Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

The attitude of woman herself is the deep secret of this question; and by attitude I mean something more than the desire of the individual girl or woman, I mean the collective spirit in which life is approached. That is where we have been wanting. We, the mothers and teachers of this last generation of women, have failed to grasp life and all that it means.

What we have most dreaded in education is sex. We can control this attitude only in our schools. Emancipation can come through a regaining of consciousness. Get this right—let our girls feel that their education because they are women is the most important work of the nation, more, not less important, than is the education of their brothers, and the rest will follow.

We have by our whole attitude shown the most coarse lack of understanding of the needs of girls. Instruction has been the sole effort of our schools. This has hampered the perfection of life. Our daughters have but accepted and abandoned their bodies and their souls to the rollers of that crushing machine we have called education.

All of us are responsible, for our thoughts and our desires affect the universe and our neighbours. Neither can any repentance that may come late, nor any wailings of dismay, stop the consequences of our sinning follies.

I cannot lay too much stress on this sense of women’s desire, for it is this that will direct action in the future. If we cannot have a fundamental change of desire, a fresh view of what is a sane, complete and profitable life; if we cannot cease from our fears of sex; if we cannot alter the ideals we place before girls and work a revolution in the practice of our education, we shall do no good. There will be endless talk of advancement—of higher motherhood, of economic emancipation and freedom in marriage; there will also be continued tinkering legislation, with many timid experiments in mother-training and child-rearing, and underneath the spirit of motherhood will be dying, dying all the time.

But the unbeliever will cry out: All this is utterly impossible; this is the old clog and degradation for women, limiting her to the single function of her sex. My answer is this. Even so it was from the beginning of time. Nature has so planned it, fixing the maternal instinct deep in the mother, and claiming from her the payment that must be given. Woman can only bow before the Throne of Life. She is entrusted with life’s supreme mission, that of transmitting the sacred torch of life to future generations. She belongs not to herself but to posterity. She must not squander her gift. She must store her energy that she may give life to her child.

Woman, all-containing, universal—how should she be limited to herself? This is my deepest belief.

Woman is the giver, the interpreter. Freedom for her never can be identified with self-assertion. Great elementary truths to-day have acquired an intensified significance. Oppression stretches like a rod over the earth, the world is ploughed with swords and reaped in blood. The echoes of slaughter reach from land to land. The cataclysm, with its immense appeal to terror and love and hate and pity, has acted to stir us profoundly and quicken our response to the emotional aspects of life. Old prejudices are rooted up; institutions are in the melting-pot. A people habitually resistant to emotion, we have been awakened to reality. I cannot doubt that we shall profit. We were occupied in intellectual pleasures and energies, but now our souls have been harrowed. This is the great opportunity if we have the will to use it.

Fear has been in us the folly irredeemable, planted like seeds of the wild weeds among our wheat. Even in our childhood doubt has slept with us in our cradles, as verily we have been conceived in sin, being born without passionate joy. And this disharmony has followed us up and down in the home; doubt was our schoolfellow, ever following our steps in our work and in our play, until fear has become our perpetual companion. I see the past, the present and the future existing all at once before me, and I know that as soon as fear is conquered redemption is ready.

Then no longer will the blessings of the Psalmist be changed by our faithless folly into cursing, but again the wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of the house and the children like olive plants around the table. Behold, thus shall the woman and the man be blessed together, and they shall see good all the days of their life.