Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

Idle curiosity is banished by simple honest teaching, and much evil is thereby prevented. But the boundless curiosity of the child is not and, indeed, should not be satisfied. The boy or the girl, as he or she grows older, will have to experiment, to find out for himself or herself. To ignore this need is, I am certain, to blind ourselves to the facts of life. We must be prepared that, with all our care, our most loving efforts to gain the confidence of our children will be met by refusals.

And although this failure may, and, indeed, must sadden us as we watch the child of our love passing out of the protective circle of our power to help, we need to know that this is a natural process—a step forward that should be taken by the boy or girl; we even fail in our duty do we try to hold them back and refuse to loosen the cords of guidance. The child is fulfilling his or her own needs in turning from us. Age cannot always help youth. In the early years the child desires and should have the very individualised and binding relation with its parents, but when he is older he ought to free himself from the old bindings—from the covering protection of the mother and father—if he is to establish his own character and suitably adapt himself to the world outside the home.

Our children will turn away from us in their search for knowledge and experience. All that any mother can do is to establish a relationship of openness and confidence in her child’s early years, for if it is not done then hardly ever can it be done later. But even when this has done, there will still be needed the utmost care that what has been gained may not be used for the mother’s own satisfaction and against the good of the boy or the girl.

All the wisdom and patience and tenderness and sacrifice of the parents will be needed after the epoch of puberty and in the difficult years of adolescence, to know when it is wise to give advice and claim confidence, or when the harder duty must be done of pushing the boy or the girl away to experiment and live upon their own responsibility.

Here, again, I would give warning: in these later adolescent years it is always the child—boy or girl—and not the parents who must be the guide. The mother and the father must be ready at all times, but their task is, I think, one of very patient and loving waiting: it is the child who must desire to give the confidence. It is true that the wise parent may create opportunities of confidence; to these the boy or the girl will respond readily; at least this will be so when the early training of the child has been without any hateful sense of shame.

Such are the facts as they present themselves to me.

The real failure in sexual education arises from our treatment of sex as something apart from the rest of life. We have got to change this, if we are to help our children. Sex must cease to be a forbidden subject. Label any natural function as improper, not to be spoken about and repellent, and at once you set up an abnormal curiosity, and open a way for almost every evil. We must cease to be afraid.

There is, of course, a very deep reason for this fear of sex. The sex impulses are not often realised and understood in the conscious life of men and women, and although they can be caught up and fused into all that is best in the individual character, they remain in most of us unrecognised and untamed. You will see what I mean. The sex instinct has retained its wildness, and we must, I think, face the fact that there is in all of us a volcanic element in sex, underlying and influencing all the rest of our nature, and, for that very reason, shaking the individual character from its foundations with tremor, if not with catastrophe. This distrust of the dynamic force, which so often we have found difficult to control in ourselves, causes us to fear for our children. We are afraid that many growths we do not like may spring up in them. And the immediate result in us is an inhibitory awkwardness—largely an effort of hiding—in the face of everything that comes within hailing distance of the sex passion.

Until we have cleared our thoughts from this confusion of fear, very little good can be done. Let us purify ourselves and re-establish our own faith. When once we come to understand, we cannot go on leaving our children to be sullied, and in some cases—and those not a few—even crushed and destroyed by our mock modesty, sham decencies and complacent blindness.

It is my firm conviction that most of the perversions of sex, a whole list of diseases, the almost countless number of unhappy marriages, many of the existing social evils—may be traced back to this cause. It is unsafe to prophesy, yet I think much of the misery would be remedied, if once we could dispel the unwholesome mystery with which we, in our timidity and uncleanness of mind, have enveloped the facts of birth and the relations between the sexes. Such mystery is really nothing but shame; much of it may be dispelled by the wholesome light of simple and wise teaching. So only can we hope to guide our children’s natural and beautiful unfolding. We must inculcate in them from their earliest years respect for their own bodies and for the reproductive act.