Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

The home, in particular, has been spoken of with contempt. Thus, Bernard Shaw, who in the reforms he advocates fails so frequently to see the real human needs of life, cries: “Home is the girls’ prison and the woman’s workhouse.” Again, W. L. George in Women and To-morrow (a “To-morrow” which, by the way, I trust I may never live to see) states: “The home is the enemy of Woman. Purporting to be her protector, it is her oppressor. It is her fortress, but she does not live in the state apartments, she lives in a dungeon.”

Mr. H. G. Wells, in a much more recent utterance, wherein he professes to forecast “What is Coming,” speaks even more strongly, and all the present conditions are estimated. He states: “Now, to be married is an incident in a woman’s career, as in a man’s.” (The italics are mine.) “There is not the same necessity of that household, not the same close tie; the married woman remains partially a freewoman and assimilates herself to the freewoman. There is an increasing disposition to group solitary children and to delegate their care to specially qualified people; and this is likely to increase, because the high earning power of young women will incline them to entrust their children to others.”

And again, at the conclusion of his article on “The War and Women,” Mr. Wells sums up the situation as follows: “To sum all that has gone before, this war is accelerating rather than deflecting the stream of tendency, and is bringing us rapidly to a state of affairs in which women will be much more definitely independent of their sexual status, much less hampered in their self-development and much more nearly equal to men than has ever been known before in the whole history of mankind.”

Now, if these two late pronouncements of Mr. Wells are compared with what he wrote a few years back, with the quotation from Mankind in the Making which I have placed before this section of my book because it so well expresses my own views, I think the harm that of late years has been working is strongly evident; harm that is incredibly active in our consciousness.[68]

Such talk of my sex as “freewomen” and of a liberation from the sexual life, as if that could be possible, fills me with impatience. I would not wait to notice it did I not believe that the hurt done to women had been deep and far-reaching. It has increased for them the difficulty of unifying life. And this uncertainty of desire is, as I believe, the modern disease which has worked such havoc in the souls of women. I would like to silence all useless, impious negators; those who, seeking to be clever, really are blinkered, and unable to see the results that would follow from their destructions. The error in all these outcries is the error of blindness, of getting into a condition of confused intellectual excitement, and because some women are dissatisfied and have been unhappy, saying, therefore, and usually with passion, that they would be more satisfied if all the sex were freed from its own duties. As if freedom were ever gained by running away. The intellectual reformer is so very far from understanding the real human needs. There is, for instance, a significant omission in the quotations I have given—no mention is made of the results of all this to the child, and no suggestion is offered except that it should be trained and cared for by experts and apart from its parents. The home is to go because it restricts the liberty of women and will hinder their earning power, as if this were all that had to be considered. I can hardly find a more striking example of how far the apparently simple and elemental things escape the attention of the intellectual reformer.

In the society in which we are living, the only use that can be made of modern progressive teaching about the family—the only ounces of practice to be derived from pounds of precept—will lead, as I believe, to a very undesirable course of action. The programme for the abolition of the home has been outlined for us by reformers of both sexes. Communal houses and kitchens, and the intervention of armies of experts, are to solve the problems which now keep women tied in the individual home. The parents are to be supplanted by “born educators.” Successive institutions are planned for the bottle-period, kindergarten, school age, and so on. The children are to stand on visiting relations to the individual home and their parents, while their bodies and souls are to be cared for by specialists. And we are asked to believe that this will be a gain to the child! “It is the trained hand that the baby needs, not mere blood relationship … personal love is too hot an atmosphere for the young soul.”[69]

Now, if I wanted a general term to express the state of mind of these reformers, I do seriously think the word inhuman would be as near to it as any. Some people talk as if there were no emotional quality to decide these questions; they are dry-minded and quite unable to grasp the true values in life.

And the essence of all such folly is an insupportable egoism. The whole argument against the home is based on the claim of woman to lead an independent life. Independent of what? It is not easy to answer. It is asserted that the ideal of the home as the special care of woman has tied her to material things; it is urged that her emancipation from the fetish of the home is essential for her soul’s freedom. The feminists ask us to make the wage-earning woman our ideal, instead of regarding her, as I do, as the unfortunate victim of industrial life and industrial ideals—and this is a very dangerous attitude and one which cannot fail to affect very seriously the fate of the home in the future. It is this that causes me such grave fear. The ideals that we set before us do exercise an influence greater than we know.

Now, I am not much moved by this modern cry for liberty. What is this freedom for which women have been clamouring? In what tyranny are they held other than that in which their womanhood holds them? Is the new liberty to be found as sweated workers? Will it come even now when women’s industrial work is being sought for and well paid? Can it ever come from the fevered effort to live the same lives as men live and do the same work that men do?