life would not be, as now it is, ignored; rather the chief work of the school would be the healthy establishment of the menstrual function, upon which the future well-being of the girl depends, and to the interests of which everything else should for a time be secondary.

There must be a new valuation of education, with an entire change of attitude, which will make possible more openness between the teacher and her pupils. The difficulties here will, I know, be great. If the mothers do not know how to help their daughters, and usually they do not; if the girls do not know how to help themselves, and dumb and untaught they are helpless, the task of the teachers cannot fail to be hard. And especially will this be the case wherever the mother has failed in her duty and a girl has received no kind of sexual training in the home.

I know of what I am writing here, and how real is the prejudice that will have to be overcome. In my own school I was met with this trouble again and again. The girls resented any mention of their menstrual function, and expressed often real anger and disgust when I required them to tell me the dates of their monthly periods, so that I might see they had extra food, more rest, and lighter studies. The answer that usually was given to me was this: “My mother never wanted me to tell her; I took no notice when I was at home.” What an unconscious indictment of the mothers! Often it was after long and patient effort only that I gained my way, and brought my girls to speak to me naturally about this function. I had the very hardest work to free their thoughts from the deeply implanted feelings of shame and disgust: in many cases I failed altogether, and I cannot, indeed, be sure that I ever fully succeeded. Of course, my failures were the result of harm that had been done much earlier in the home.

It was at this time of my life, now long years ago, when these considerations were forced upon my attention by my failures with my elder pupils, that I was first led to desire special classes for girls to enter at the age of puberty, where the life, the work, and the aims were separate and quite different from the ordinary school. It is so much easier to do the wise thing, if what you are doing is a matter of course, and not something you start for yourself.

I am convinced of the value that would be gained for life from the plan I am advocating. I would begin with these special classes, but I want more than that to be done. A much better course would be that separate adolescent schools should be provided, preferably in the country, where all work as well as play could be done out of doors. All girls would enter before the commencement of puberty, and would stay in one of these special adolescent schools for two or three years or longer. The work would be organised entirely to meet the needs of the individual girl; there must be no set courses of study, no hide-bound rules, and above all no examinations to be crammed for. In my opinion, which was formed from my own experience in my school, girls should do hardly any steady work for one year before and two years after puberty; they cannot, I am certain, work continuously without peril. Mental overwork or any kind of strain destroys the nervous resistance and tends to that irritable weakness which makes the rankest ground for all sexual ill health, and may work to establish evil habits in ways not yet openly recognised. The kind of work done should be chosen by the girl herself; there should be far more opportunity for rest and for play, and, while guarding against opportunities for harmful idleness, any kind of mental or bodily strain must be avoided. Hard study, if this is necessary, will come later at the close of this special school period. But I plead for all girls during the difficult time of their metamorphosis from the girl to the woman to leave them much more largely than we do at present to nature and to themselves.