Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

We come then to this—How can provision be made for honourable partnerships with security for the woman outside of marriage? For I am altogether persuaded that this provision must be made in order to harmonise our sexual life, and meet the desires of a large and increasing number of young people, whose exceptional needs our existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.

We must all of us know from our experience of life that many women as well as men are by their temperaments unsuited for monagonious marriage—the living permanently with one partner for life. Often, I would even say as a rule, these individuals are strongly sexual. They will not, because with the character they have, they cannot, live for any long period celibate. They will marry to gain permanent sexual relief or, if they are men, they will buy temporary relief from prostitutes, unless they are able to seek satisfaction in an irregular union.

Now, I affirm it as my conviction that the first and second of these courses are likely to lead to greater misery and sin than the third course; and of the three, the first, in my opinion, is the worst. I have, no doubt at all on this matter. No one, who is not blind to the facts of life, can close their eyes to the evil and suffering that certainly follows, when permanent marriage is entered into by those people who are unfitted and do not desire to fulfil the obligations and duties of living faithfully with one partner. And I would ask all those who stand in fear of change or reform, and cannot contemplate any open toleration of wider opportunities for sexual friendships to consider this fact: the discredit which has fallen upon marriage arises largely from the demoralising lives lived under its cover by those unsuited for enduring mating.

It is commonly taken for granted that love and passion in men is quite different from love and passion in women. I am sure this is not true. It is very necessary to break down the idea that for the impulses of sex, with their immense complications and differences, there is one general rule. Nor is it possible, I am sure, to make any for arbitrary judgments. To me the man or woman who is able to live in faithful love with one partner is not necessarily better than the man or woman who is not so able. I may prefer the one type, and dislike the other, but that again is a matter of personal judgment. We cannot safely class those who differ from ourselves as wrong, and set them down as fit only for suppression and education. We have to put aside the old shrieks of blame that are possible only to the ignorant.

It is all very well to preach the ideal of complete sexual abstinence until marriage, but there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for all but the really rich, who can marry when they want to do so without other considerations, and the very poor who marry young because they have nothing at all to consider. We have to face the presence among us to-day of an amount of suffering through enforced celibacy, which is acting in many directions in degrading our sexual lives. Any number of these sufferers, both the unmarried and the married who are ill-mated, are everywhere amongst us. I need not wait to prove this: the facts face us all, unless, indeed, we are too wilfully blind and too prejudiced to see what is happening.

I would propose as a first step towards honesty and health, that we ought to claim an open declaration of the existence of any form of sexual relationship between a woman and a man. We shall, I believe, have to do it, if not now, then later, because we are finding out the evils that must ensue, both to the individuals concerned and to the society of which they are members, by forcing men and women into the dark, immoral way of concealments.

I believe if there were some open recognition of these partnerships outside of marriage, not necessarily permanent, with proper provision for the woman and her children, should there be any, a provision not dependent on the generosity of the man and made after the love which sanctioned the union had waned, but decided upon by the man and woman in the form of a contract before the relationships were entered upon, there would be many women ready to undertake such unions gladly; there would even be some women as well as men, who, I believe, would prefer them to permanent marriage, which binds them to one partner for life and as a rule entails mutual living together and the giving up by the woman of her work or profession. In this way many marriages would be prevented which inevitably come to disaster. It is also possible that such friendship-contracts might, under present disastrous conditions, be made by those who are unsuitably mated and yet are unable or do not wish to entirely sever the bond between them, with some other partner they could love. Such contracts would open up possibilities of honourable partnership to many who must suffer from enforced sexual abstinence or be driven into hateful concealed intimacies.

I do not think we need fear to do this. My own faith in monogamous marriage, the living together of one man and one woman for the life of both, as the most practical, the best, and the happiest form of union for the great majority of people, is so strongly rooted that I do not wish, because I hold it unnecessary, to force anyone either to enter or stay within its bonds. I want them to do this because they themselves want to be bound. We get further and further away from real monogamy by allowing no other form of honourable partnerships.

Under present conditions and the prejudice of social opinion, the penalties that have to be paid in particular by women, for any sexual relationship outside of marriage are too heavy. This is manifest as I have, to some extent, pointed out already. Indeed when we consider the difficulties faced in these unions, that so many do take the risks is another proof, if one were needed of the elemental strength of the sex-impulse. But mark this: it is only those whose social conscience is for some reason unawakened who can enter into these irregular relationships except under special and very exceptional circumstances, until some steps have been taken to regulate them. They may be willing to take the risk for themselves, but they know, or perhaps I had better say ought to know, that the payment may fall also on the child of their love. You may say—there need be no children. This is true. It makes the conditions of such love much easier. It is not, however, a solution and can never, I think, be accepted as such by women. The woman who loves a man wants to be the mother of a child by him. I shall be told that there are women of whom this is not true. I know this. But that does not make it less true that the great majority of women can find the completion of their love only in the child.