Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

I must, however, reaffirm my opinion that sexual relationships, whether within marriage or outside of it, whether legal or free, can never safely be unregulated, and will always be a difficult experiment. And experience has forced on me the knowledge that the most passionate union is often the one most likely to end in disaster. For Buckle is not far from right when he says we accumulate knowledge, but do not progress in morals, which depend on the unaltered heart of man.

Some characters are manifestly and essentially unfaithful, self-seeking, and regardless of the happiness of others in love and in all the affairs of life. Others again act unfaithfully through weakness or haste, or through the misfortune of circumstances. The mistake with many of these people is that they ever bind themselves in permanent unions. We should not condemn or deal harshly with them, for by so doing we drive them to undertake obligations which they do not, because they cannot, fulfil. In my opinion, it is foolishness to pretend that for the whole of sexual conduct there can ever be one fixed rule. We shall have more morality, not less, if we accept this.

It is for this reason that I am altogether persuaded of the need of much greater facilities of divorce than exist at present: divorce on the ground of mutual consent, and based on inability through any cause to maintain true partnership in marriage.

There are some men and also women unsuited for marriage and quite undesirable as life-partners; they are not, however, undesirable because of the legal bond, but because of certain qualities which as individuals they possess. And this wider facility of divorce would do very much to lessen individual hardships, and moreover it would cleanse, in a way not sufficiently recognised, the immorality which is present in many unions. Marriage, with its fixed duties and the restrictions it does impose, in particular, upon the woman, will always appear to some a bondage from which they will seek the quickest way of escape. If no honourable way is allowed to them, they will take a dishonourable course. This may be deplored, it cannot (at any rate under existing conditions of character and public opinion) be helped, and nothing but evil can follow by pretending it is not so.

Thus we find that the difficulty of divorce is the strongest factor that brings disgrace and immorality into marriage.

This matter of honourable divorce is, however, one only of the almost countless questions in the tangle of considerations involved in the difficult matter of any attempt to change sexual conduct. More important, perhaps, is the great disproportion between the two sexes in a country that calls itself and tries to be monogamous. In our society, where so many conditions and causes have corresponded to make marriage more and more difficult, there are a very large number of women and also some men, and will be for a long time, who, from necessity rather than from choice, have to seek to satisfy their sex needs and to find love in the best way that they can. I do not see that we can or ought to condemn without fuller knowledge than as a rule we can have, these breaches of the prohibitions and laws of marriage: I am very certain that no good can be gained by branding those who commit them as sinners. Rather the conditions that give rise to such conduct must be openly faced and wherever possible dealt with. War, acting as it must inevitably do in increasing these evils and making marriage more difficult for many women, perhaps will bring us to do this. Changes in our laws may be forced upon our acceptance. We shall have to be more careful to protect life and to prevent waste of the powers of life. We cannot, therefore, I think, go on, in this question of the sex needs that are not satisfied in marriage, with the old game of pretence, that no irregular conduct need be considered as long as it can be hidden, or at least not publicly acknowledged.

But of sexual relationships outside of marriage I shall speak in a separate chapter.[80] The question is too urgent to be dealt with hastily. I shall state what seems to me can be done to regulate these unlegalised unions so as to free them, as far as this is possible, from the secrecy and shamefulness which acts, I am certain, as the strongest factor in the distress and evil which they do almost inevitably bring, both to the individuals who enter into them and to the society which tolerates, but does nothing to protect, them.

In the past, we have failed sufficiently to recognise the immorality which is present in many marriages. Monogamy has in reality never been attained either by ancient civilisations or in the modern world. Thus, while accepting monogamy, we tolerate extra conjugal relationships, which can be regarded only as a hidden polygamy, and, indeed, from one practical point of view, it is even worse in its results than a well-understood and regulated polygamy, as these fugitive unions, being unrecognised, carry with them no obligations. And the action of this double standard of sexual morality, with its concealed element of lying hypocrisy, has brought, and rightly brought, into discredit legal monogamous marriage; it has led on the one side to the setting up of an ideal of marriage conduct which, as many in fact actually do not follow it, tends to become an outward form, and this on the other side leads to a concealed laxity in practice, which results only too frequently in irresponsible unions, hidden diseases and blasted motherhood, the most terrible of the evils in our disordered sexual life of to-day. Facts of daily observation may not be shuffled out of observation by any hypocrisy. They must be faced and dealt with.

The question becomes clearer, if we consider that some people, men as well as women, have a great desire for children; or possibly as the desire is not always consciously recognised, it would be truer to say that with them the sexual impulse is more deeply rooted. I mean, though it is very difficult in words to express this, that erotic desire is less personally overmastering, that they are in truer relation with the race—one link in the long chain of the generations. This being so, the getting of a child is the ultimate, though rarely, I think, the conscious, satisfaction of sex; while for others—and this is true of some women quite as much as it is true of many men—sexual relations are in themselves the final gratification of love. Children may come, but they are born because of the operation of this strictly personal impulse or need of the parents.

It is, I think, very necessary to distinguish between sex-passion and the desire for a child; they are not the same, though, of course, the one impulse may be, and is as a rule, involved in the other. We need more clear thinking and frank speaking on the two elements in the reproductive act. This is a human problem, one that belongs to mankind alone; moreover, it has greatly increased among civilised races, and is likely to become more, and not less, difficult with the advance of time. Animals have sex-passion, which is neither love as we feel it nor lust; with them, as also in some degree with most primitive peoples, this passion is seasonal, not always active, and is more or less closely connected with the obtaining of offspring. Far different and much more complicated are the conditions of love among us to-day. Men and women have a continuous desire for love, with sex-passion as its outward expression and children for its efflorescence. They also have lust, which is a comparatively new expression,[81] at least, that is my opinion as to what is true of the majority among us. I do not use the word “lust” here in any sense of contempt, but to express strong and conscious sex-passion, seeking its own satisfaction without connection with any possible result in a child. Then at a much lower level there is lust-desire without love, or clothed merely in a rootless ephemeral mimicry of passion—a libertinage having no law but curiosity in self-indulgence. And all passion is a very different thing from the serene considerations which, according to the Prayer Book, cause men and women to marry.