Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

This problem of Passionate Friendships, like all problems of sexual conduct, demands something more than emotional treatment; it requires the most careful consideration of many different sets of facts, that often rise up in what seem to be direct opposition.

I must follow this a little further. The sex-needs are almost always dealt with as though they stood apart and lay out of line with any other need or faculty of our bodies. This is, in part, due to secrecy which has kept sex as something mysterious. We have most of us been trained from our childhood into indecent secretiveness. There is as well deeper trouble, and it will be a long time before we can change it. Sex is so powerful in most of us, and occupies really so large a part of our attention, that we are afraid of ourselves, and this re-acts in fear of any open acknowledgement of our sex-needs.

It is necessary before we can even begin to judge this question of passionate friendships, to face very frankly this tremendous force of the sex-impulses, for the most part veiled in discussion. Next to hunger this is the most imperative of our needs, and, indeed, to-day sex enters more into conscious thought than hunger. For the hunger needs of most of us are satisfied, while the sex-needs are thwarted and restrained in all kinds of ways, and thus insist themselves the more insistently in our thoughts. Here is some slight explanation why so many of our judgments about sex are so arbitrary and so unforgiving. In penalising the sexual misconduct of others we are really passing judgment, though we do not know it, on our ourselves in blaming them we gain a curious kind of vicarious salvation, which brings the peace of self-forgiveness. In devising punishments for others, we are fixing a compensatory sacrifice for our deeply buried wishes, which never having found relief, either in direct expression or by sublimation, remain to torment us with ceaseless conflicts in our unconscious life.

I must not follow this further. Anyone with knowledge of the new psychology will understand what I mean.

Now, what I want to emphasise is that, to some limited extent at any rate, this system of self-concealments and lies is being broken, or if that view is too hopeful, at least the point of view has shifted. Indeed it is the acceptance of the imperative force of sex hunger, and the frank recognition of the present position—a fearless acknowledgment of the natural right of every adult woman as well as man to sex experience, that renders so noteworthy the change in outlook between this generation and the last. The youth of to-day have been fearless enough to cry aloud desires that the men and women of my generation, either denied or whispered about. Within its limits (and I am bound to say that, in my opinion, these limits are badly fixed and very narrow), this is the most truthful generation that yet has existed. I am glad to have lived to know it.

It is true that the many difficult problems of sexual conduct, of which we hear so much and so continuously, in almost every case are approached from one side only—the personal-pleasure side. That is why there is so much waste and foolishness. It explains too, why there is no consistent and united movement; no attempt at trying to find for everyone some possible decent way out—an escape from the terrible conditions which we are all agreed exist under the difficulties and strain of our under-controlled and over-civilised life.

A new conception of morality is, indeed, called for, but we have to be clearer as to what it is to be and where it is taking us. You will see at once what I mean. Until new safeguards are established, the old restriction cannot safely be loosened. It is too dangerous. The brief passionate partnership must entail disaster, in particular for the woman. She must still pay the heavier price of love. For what do these partnerships really mean? There can be no glossing with talk about freedom here. It is the old solution, the giving by the woman without security, what is given by the woman who is married under security and permanence.

I do not believe this can be accepted as an established and permitted thing as soon as we come to consider the lasting results.

It is an essential part of sexual morality, as I conceive it, that in any relation between the two sexes—I care not whether the association be legal or illegal, recognised or unrecognised—the position of the woman, as the potential mother must be made secure. This is a social, not a private matter. As such it has always been accepted by a wise State: it is the disgrace of our lax civilisation that too often to-day it is forgotten or ignored.