Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

Certainly it is unnecessary for me to say, after what I have written in the earlier chapters of my book, how exceedingly I regret the permanence of conditions that can seem good only in an industrial society. In my opinion the working of women will be the greatest of the many disasters that are likely to follow and remain from the war. I wish I had the power to prevent it. I do not, however, see any way in which this can be done. For one thing, if the desires of women are being set in a direction away from the home, this, as I have just said, must count as the strongest factor of all. What women want to do is what they are likely in the end to do.

So many women have been for long, and still are, suffering from the delusion that conditions which industrialism, with all its failures in the art of life, first established, and which war now has made necessary, are an advantage to be maintained after the need of war has made them unnecessary. This is the great mistake. I would emphasise again what I have shown in an earlier chapter,[88] that conditions which act against the home and marriage (always dependent on the individual home) are sure proof of social instability. Such conditions are centuries old; all this flood of change is bringing nothing that is new. In all periods of unsettled life the individual home and the family have been threatened. The primitive form of marriage, the maternal form, where the husband visited the wife in her own home, is very near to the most modern suggestions for the readjustment of marriage. And the heavy working of women is a further sign of disturbance and of primitive conditions of life. It is a step backward, not a step forward. Few women, however, realise that this is so. Perhaps this explains why so many among them are talking and behaving to-day as if no more babies were desired to be born.

How far this will be carried I do not profess to say. Women will have a fresh power to refuse the position of wife and mother; thus it seems likely that there may be an increased option against marriage in its true and binding form. And closely connected with the independent position of women will be the great shortage, for the next decade, of marriageable men, due to the killing and disablements of war. It will be a world in which the proportion of women will be very high. And although it would be folly to estimate precisely how this great numerical strength of one sex will act, whether it will strengthen women’s position, or, as it equally well may, will lessen their importance in a society crowded with unwanted women, it is plain that it must directly affect the sexual relationships. Women, accustomed when young to control their own lives and able to be self-supporting, will not only find it much more difficult to marry, but they will be in a position to get along economically without marriage. To every married woman there are likely to be three or four unmarried ones.[89] It will also probably be a period of poverty. The economic stress which war causes will almost necessarily continue in the years when we shall all be compelled to meet the huge task of national recovery that peace must bring. It is possible that for some years it will be more difficult to maintain a family than it has ever been before. This will be a third factor acting against marriage, and tending to maintain as permanent the class of energetic, not strongly maternal and undomesticated women workers.[90]

In different directions also causes very much the same may possibly be acting to the same end. The desires of men as well as the desires of women may be affected, and be turned from marriage and the duties of the family and the home. Many men will not come back out of the hell of war the same men that entered it. It may not be easy to plan life on the old rules, the safe customs of civilisation may well count for less. Some men will not want to return to the posts kept open for them by women; to sell tablecloths to fussy women, or to spend dull days in offices adding columns of figures and addressing envelopes, may not appear “a man’s job” to men who have met the stark facts of death and life. I doubt the zeal of the response of all these men to the binding ties of family life. And in this way, it may be, that many fathers will be cut off from the family and turned away from desiring the sacrifice and duties that children entail, which cannot fail to act as a further force in modifying marriage.

If we try to take an entirely practical view of the position, certain grave facts must, I think, become evident. For side by side with these forces acting against marriage, and the parental sacrifice necessary to maintain the ideal of the family, must be placed the nation’s increased need for children—in particular for male children. The repair of the war drain on the world’s manhood must fall heaviest on women. It is woman who has borne and bred and loved each life that has been lost by war. It is she who will have to make good the waste. This is her bill of compulsory service.

Never will child life have been so precious as it will be after this World War. Already in this country we are beginning to recognise this need. Excellent work for the restriction of infant mortality and the protection of child life is beginning to be undertaken, and these questions are receiving a practical recognition which they never gained in the days of peace. But much more drastic action than has as yet been considered will be needed. It is certainly not inconceivable that this need for children may lead to changes both in our public and private attitudes to many sexual questions. I am hopeful that it may force us to face squarely many problems that hitherto we have turned from in fear.

Speculations on all matters connected with marriage and the relations between the sexes are so hazardous that they are likely to be wrong. I do, however, think that, having regard to the direction in which so many forces are acting, the position in regard to the special problem we are considering has become clearer. Monogamous marriage and the home based upon maternity and offspring has got to be saved. And in my opinion this will be done most surely by a frank acceptance, under the almost certain conditions of the future, of more than one form of sexual association.

This proposal is not made lightly. I am not advocating such a course as being in itself desirable or undesirable. I am attempting merely to estimate the drift and tendency of the times, considering those forces that were beginning to act before the war and, as I think, must continue, even with greater power, after the war. I suggest, therefore, the one course that seems to me can in any practical way help us to be more moral. All the facts that we have found work out to force us to the realisation that an increasing number of women will not be able, and probably will not desire, even if they marry, to bear children. Now, I do not believe in changing the ideal of marriage so that its duties no longer bind women to their children and to the home. I think it better to make provision for other partnerships, to meet the sex-needs (for we can cause nothing but evil by failing to meet them) of the women and men who are not able or do not desire to enter the holy bonds of marriage and undertake together the duties and sacrifice inevitable to the founding and maintenance of a family.

I know the whole question is a very difficult one. Let me try to make my position somewhat clearer.