Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

In fear, we have tried to keep the blinds down so that love may be decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its actions, like all the emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths of the ordinary experience of each one of us; it exercises its influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.

Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. The emotional-self refuses, at times, to be controlled by the reason-self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evils. For our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretenses and guards we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own conceit and egoism, or collectively as a so-called civilized people in the hope of controlling conduct.

That is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so foolish. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and want to do, and, therefore, are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost always fail to face.

To me, one thing, at least, is certain, the romantic view of marriage has failed us.

But we cannot change the ideal of to-day unless we have ready a new ideal to inspire our conduct. We cannot destroy a sanctuary unless we first build a sanctuary.

There is a strange idea among some young people to-day that sexual happiness can be gained by breaking away from all the traditional bonds, it is the visible sign of our confusion as a people, and the want of happiness in our lives. The new generation should not set at naught the experience of the ages.

The individual household where both parents share in the common interest of bringing up the children, is the foundation on which marriage has been built up, and on which it must stand. If the conditions of the home are seriously changed, and the bearing and caring for children is no longer considered an essential part of marriage, a change in marriage itself will follow. I do not think you can hold the one if you let the other go. For Westermark is right, and children should not be regarded as the result of marriage, but marriage as the result of children. And love between men and women implies duties and responsibilities that go out beyond themselves; without this, even love of the most passionate kind, loses its quality and tends to become an ephemeral or even a corrupt thing.

There is much stupidity in the view of many reformers of marriage who fail to see that, however hard it is to live faithfully to the obligation, and unchecked responsibilities of love, the old ideal of marriage does so appeal to our emotional nature, that men and women are seriously unhappy in trying to destroy it.

Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards of children and of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of jealousy and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden with your smile?” are still felt, even if not uttered by the lips, of the most emancipated husbands and wives. For our sex-judgments are not intellectual, nor are they merely moral; they are not just questions of understanding and forgiving, but they are also physical, of the nerves, of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.

Fortunately it is easier to talk of love’s freedom, than it is to act as if it ever could be free. And in spite of what advanced people say, some feeling of duty in sex will always exist as long as it hurts us at all to hurt others. The immorality that says, “Do what you desire irrespective of others,” is as yet beyond most of us.