Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

I was asked to answer—I had, as it were, to sum up, sift out, weigh and judge, what was said in both articles. I did not then know anything of their bastard authorship, and I accepted. My answer appeared in the September number of the Review. At the time it gained some attention. In America the three articles were republished together. The little book, called “Women and Morals” had an exceedingly attractive cover and an excellent preface: I believe it sold widely. More amusing and also, I think, more witness to the power of my work, was a very different kind of notoriety which, in one quarter at least, it achieved in this country. It aroused anger. The number of the English Review in which it appeared was, I believe, burnt publicly in an Advanced Club for women by order of the ladies who then formed the committee. For their intense virtue considered my views too horrible to remain uncleansed by fire. (Excuse my laughing, but the fact is I always do laugh when I picture this incident—those splendidly blinkered women holding solemnly in extended fire-tongs that burning review!)

My work was immoral!

Immoral! What is it that people mean? I do not know. I am for morality and always shall be. That is, indeed, why I offend. I am always wanting to turn out dirty places and to spring-clean life. And I have to show things as I find them, not as I would like them to be. It is so easy if you drug your soul and place blinkers over your intelligence. But you cannot be moral if you are over-occupied with being nice.

It is the young, not the old, who are thinking and writing to-day. Let me give you an example that exactly fits this question we are considering.

By a somewhat suggestive coincidence there appeared an article on “Youth and Marriage” in the English Review for May, 1923—the last number issued under the editorship of Mr. Austin Harrison—which very strikingly repeats, but more openly and with cruder emphasis, almost everything that was said in the three articles published in 1913. It treats the same difficult and still unsettled question of sexual relationships outside of marriage. The article gives the answer of youth to the old, who are criticising and condemning the friendships and new freedom of sex intimacy between young women and young men: they are told frankly that they fail to realise the changed conditions of present-day life. The name of the writer of this interesting article, Vera M. Garrell, is unknown to me, but I take this opportunity of thanking her. Her article has given me the greatest pleasure. All the facts are considered in a refreshingly candid, if not always entirely adequate way. (1) The increased enormous disparity between the numbers of the sexes, which the writer comments upon as “an outstanding tragedy of the war;” leading as it must do, to “an unhealthy competition to attract men,” under the urge of which girls are drawn “to use coarser measures and act on bolder lines,” if they are to escape “the dark dread that haunts the average girl of being ‘left on the shelf.’” (2) The economic factors, which cause marriage to become increasingly difficult, and thus act in lowering the marriage ideal by making a permanent union so remote that it comes to be regarded as “practically impossible.” “The young people of to-day are very much realists. They intensely dislike poverty.” A great deal is said about this “economic blockade against marriage,” and the writer maintains that “much of the laxity in sexual morals is the direct outcome of this position.” (3) Yet, even deeper in their action are the inner reasons. War has left the youth of to-day “with a kind of sexual neurosis.” For years it kept life “entirely physical;” “morality was at a discount,” the inescapable result has been that “youth has been lured into sexual compromise.” The old code of morality has failed: it does not meet the new demands.

I have been impressed and sharply hurt at the bitterness and fatalism underneath what is written. Let me quote one or two sentences. “The charge against youth is correct. He is in revolt against conventional morality. Young men and young women are sex conscious, not on the old lines of retiring from intimacy, but rather in the opposite direction of intimacy.” And again, “Every sex companionship is born of mutual recognition of social grievances. Where it is possible for men and women to come together and form friendships they do so, without any regard for the commital convention that marriage must be the object.” (The italics in the passages are mine.)

It is insisted upon that every normal person has a right to self-expression in the sex-function, while further frank acknowledgement is made that when sex-friendship “is unregulated it ends in vice.” “We shall not marry so why not enjoy ourselves,” is the prevailing philosophy of those who have ceased to regard the sexual act as immoral. (Again the italics are mine).

Now, all this has set me thinking that it is worth while to restate certain propositions in connection with these friendships of passion, which I made first in the article I wrote in 1913. I do this for two reasons. First I would like to assure the young, who to-day are more than ever impatient of, and condemnatory of, the old, that the old are not always ignorant and that some of them, too, have tried honestly to face this difficult problem of sexual conduct. The second reason is deeper. A sickness of soul cries out from so much that the young say to-day. I want to end this. And the only way in which I know to do this in connection with these unregulated friendships is to have them regulated.

It is ridiculous to say as so many of the young do to-day that sexual relationships between two people affect no one but themselves, unless a child is born. It is not true. The partners in even the strongest and purest union have no right to say to society, “This is our business and none of yours.” The consequences may be so grave and wide-reaching for society that the sex-deed can never be confined to the pair concerned.

And I would go further even than this. For the sexual partnership that is kept secret, almost of necessity, will work anti-socially. Just in the same way as in any other secret partnership, opportunity will be given to those who desire to escape from the responsibilities of the partnership. This inevitably leads to the commital of sin, by those who are weak and unfixed in character. While other men and women of higher conscience, who wish to, and would act honourably, often find the way so difficult that they fail in their endeavours—lose themselves in the dark and tangled ways of concealment. Many unions that now are shameful, would not have been shameful, if the partners had not been drawn into deceitful concealments, that cannot fail to act in a way disastrous to love.