The Truth About Woman

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

The intimate association between religious ideas and feelings and the sexual life is abundantly proved by the history of all peoples. We first meet it in the widespread early practice of religious prostitution, which has aptly been called "lust sacrifice." It is even more manifest in the ancient religious erotic festivals. Of these we have examples in the festivals of Isis in Egypt, in the Dionysian and Eleusinian festivals of the Hellenes, in the Roman Bacchanalia and festival of Flora, and among the Jews in the feast of Baal-peor. In these festivals the frenzy of religious mysticism merges with the wildest sexual licence. Sexual mysticism found its way also into Christianity, a fact to which the lives of the saints furnish an illuminating witness. And down to the present day we may notice its manifestations in the most diverse sects during any period of religious revival. We still meet with sexual excesses under the shadow of faith, as, for instance, occurred in the late revival in Wales.

Havelock Ellis has laid stress on the leading significance of religious sexual perceptions, and their special importance on the emotional feminine character. This subject is so deeply connected with women that I shall, I hope, be pardoned if I pause for a moment to relate a personal experience which may help to make this truth more clear.

In my girlhood I was strongly drawn to religion, partly through training and example, but more, as I now know, by the affectability of my strongly feminine temperament. My religious enthusiasm was so intense that often I was in a condition which must have been closely connected with erotic religious ecstasy. Salvation was the essential fact of my life; seeking for it brought me the excitement I unconsciously craved of conflicts and fulfilled desires. I sought for God as the passionate woman seeks her lover. I recall a period—I was approaching womanhood—during which I prayed continuously and earnestly that it might be granted to me, as to the saints of old, to see God and the Risen Christ. For long I received no answer. This did not weaken my faith, but the great trouble of my mind became for long a consciousness of my own unworthiness. I began an absurd and childish system of self-punishments, and what I thought would lead to purification. Then there came a night—it was summer and I was looking from my window out at the beautiful evening sky—when my prayer was answered. I seemed, in very truth, to see God. From that time, and for long, I lived in extraordinary happiness. I am sure that I must have become hysterical. I felt that I was set apart by God; I conceived the idea of founding a new religious sect. That I made no attempt to do this was due to circumstances, which forced me into active work to gain my own living. Religion continued very largely in my life, but I was too healthily occupied to be favoured with any more visions. But the essential point in all this is its close connection with my sexual development. So far I had never been in love. I believe that the natural sex desires awakened consciously in me much later than is common. My need for religion lasted until my sex needs were fully satisfied, then, little by little, it faded. I want to state the truth. I did not then trace, nor should I have understood, this connection. The knowledge came to me long years afterwards; how it does not matter, but I am certain that in me the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one.

Love has in it much of the same supernatural element as religion. Both the sex-act and the act of finding salvation come into intimate association with woman's need of dependence; hence arises the remarkable relation between the two, and that easy transition of sexual emotion into religious emotion which is manifest in so many women. In both cases the surrender, the renunciation of personal will, is an experience fraught with passionate pleasure. "Love," as H.G. Wells has said, "is the individualised correlation of salvation, like that it is a synthetic consequence of conflict and confusions." It is true that few women render love the compliment of taking it seriously. To many it is merely this: a little amusement, clothes, a home, money to buy new toys; some mild pleasure, a little chagrin, a little weariness, and then the end. They do not realise or ever desire love in its full joy of personal surrender. So, too, many women never, save in some time of personal bewilderment, desire or seek salvation. But such aimlessness brings its own emptiness, and women strain and seek towards the god-head. For the truth remains, woman's need of love is greater than man's need, and for this reason, where love fails her, her desire for salvation is deeper than man's desire. And here again, and once again, we see the difference between the sexes. The woman pays the higher price for her implicit, unquestioning, and unconscious obedience to Nature. And society has made the payment still heavier. Let us for this last pity women! The dice they have had to throw in the game of life is their sex, and they have only been allowed one throw, and when they have thrown wastefully—yes, it is here that religion has entered into the game. It may almost be said to measure the failures and false boundaries in women's loves. The songs of love and the songs of faith are alike; and women act worship as also they are often driven to act love. The woman who knows her own heart must know that this is true. And one cannot wish to see the opium of religion taken from women until the game is made a fairer one for them to play.

There is another point to consider.

