Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

It is often objected that children are happier and healthier away from their parents, and that no conditions could possibly be worse than those which exist in countless homes. I know this. But it is no indictment against the home as an institution, rather it is an indictment of the kind of home and of the mother and the father.

I can hardly express too strongly my own want of faith in the expert child-trainer. I have found always that they regard the child, mainly, if not entirely, as something to be improved and instructed on a definite plan. The expert is never human, and the child has need of all the human element that it can get. It has absolute need of a mother and of a father. And it is impossible to be parents in the complete and right sense apart from the individual home. All experience shows us that the home, with its sympathetic relationships of mutual affection, cannot be replaced. We must insist on conditions of society that will make home life possible. The child has to accept the arrangements we make as a sacred thing, that is why this question is of such immense importance. If the matter could be fixed by the will of children, I should have no fear. The child has not lost the true values of life.

We have grown careless of the home under the blighting effects of industrialism. And the problem of the child is much more difficult in the case of modern mothers, who have few children and no strong traditions—no fixed standard of child training and of home life. Each mother is continually making personal experiments, a course of conduct that is not only harmful to the individual child, but one that must lead to collective confusion. Under such conditions excessive ardour may be as dangerous as neglect. One of the most unfortunate children I have known was an idolised only child with most conscientious modern parents, who kept a record in many large volumes of its every act and every saying. This child was trained out of childhood. There may be too much care and attention given by the parents as well as too little.

Motherhood in theory much praised, poetised, and hailed as a wonderful thing, often in actual expression is the strongest deterrent influence in the life of the child. The mother cannot realise the young life that has come from her life apart from herself. The child is too near to her. And it follows from this that her instinct and her love are not primarily concerned with the child, rather she is interested in it chiefly as its mother, that is, the birth-giver and possessor of the child. Most mothers bind their children to them much too closely with an egoistic love which is the most poisonous form of selfishness. Therefore the mother often is the real enemy in the home, the most self-centred and conservative member.

There are, of course, exceptional mothers who have the knowledge and the will to avoid such danger; mothers who as need arises are strong enough even to push their children from them at any personal cost; who insist on the freedom of each child, and see it has the opportunity to grow up harmoniously, unhampered and unspoilt, and according to its own nature. But such wise mothers to-day are few. And the average mother is like the hen with her brood, for ever fretting about her chicks if they venture away from her. In such conduct there is a terrible infringement of the personal rights of the child. Indeed, the mother too often enslaves with kindness, a bondage harder to bear and even more difficult to escape from than the brutal fist of a father.

Now, this mother-egoism will not be changed easily. It is a quality that reaches far back before human parenthood, and is instinctive and not conscious. You will recall that I referred to this in Chapter VI,[75] where I tried to find an explanation. We saw then the manner in which the maternal instinct was fixed and strengthened. The mother became chief parent, as soon as the early stages of mother-care were changed from an external to an internal process. This strengthened immeasurably the relation of the mother to the offspring, who now became an extension of her life. Before, the mother’s relation to the family was not very different from the relation of the father, and was dependent on parental sacrifice and the amount of care bestowed. And one result of the change was a deepening of egoism—of the self-feeling, if I may so call it—in the mother’s love, a quality which has a much deeper significance that is commonly recognised. In my opinion it is stronger in the love of the mother than it ever is in the love of the father. Mother-love is not quite the unselfish thing we have been accustomed to believe. Even the care which is bestowed so lavishly upon the child is often but the outward sign of a self-fussing anxiety, and serves no true purpose, but is a hindrance to the child’s health and happiness.

I would emphasise this difference between the two parents, a difference which may be marked in the father’s attitude to and affection for the child. It seems to me to be of great importance. It is the popular view among women who are too idle to think—it saves them the trouble of detecting their own faults—that all good women have an instinctive understanding of a child and of its needs. This is very far from being true. And, indeed, there are good grounds for believing—though I own I do not like to acknowledge it—that the father’s guidance and sympathy are of even greater importance to the spiritual well-being and happiness of the child than the excessive care and too-absorbing love of the mother.

Here, then, is yet another reason why we must regard with profound mistrust the modern movement to break away from the tried and fixed institution of the patriarchal home. We have seen again and again in our examination of the past history of parenthood, that wherever the father has been cut off from the family and the duties in caring for the young, a deterioration has followed. The development of the individual family is most intimately connected with patriarchy. It was under this system that the father’s position in the family and his right to his children were established. Nature sees to it that the tie between the mother and the child cannot be set aside; the case is different with the father, and his position in the family has to be made secure in another manner. We need to remember the degradation of fatherhood which must be connected with any matriarchal programme. And my own faith in the patriarchal family-group and the individual home, a faith that has only recently been fixed and made strong, is based upon this: I am convinced that it is the natural and, indeed, the only way of securing the loving care of both parents for the upbringing of the children.

In these days of destruction and of the pulling down of barriers, the home is exposed to peculiar danger. Much, incalculably much, depends on women’s attitude. The maternal instinct, or what I would call the mother-sense, has surely lost in quality. When I think about this, I feel as if I would like to found an order for motherhood. Everything to be truly done must become a religion. And motherhood should have its ritual no less than faith. There is not a single act of duty in the home and in care given to the child which the mother may not make into a spiritual exercise of her soul. The child should be the mother’s creation. She is the potter with the power to mould the clay, and she should know the rapture of the artist. I want to bring back to motherhood the quality it has lost.

The home awaits a fresh inspiration to turn back and hold the desire of women. We have to find again the right way. If we get our ideal fixed, it will be translated later into the acts of our life.