Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

We have had a striking example of the enthusiasm and interest evoked by situations of conflict and danger, in the intense and primitive emotions revived in all of us by the war. War is the thunder and voice of the trumpet without which the wisest moral and political ideas never attract sufficient attention to lead to difficult action. For the world will not listen to a truth until bloodshed and violence have awakened its sluggard imagination.

And in these new circumstances we all, women as well as men, have been caught by a powerful excitement. The war has us in its grip, there is no other thought, no other remedy, no other interest. In many ways war is the most uniting of all forces. We are all joined in one work of service and co-operation. No man or woman can turn away, skulk in the individual garden of their own petty interests, because they do not want to be bothered. Something fresh has come, something that had to come, and all that went before is changed.

We see thus that war has brought to all of us a succession of disturbing revelations of reality. And the lesson has come most severely on those whose lives have been most unreal. Here is a force against which there is no argument. We are involved in a struggle of the most momentous dimensions. No one as yet can mark the limits of destruction, and in the harshness of the war’s lesson the struggle of women for sex mastery at once became uninteresting.

For hundreds of centuries and myriads of generations the life of fighting has gone on for men. But women’s opportunity waits upon leisure and peace. The savagery of war brings the two sexes back to primitive values. And the truth is forced upon us; we realise the gulf which lies between the man and the woman.

All our days we women have been denying this separation, and, enslaved by male ideals, have sought to break through the barriers of sex. We have been pursuing power, wrapping ourselves up in one garment after another, calling these coverings romance, adventure, work, individual development, and what not; now we have come in our hearts to know the falsity of it all. Somewhere in the confusion of war stark facts awaited us. We had to face life as a reality, not as theories, or movements, or sex development.

For many of us women the lesson has been sharp and sudden. War leapt upon us as it were a beast out of some hidden darkness; leapt upon us, holding us powerless, tearing our illusions into shreds with its blood-stained claws.

And on a sudden women were held by a new, quick-striking, absolute realisation of the truth. They had not seen it nor felt like this before. But this beast of war crouching in front of them said to women, “Always I have been beside you waiting for this hour. I have waited for a long time. You have struggled; you have fought; you have played; you have come to think yourselves important in strange ways, meddling in all the affairs of the world. This you have done, and you have learnt much of the means of life, but you have everything yet to re-learn about life itself.

“In all your struggles for political recognition and in all your work reality has not touched you. You have feared to be yourselves. You have been ashamed of your sexual differentiation. You have gathered power around you to pretend that you were the same as men, your strength as their strength, that your work was the same as their work. You have mocked at those qualities that were your own, that set you apart from men, denying your womanhood. You have suffered. But you will not suffer less by any such efforts to escape. Who can wonder that you have been dissatisfied? For you have wasted in haste the power that is your own. And conscious of, though not understanding, the want in your own lives, you have been deeply conscious of the discords in the rest of the world. The instinct of motherhood has been strong within you, and wasted, it has not ceased to torment you.

“You have gained excitement and applause, much work you have done and had many triumphs. It has seemed a big thing. Yet, after all, has the gain been worth the payment? Have women indeed escaped from their prison? Think, do you not know deep in your hearts that its bars have not been broken?”