“Susie, I have washed baby’s napkins, what shall I do now?”
She answered, “Begin to get the food ready; I will come in a minute to boil the milk.”
This is no exaggeration, I state exactly what I heard.
Now, it is no use shrieking out that this woman’s conduct is unnatural and a libel on motherhood. If the maternal instinct was a fixed instinct and bore good fruit only, this might be done. The objection to the wrong kind of women being mothers is precisely that it inevitably produces some such results. This woman simply followed the promptings of her own desires: the difference was that she did it much more frankly than is usual. She employed the days in playing croquet and tennis and in flirting with any available male. I do not think she knew she was not a good mother. At intervals, when she remembered, she scolded the children; but when she forgot them, which was frequently, she left them alone.
Often I talked with her, as she interested me very strongly. I wished that I could have known her early history, and especially some details of her sexual life. I could but guess, still I do not think I was mistaken. She told me quite frankly that she did not like children, though she added (clearly, though quite unconsciously, speaking conventionally), “Of course, I love my own children.” Then (lapsing again into truth) she went on bewailing the length of the school holidays (the little boy and the girl were both at boarding-school) and her present position of being without a nurse to look after the baby. On the occasion of another conversation she told me that she did not care for men. I answered, “Probably not, but you like them to care for you.” She laughed and seemed pleased, and asked me how I knew this.
Now, this woman was to me a most interesting study. A friend who was staying with me at the time blamed her very severely. I think this was unfair. What was clear to me was that life was demanding from this woman what she could not give. She was strongly sensual without being passionate; she was probably philoprogenitive or she would not have had so many children; but she was not at all maternal, and was quite unfitted to be entrusted with any child. She was not immoral—at least, I think not; probably she was faithful in the usual meaning to her husband. In her world the price was too high to make unfaithfulness worth while; but she was wholly non-moral. Such a woman should not marry; she should never be a mother. I would go even further and say her place was the place of the prostitute. This judgment may seem hard. Yet I know of no other remedy. You cannot alter these things by pretending they are not there. And the expression of sex is always a question of refinement and of character.