Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

I have emphasised this question of the unholy ascetic view of marriage because of its unspeakable evil, not only for women, but for the waste it entails to the race. It is the basis of most of the failures and diseases in our sexual life. As you know, our moral and religious systems regard the body as the prison of the soul, and pay consequently no attention whatever to the body from the moral point of view. I desire a regeneration of all the instincts of the body through consciousness. I desire this much more for the health and happiness of women themselves than I do for the enjoyment of men.

But it is not going to be easy. The education of the senses is quite a new thing, and it is not even allowed to most women to possess them. The principle of “re-discovery” will have to be begun. We must teach woman that she wants love for herself; the man must not claim it from her as a right he has bought by marriage.

Most women and some men do not realise (at least, they do not openly acknowledge) the immense disturbing power of sex and the claims the sexual life makes at some time on us all. To hear many people talk you would think it were possible to free ourselves at will of all those troubles and prejudices of sex that are our heritage from an uncountable past. Love is something fiercer than hand-holding in the darkness of the cinema, or moon-gazing in the parks.

In fear we try to keep the blinds down so that love may be decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its action, like all the emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths of the ordinary experience of each of us; it exercises its influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.

Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. The emotional self refuses at times to be controlled by the reason self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evil. For our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretences we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own deceit or collectively as a nation in the hope of controlling conduct.

This is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so foolish. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and want to do, and, therefore, are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost always fail to face.

Having said this much, you will readily understand why I regard as necessary for the morality of marriage some public recognition of the relationship, and some accepted standard of conduct in it. We cannot, remembering the inherent defectiveness of our wills, safely hesitate and experiment in the liberties we can allow and the limits we must set to a force so strong as sexual love. Still less can we allow to be done in secret and in shameful darkness things that we will not face in the light. The unregulated union in any form does not seem to me to be practicable. Our sexual relationships are, or ought to be, so hedged about by duties, obligations, and consequences, that sexual conduct can never be considered as a personal question, and any society that permits such a view, whether openly acknowledged or secretly accepted, opens the way to real immorality and great unhappiness.

Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of jealousy, and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden with your smile?” are still felt in the heart, even if not uttered by the lips, of the most advanced and emancipated husbands and wives. For often we are forced into acts over which reason has no control. And our sex judgments are not merely moral, not just questions of understanding and forgiving, but also physical questions of the nerves, of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.

And marriage, I say, the old patriarchal marriage that the advanced people and the idealists alike scoff at, is necessary for most of us—it does through its checking influence help us, and, by setting clear limits and prescribing a fixed code of conduct, it certainly hinders, if it cannot destroy, irregular manifestations of love. Moreover it does, by its ideal of faithfulness and duty to one mate, turn the imagination to desire fidelity. It is not so much that we could not love others, but that we shall not want to do so. Our desire is the first necessity: all else will follow. It is the seed of everything that can grow up in marriage: it is the true magic power. And this desire is always active, every real marriage is a continual renewing of interest through love, and, if the partners are not interested in each other, they will seek for something else.