Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

The sin that the man commits against his wife is being unfaithful. Having caught the venereal disease is a misfortune. The effect must not be blamed by itself. Let me illustrate this point of view by considering a different case. Your child gets scarlet fever by an act of direct disobedience or sin. He goes to play at a house he has been forbidden to enter. Would you, because of his sin, refuse to pity and nurse him? Rather would you not forget his disobedience and desire only to help and to heal him?

Do you see what I mean now? It is not that I uphold immoral conduct in the husband or in the lover that I plead thus for pity and understanding on the part of women.

Few men are intentionally evil. They do not even act foolishly in this question of infectious disease because they are wantonly careless. Often they are fully alive to the danger that may result to their wives from their own infection. I repeat they are not necessarily bad men, and they may love their wives and children; but they are cowards. All men are cowards when it comes to facing their wives with their own wrong doings. If they cannot rely on the pity of their wives, few men will dare to tell the truth. If they cannot tell the truth, they cannot avoid infecting their wives. This may lead to the birth of infected children, and who may say that in this case the crime is the man’s alone? It is to prevent this crime against the child and against life, that I urge upon women a wiser and more tolerant attitude.

For greater clearness, I may state the matter thus: there are three attitudes that may be adopted towards sexual disease. First, that of the pure moralist, who says only, “This is a sin to be punished.” On the opposite side is the purely utilitarian, who says, “This is only a disease to be cured.” But both attitudes may be alike wrong, or, more correctly, the truth lies midway between the two. The disease, as a disease, needs to be cured. This is the first step with which nothing should interfere. But far different and much more complex is the treatment required to alter the actions that lead to the disease.

As a first step, public opinion ought to condemn too late marriage, instead of recommending it on economic grounds. The mania for making economics the centre of life should now surely cease: the falsity of this view has been exposed by many great writers, but much stronger is the condemnation that must be given to it by all who can understand the evils that it has wrought in our sexual lives. Late marriages must be one of the causes contributing to men’s use of prostitutes before marriage. This subject has been dealt with already in Chapter XII.

A natural division of the subject here presents itself. The problems of venereal infection are different before and after marriage. A practical knowledge of the physical facts of sex should be the possession of every girl some years before the age of marriage. Sex must cease to be a subject on which it is not decent for a girl to speak. Until this has been achieved, it will be impossible to have that frankness between lovers which will make certain an acknowledgment being made of infection, if it is or ever has been present in the man, so as to do away with the dangers of concealment and further disease. In my opinion, this openness is of necessary importance to the wise choice on the part of girls of the men they are to marry.

Our whole attitude towards youth in relation to sex is mistaken. And some of our worst mistakes take a direction not usually recognised. We often over-emphasise the possibilities of romantic love and chivalrous devotion, or we leave our children to gain this false attitude from the books they read. This is bad for both boys and girls. To personify all inspiration and nobility as Woman often but acts to make unknown vice attractive to youth. The unknown is almost always desirable. It is probable that times and places where excessive respect for women has been expressed in poetry and romance have been distinguished by looseness of sexual habits; just in the same way and for the same reason that extremely vulgar behaviour between the sexes is compatible with the strictest physical chastity.

In the case of girls, the evil that may be done by over-exalting romantic love is a different one. To idealise the male virtues of courage, adventurousness and self-confidence comes near, in many cases, to teaching the girls admiration for the calm, reckless Don Juan. This is the man who is likely to have been infected by venereal diseases.

In the story of the Beauty and the Beast we have material out of which part of the great sex difficulty can be explained. In the fairy story, the husband before marriage looks like a beast, after marriage he becomes a prince. In real life, the story is inverted. There is a deluding force in the mere skin and limbs of those of the opposite sex at the time when maturity is reached which may give princely attributes to those who would be seen as beasts at other times. The prince seen as a beast after marriage is a tragedy into which the romantic, ignorant girl must beware of drifting. The man who most boldly plays up to the romantic part expected of him—reciprocating to the perhaps unconscious encouragement of the girl—is not the man who will be the most agreeable to live with. I believe there is real danger in the sentimental view of love that is common to most girls. They do not know the poverty of feeling that loudly expressed sentiment may hide. The defect of many unfaithful lovers is not sensuality, but sentimentality. The lower types of lovers are strangely, almost incredibly, sentimental. Such teaching as this about the danger of an over-romantic view of love will not safeguard from all evils, but it will at least give knowledge that may protect in some time of peril.

The problem of the wife infected by a husband, who becomes diseased after marriage, is one that is different and more complicated. I have spoken already of the urgent need on the part of the wife that she should feel pity for the husband, even if she does this as the only means of protecting herself and her children. Without this pity, men will not dare to tell the truth. And even against their judgment and their wish, they will have sexual intercourse with their wives to prevent suspicion.