Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

“But, alas! a hindrance ever lurketh in our way; it is the leaven in the dough, the deadly flies that invert the sweetness of the fragrant wine; … Thus … the wrongful thoughts ferment. Evil plougheth in and urgeth as a task-master. He wasteth and destroyeth, and, lo! we are taken captive in this thraldom; he giveth over the innocent and pure to death; defilement spreadeth, and of joy there is naught left.”—(Eng. trans., Jewish Prayer for the Day of Atonement.)

Now, because I desire sexual enlightenment for all children, and, in particular, for all girls, and seek as a reformer the re-shaping of education in the home and in the school, it does not follow that I am so over-presumptuous as to believe it possible in this way quickly to remedy all sexual mistakes, or that I do not realise how our policy of muddle and leaving these matters alone has not always been as disastrous as, indeed, we might expect. I know that in many cases and among numerous young people the sexual life follows a healthy and beautiful unfolding, in spite of anything we may do or may leave undone. And it needs but a cursory view to see that all is not confused and an aimless conflict of waste, but that the wonderful beauty of youth often will triumph over the meanness of our fears, our subterfuges and blind blunderings. One perceives something that goes on, something that is continually working in the child to make order out of our muddle, beauty out of our defacements: to force light, frankness and purity in place of our shams and our lies.

Doubtless to the theoretical teacher eager to reform the world on paper, it seems a very easy matter to lay down rules for mothers and teachers regarding sexual instruction—new finger-posts to conduct, whereby the young generation may be guarded from making the mistakes that we ourselves have made. But can we do this? For in sex we have as yet learnt very little, and I doubt sometimes if we can ever learn very much, except each one of us for ourselves out of our own experience. We of an older generation cannot save our children very far, or hold them back from life. And it may be well that at once we realise and acknowledge the very narrow limits of our power.

But this is not to say that we are to shirk and continue to act as if all were well when we know that it is not so. The manner in which, up to the present day, we have completely ignored the very fact of sex in our educational system is almost incredible. There has been in many directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in our treatment of youth.

No other emotion is so hindered, opposed, and loaded with material and moral fetters. We know how education makes a beginning in this way, and how life continues the process. Perhaps some of these hindrances are inevitable; but many are the direct result of our adult stupidity, and the way we have failed in training the young. How can you expect the primitive powerful sex impulse not to suffer? The sex emotions are among the deepest, if not the deepest, of our nature; they exercise an influence on every phase of development, and, in one form or another, direct the entire being of the individual. We know this. And all the time we continue to educate girls and boys as if they were sexless neuters. Could folly be greater?

By our teaching and our example we are destroying for the young the harmony of Nature. We ourselves are shame-faced because we are still savages in sex. If not, why this awe and funk, these taboos and mysteries, all the secretive cunning with which we hide from the young facts that we all know, but pretend that we don’t know?

And it cannot be overlooked that this fear of sex is of very ancient origin, which makes it the more difficult to eradicate. We have, I believe, to allow for an ages-old, and therefore strongly rooted, sense of separation, causing an often unconscious antagonism between the two sexes. We see its unchecked action in many examples in the animal kingdom, though not in all—it is quite absent, for instance, in the family life of certain insects and in the perfect loves of many birds, whose life-histories we examined in the first section of this book. We see the same antagonism acting continually among primitive peoples in the elaborate and sacred system of taboos which separate the two sexes. Indeed, the beginnings of the marriage system can be traced back to a primitive conception of danger attaching to the sexual act. I am not very hopeful that this sex separation that is a kind of antagonism can ever be wholly eliminated; I am not even sure that it is well that it should be eliminated. May it not be that love itself would be withered did we take it away? I am not certain at all; I know, however, that this fear of sex has led us into great folly.

What is the psychological meaning of the combination of man and woman? It is the union between opposites, which, perhaps, I may try to explain further as the union between consciousness and unconsciousness. The man is essentially conscious, the woman essentially unconscious; the man is concentrated in his intellect, the woman is concentrated in her senses. These, at least, are the nearest words in which I am able to express it. And of one thing I am certain: the modern way of mixing the qualities of the two sexes acts directly for unhappiness and in harm to the race. I did not always think this: I did not want to think it. I have come slowly to be convinced and against my own will. And I am glad to take the opportunity now, as I near the end of my book on Motherhood—the subject which ever has been deepest in my heart—to state this as my later opinion, which has been made clear to me by the experiences of my life.

There is no use in saying there is no difference between the girl and the boy when human nature keeps asserting that there is. There is even, as I have been forced into accepting, a natural tendency between boys and girls to draw away from each other. You may see this separation in every co-education school where the children, led by deeper instincts than we have understood, bring our wisdom to foolishness. They unconsciously feel that separation which we have been trying to pretend does not exist. Each sex, at the very dawn of the teens and before, is unfolding interests, tastes, plays and ambitions of its own.

It would be interesting to follow this dissimilarity as far as it could lead us. Sometimes it would seem that we had got to the bottom—to what is common to the girl as to the boy; the qualities that both sexes share as human beings, where the ties of similarity seem to link their characters. But wait! deeper than this we must seek for the truth. Even in this likeness there is an all-pervading unlikeness. And it is just this: the differences, which cannot, I think, be expressed, but which do exist—differences in souls, in minds and in bodies—as well as a separation in the habits, the desires, and attitude to life, that makes for such harmony in the elemental depths.