Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

And such foolish and cruel action has all been done in the name of morality! Let us tear the mask from the lying face of our social conscience. We need a clean clearance of a moral attitude that really is profoundly immoral.

Let no one make a mistake. In pleading for these unhonoured mothers and their children, I am not advocating illegal parentage. There is a sin of illegitimacy, as presently I shall show. Irresponsible parentage must always be immoral. It is, however, the parents who behave illegitimately, not the child, since it can never be the fault of any child that its parents have brought it into the world. I would wish for every child that it should be born within the happy safeguards of a true monogamous marriage. But I cannot close my eyes to the facts of life. I know that we shall not be able to make it impossible for extra-conjugal procreation to take place: love-children will be born. And what we, in our curious moral muddle-headedness, forget is that by penalising the mother we cannot escape the penalty being paid by the child. Our attitude in the past has been a reproach to our social intelligence.

I am very far indeed from any desire to lessen parental responsibility. And if I want the harshness of our law and our moral attitude changed, it is first of all because I wish to make it possible for unmarried parents—the father as well as the mother—to give adequate protection to their child. If they do not do this willingly, I would use the pressure of the law and a strong public opinion to bring them to their duty. Under present conditions this can never be done. It is because our harshness does no good that I condemn it.

The iniquity of our bastardy laws and public opinion concerning illegitimacy both reflect the Anglo-Saxon habit of mind, which persists in ignoring all social problems arising from the sex relation. We have never yet squarely faced the question, we have just pushed it into the darkness, and pretended it was not there. It has even been a kind of disgrace to bring it forward; and the evil and the waste is so hidden up that most of us have been quite unaware of its immense existence among us. But we cannot thus escape from what we have done, or rather have left undone.

The fact is, that all our thought on these questions has been obscured by the puritan view of punishment, based on the assumption that harshness in the treatment of sexual offences will make for a higher standard of morality. Do we really believe this? Surely the underlying fallacy of our morality has always rested here—in our desire to crucify the offender. We forget that, by doing this, we but open the way to make easy, even if not inevitable, the committal of further sin. By our attitude we drive men to desert the girls made pregnant through their lust, and open the way for them to escape from responsibility for their sexual sins and to disown their fatherhood; we do everything that we can to encourage unfit parenthood.

Few people want to do wrong; they drift into wrong; the circumstances are too hard or their wills too weak to resist. We are suffering a great deal of confusion from demanding from men and women a rule of conduct in sex without taking any care that the conditions of life render such conduct practicable. In the last chapter I tried to make plain how short-sighted has been the attempt to force all types into a single mould. The plan I there outlined for an open acceptance of honourable unions outside of permanent marriage, would cut at the roots of many of these problems, and, in particular, by lessening the sufferings from enforced sexual abstinence, would render much less frequent those disgraceful and hidden unions which result in illegitimate births; it would also materially reduce the dire results of venereal diseases, and would be, in my opinion, more beneficial and far-reaching than anything that yet has been proposed. I would affirm again that I am not advocating license of conduct. It is necessary to proclaim allegiance to the God of morals, who has proclaimed for ever “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” But it is necessary also to understand that repressive terrors may drive men and women into greater sins.

Our bastardy laws act directly in this immoral way. The child born of unmarried parents has been branded under Christian teaching as “the child of sin,” and condemned from its birth as a member of an unclean caste. But, from the point of view of practical morality, this identification of the child with the sin of its parents is wholly unjustifiable.

The urgent duty that rests upon us all is the duty of taking action to prevent the penalty for the sin of illegitimate parentage being paid by the child.

It is common sense, after all.

We have to remember that the birth of every child—and it matters not at all whether the birth is legal or illegal—is always the introduction of a new individual into the community. Birth is not a personal fact only, but a social fact, in which the State cannot fail to be concerned.