Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

“Often, far from offering a rest from the fatigue of the day, the home conditions offer but fresh aggravation. A day begun at 4 or even 3.30 a.m., for work at 6 a.m., followed by fourteen[8] hours in the factory and another two or two and a half hours on the journey back, may end at 10 or 10.30 p.m., in a home or lodging where the prevailing degree of overcrowding precludes all possibility of comfortable rest. Beds are never empty and rooms are never aired, for in a badly crowded district the beds, like the occupants, are organised in day and night shifts. In such conditions of confusion, pressure and overcrowding, home life can have no existence.”

The overstrain of the women is increased by their difficulty in obtaining living accommodation near to the factories.

“It is far from uncommon now to find some two or three hours spent on the journey each way, generally under the fatiguing conditions of an overcrowded tram or train, often with long waits and a severe struggle before even standing room can be obtained. The superintendent of a factory situated in a congested district stated that the women constantly arrive with their clothes torn in the struggle for a train, the satchel in which they bring their tea being sometimes torn away. The workers were of an exceptionally refined type, to whom such rough handling should be altogether unfamiliar, but they bore these conditions with cheerful resolution.”

What are the results going to be? Women have no right to bear such conditions with cheerful resolution. And it is just this acceptance of so many things that never ought to be accepted that fills me with apprehension. You see, I believe there is a much deeper cause than the urgencies of the war which is causing women to spend their strength in industrial work. Did I not think this, there would be little need for me to write.

I know that women’s labour at the present crisis is a matter of necessity. How the work is to be done with the least possible injury to the workers is the question of the present. For it is equally momentous to the future that the standard of health and well-being of the country should be maintained. The problem is, how much work and of what kind can women do combined with perfect health. The health we must have, for it is requisite for the life of the race.

No doubt Nature is prodigal in her gifts of energy to women and provides enough for high-pressure work. But what we forget is this: the total amount of energy is strictly limited, and if women use up in work the energy that ought to be stored for child-bearing, they are preparing the way for an enfeebled race. Thus the problem of women’s labour will not be solved until her work no more unfits her to be a mother than man’s work unfits him to be a father. Woman sows in her flesh for the race, and because the demands of sex are stronger upon her she has to store more for the future than the man; she cannot expend so much in work in the present.

I have tried now to show in this and the preceding chapter the present and urgent need of an inquiry into the conditions of motherhood. The facts we have considered give, I feel, sufficient proof of our immense failure. Our attempt must be to bring order where we have had confusion. We have got to end this disastrous squandering of women’s energies; a bankrupt expenditure which must result in wholesale waste in health and the lives of little children.

And I do not allude here only to the obvious immediate remedies. These will have to be made. The efforts for reducing infantile mortality must be such as will have lasting and substantial effect. Feeble tinkerings with such a question are the deepest foolishness. England can be indifferent to the health and well-being of women no longer, for she cannot afford to lose children by tens of thousands and to let the survivors be maimed and weakened by the million.

This, however, is not all; no legislation or social reconstruction—not any outward change, can accomplish alone what needs to be done. I am very certain of this. The wretched confusion and failure in efficient motherhood, which repeats itself everywhere, again and again, and in all classes of women, must be due to something more than industrialism and the hideous, ugly pressure of work for women, now so startlingly increased by the urgencies of war; it must be due to something stronger and more fundamental, to some inward cause. We must, I think, look to find some general and essential failure in women themselves—some unsoundness in their desires and their ideals, and in the principles they have set down for the conduct of their lives.