Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

“Yes, to the highest bidder,” was the answer given.

The seed thus sown gave a rich harvest. Sex-trade became the object, which Elsie Lindtner pursued with the same unflinching purpose which directs all those who create for themselves the false gods of possessions. Truly, while we support with our praise the successful financier, we cannot in justice give less esteem to the woman who pursues the same end in the way that is the easiest and surest of success.

It is no part of my purpose to give a resumé of the history of Elsie Lindtner. The details matter little; a structure of life built on a false foundation must of necessity fall to ruin. And there is another point I wish to make clear. The destroying penalty paid by this woman for the gain of wealth and position was a failure of the power to love. The real explanation of her unrest, hysteria, and manifold symptoms of excitement was caused by the unceasing warfare within her of two antagonistic forces—the desire for comfort and ease, partly instinctive, but also fixed by habit, strengthened by a wish to keep the moral dignity imposed upon women by the conditions of the society in which she lived, fighting with the deeply instinctive desire for satisfying sex experience to fulfil the functioning of life.

It is necessary for women to speak plainly. You cannot deny the needs of the body, or prostitute their use, without the soul paying its penalty. That is what women too often forget. A false purity held Elsie Lindtner from giving herself to her lover, Jorgen Mallthe, and kept her faithful in the letter of the law to the husband she had married for his wealth. She had no children. I say without any doubt that she would have been a purer and a better, because a happier and more healthy woman, if she had followed the cry of her heart, at the first, as she was driven in the end to want to do—when it was too late. That she did not do this, but chose to sacrifice her lover in the same way that she had sacrificed her husband must, in my opinion, be counted as sin against her. Only the falseness which had wrapped her own life in a net of pretence could have made her fail to see the truth for herself.

It is a fact of very special importance that Elsie Lindtner and all the women who enter into this book belong to the Scandinavian race, among whom chastity was extolled as the chief virtue of a woman, while any lapse was punished with terrible severity. If the husband of an ancient Dane discovered his wife in adultery he was allowed to kill and castrate her lover. “There is a city,” says the Scandinavian Edda, “remote from the sun, the gates of which face the north, poison rains there through a thousand openings, the place is all composed of the carcasses of serpents. There run certain torrents, in which are plunged the bodies of the perjurers, assassins, and those who seduce married women. A black-winged dragon flies incessantly round and devours the bodies of the wretched who are there imprisoned.” Again, the Icelandic Hava Maél contains this caustic apophthegm “Trust not the words of a girl, neither to those which a woman utters, for their hearts have been made like the wheel that turns round; levity was put into their bosoms. Trust not to the ice on one day’s freezing, neither to the serpent which lies asleep, nor to the caresses of her you are going to marry.”

III

Now, it may be asked: What has all this to do with Elsie Lindtner? My answer is: “Everything!” The customs of a past social life do subsist beneath the surface of modern society; we cannot without strong effort escape from the chains of our inheritance. In the sad nations of the cold north, where the natural joy of the body has been regarded as something to be fought with and denied, a perpetual confusion has arisen at the very source of life. For the sex-passion is a force, huge and fateful, which has to be reckoned with. Woman is more primitive, more intuitive, more emotional than man. And the outlets allowed to her in the past have been more restricted; thus the price she pays for any repression of the natural rights of love is heavier. Elsie Lindtner’s history is a sermon to all those who set up the false god of chastity for women.

I am aware that this statement will arouse opposition—especially in women. To-day we hear much talk, and often among women who are working nobly for the better life for women, of control of sex and the need of imposing on men the same code of repression which for so long has been imposed upon them. This is, of course, very natural, but that does not make it wise. It is a truth realised by few women that repression is not, and never can be, control. There seems to be a very widespread opinion that to use the divine gift of sex even in marriage, for joy, is wrong. One would be inclined to laugh, if the sadness of this falsehood did not make one want to weep.

The whole subject, wide as life itself, escapes anything like adequate treatment. The lady—the Elsie Lindtners of society—the household drudge and the prostitute, are the three main types of women resulting in our so-called civilisation of to-day, from the process of the past, and it is hard to know which is the most wretched, which is the most wronged, the most destructive, and the furthest removed from that ideal woman which a happier future may evolve.