Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

There is a question I would ask all wives, whose husbands having left them, are to-day seeking relief in the divorce courts. What was it that first sent your man away from you? What was it that first turned him from the safe happiness of marriage to seek the restless unhappiness of unregulated love?

It will not do to dismiss this question with the old unreasoning condemnation of men; nor will it serve to talk of their polygamous nature and uncontrolled passions. Let us look at the matter a little more closely, and with greater regard to truth.

In marriage the woman dominates more often than usually is known. For one thing she has the children on her side. I think marriage is more of a duel than usually is acknowledged. One partner wins, kills the other, kills all that makes joy and life—makes the one who conquers a captain; the other—the conquered one, a servant, slave—what you will. It is so always, more or less. And in this marital duel there is no quarter; and, nine times out of every ten, it is the woman who holds the cards; she who wins. If she is clever, she knows this—knows the game is in her hands. But the dice she has to throw is her sex, and she has only been allowed one throw! And when she has thrown wastefully—Yes, it is here that disaster enters into marriage and makes tragedy of the game of life.

But there is another side—and a side that is of immense importance to women.

Undeniably the greatest function of any man in the life of the average woman is to be the father of her child. All other things he means to her are secondary to this. For this reason, after the birth of her first child, she frequently ceases, though she does not know it, to love her husband as a man, and for himself.

The feeling of a child against a woman’s bosom is more to her than the kiss of a lover or the devotion of a husband. What is it that she feels? It is a liberating power; a sensation of unaccustomed unity—like a strong tide that carries her over everything, makes her unconscious of the worry of the days. It is life itself. It irradiates all the world about her, all that belongs to her—her very soul. She has become one with life—a creator, as a god.

That is why so often the man—the husband and the father, finds himself left outside this charmed circle of life.

And even when the marriage is childless (as happens most frequently in the marriages that come to the divorce courts), this same passionate, grasping maternity acts—indeed, acts sometimes with added fierceness and even more disastrously. She mothers her man, but she does not love him. She gives him the protection that she should have given to her children but she holds back the inspiration and the spur that he most needs from her.

The woman’s life so often is filled with attending her children or her husband, whom she loves (I must press this home again), where she has no children, not as a mate, but as a child. She ceases to consider him as a man—to belong to him as completely as he belongs to her.