Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

There is a further question that must be placed before women, and it is necessary for me to speak plainly. There is a question which I would ask the wife whose husband has become infected since marriage with one or other of the two forms of venereal disease: What is it that sends the man who is married to seek sexual satisfaction with the prostitute? It will not do to dismiss this question with the old, unreasoning condemnation of the male and his brute passions. In the case of the man of average decency, it is not deliberate choice that first sends him to dissipation.

Let us look at the matter a little closer and with greater truth. In marriage the woman dominates more often than usually is known. She has the children on her side. Undeniably the greatest function of any man in the life of the average woman is to be the father of her child. All other things that he means to her are secondary to this. For this reason, after the birth of her children she frequently ceases physically to desire her husband. Thus the position arises that many husbands, after some years of marriage, find themselves in a condition of loneliness in their own homes. And the cleavage is wider than the physical needs, and extends to the mental and spiritual plains. The woman’s life is filled with her children; she ceases to belong to her husband as completely as he belongs to her. She holds back more and more of herself—the vital part that he wants. The man feels that he is losing, and, after some bluster and conflict, he begins not to care.

This, I believe, is the history of many marriages that started with love. The result in the end is almost certain. The lower types of husband from time to time will break away and seek distraction in wild love. Other men of more refinement will suffer much more, till they seek to find love with some woman in a permanent union outside marriage.

It may, and I expect will, be said that I am looking at this question from the man’s side only. This is not because I do not feel the woman’s position, but because the facts I am trying to state are so often neglected, in particular by women themselves. Women have been taught to believe, and do really feel, that by sexual unfaithfulness a husband does them the cruellest possible wrong that a man can do to a woman. But is the man ever wholly to be blamed? After all, he has given away only what his wife has shown him she does not want for herself. Most English wives always are acquiescent rather than passionate in the sexual embrace. Even when in love they are unresponsive, hiding what they feel, and rarely showing their husbands that they want them with any real desire. After a few years of marriage, his embraces are suffered as a duty. And here I would re-state an opinion given in an earlier chapter: I do hold that man is by his nature faithful. If he has once loved a woman, he does not cease to desire her until after she has ceased to desire him.

This brings me to the last question I want to consider. Why does the desire of the wife so often cease towards her husband? It is a difficult question to answer. One reason has been given already in the false attitude of the woman, which in so many cases makes her ashamed of expressing openly the passion that she feels. Yet there is, I think, another and much deeper part of the truth that is fairly clear. Each man is able to enforce his sexual desire upon his wife at a time when she feels no desire, whereas she cannot gain her desire unless he gain his. We may perhaps trace back to this cause the feeling of disharmony and waning of desire which injures the woman’s power to love. Of course, this disharmony is not always conscious even to herself, and the man is quite unaware of the evil. But his acceptance of the woman’s subordination, however gladly given, does exhaust the passion in her.

This difference in the power for sexual sacrifice between the two sexes is, I have frequently thought, one of the gravest causes of our misery. It will take very long to overcome it. Only as we advance in refinement and knowledge of love can this antagonism in the sex act lessen, as the woman gains in frankness and the man comes to know how to arouse and keep aflame her desire.

And there is here a question I would put to those husbands who are suffering to-day from the sexual coldness of their wives. I would ask them: Have they taken sufficient trouble to understand, both on the physical and psychical side, the sexual nature of woman, which is much more complex and difficult than their own? The art of love is not understood by Western people. If we paid more attention to this subject marriage would be freed from the greatest cause that brings it to disaster. Greater openness and sexual confidence between the husband and the wife is the first necessary step. But we shall never have this until we have rooted out of our moral conscience the idea of “the body as the prison of the soul.” I have often asked myself if this misconception of love is not the real cause of all sex trouble.

And the remedy? Yes, that is the difficult matter. We cannot alter these evils by any cut-and-dried plan. The expression of sex is a question of refinement, and its regeneration must begin with a movement towards consciousness.

It may seem that we have reached no very definite conclusion. We have not solved the problem of venereal diseases. There is nothing to be gained by denying the difficulties that visit us in our sexual lives, or in talking, as many do, as though there were an easy way out. There is not.

I hold preaching on all these complicated questions to be quite useless. No platitudinous formulæ, no recrimination of one sex against the other sex, will do any good. The wrong is deep down in our attitude towards love, in our system of education, and in the very prevalent vulgarity of our surroundings. It is there that we must seek for it and destroy it.