Many great thinkers have striven against this profound and primitive connection between the bodily and spiritual impulses, which has seemed to them an intrusion of evil, impairing their pure spirituality by the sexual life. They have thus recommended and followed asceticism in order to arrive at a heightened spirituality. The error here is obvious. The spiritual activities cannot be divided from the physical; as well cut the flower off from its roots, and then expect to gather the fruit. This is why sex-denial and sex-excesses so often go together. Hence the undeniable unchastity of the mediæval cloisters. Nor need the manifestations of sex be physical. Erotic imagination and voluptuous revelations are expressions of sex-passion. The monstrous sexual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the sexual perception of ascetics.

We observe it, then, as a fact of wide experience that the ascetic life is rooted really in the functional impulses; and further, that it is only through sexual perception that the spiritual and imaginative can be grasped and reached. What the ascetic has done is to fear overmuch. It must not be overlooked that this continual battle with the primary force of life is necessarily futile in accomplishing its own aim. For the woman or man who, for the religious or any other ideal, wishes to overcome the sex-needs must keep the subject always before her, or his, consciousness. Thus it comes about that the ascetic is always more occupied with sex than the normal individual. It seems to me that this is a truth few women have learnt to face.

I am not for a moment denying that the potential energy of the sexual impulse may be transformed with benefit into productive spiritual activities, finding its vent in religion, as also in poetry, in art, and in all creative work. Plato must have had this in his mind when he speaks of "thought as a sublimated sexual impulse." Schopenhauer, and many other thinkers, lay stress on the connection between the work of productive genius and the modification of the sexual impulse. This may be illustrated—if examples are needed in proof—by the power that has been exercised so conspicuously by women throughout the world in religious movements. Two of the greater festivals of the Catholic Church, for instance, owe their origin to the illumination of women; the mystic writings of Santa Teresa of Avila give classic expression to the highest powers of the spirit. Take again the part played by women as religious leaders of the convents in the early Middle Ages. In them women of spirit and capacity found a wide and satisfying career, many of them showing great administrative ability and a quite remarkable power for government. In recent times mention may be made of the Theosophists, the most important modern religious movement established in this country and led by women; and of Christian Science, which, under the able guidance of Mrs. Eddy, has sprung up and flourished. It is instructive to note that both these religions are connected with, and largely established on, magical faith and esoteric doctrines and practices. In almost all the religions founded by women we may trace a similar relation with hypnotic phenomena which must be regarded as closely dependent on sexual sources. The proof is wider even than these particular instances. It is without doubt the transformation of suppressed sexual instincts that has made women the chief supporters of all religions.

It may be said that the religious impulse has to a large extent lost its hold upon women. This is true. A new age must expect to see a new departure. As women take active participation in the work of the world their sense of dependence and need for protection will diminish, and we may look for a corresponding decrease in that display of excessive religious emotion that dependence has fostered. But the needs of woman can never be satisfied alone with work. The natural desires remain imperative; deny these, and there will be left only the barren tree robbed of its fruits. Sexuality first breathes into woman's spiritual being warm and blooming life.

The religious ascetic is not common among us to-day. Yet the old seeking for something is there. The impulse towards asceticism has, I think, rather changed its form than passed from women. The place of the female saint is being taken by the social ascetic. Desire is not now set to gain salvation, but is turned towards a heightened intellectual individuation, showing itself in nervous mental activity. No one can have failed to note the immense egoism of the modern woman. Women are still in fear of life and love. They have been made ascetics through the long exercise of restraint upon their explosively emotional temperament. They have restrained their natures to remain pure. This false ideal of chastity was in the first place forced upon them, but by long habit it has been accentuated and has been backed up by woman's own blindness and fear. Thus to-day, in their new-found freedom, women are seeking to bind men up in the same bonds of denial which have restrained them. In the past they have over-readily imbibed the doctrine of a different standard of purity for the sexes, now they are in revolt—indeed, they are only just emerging from a period of bitterness in relation to this matter. Men made women into puritans, and women are arising in the strength of their faith to enforce puritanism on men. Is this malice or is it revenge? In any case it is foolishness. Bound up as the sexual impulse is with the entire psychic emotional being, there would be left behind without it only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. The Christian belief in souls and bodies separate, and souls imprisoned in vile clay, has wrought terrible havoc to women. I believe the two—soul and body—are one and indivisible. Women have yet this lesson to learn: the capacity for sense-experience is the sap of life. The power to feel passion is in direct ratio to the strength of the individual's hold upon life; and may be said to mark the height of his, or her, attainment in the scale of being. It is only another out of many indications of the strength of sexual emotion in women that so many of them are afraid of the beauty and the natural joys of love.