C. Gasquoine Hartley

“ And this I contest against all the Feminists: the real need of the normal woman is the full and free satisfaction of the race-instinct. Do I then accept the subjection of the woman. Assuredly not! To me it is manifest that it is just because of her sex-needs and her sex-power that woman must be free. To leave such a force to be used without understanding is like giving a weapon to a child, in whose hands a cartridge suddenly goes off, leaving the empty and smoking shell in his trembling hands.
It is well to remember, however, that for all women there is conceivably no one simple rule. ”

“ After all it is the people of any race who make marriage, not marriage the people. The form of union is but a symbol of the people's character, their desires, and capacities. If we have evolved the wrong women and men, then any reform of marriage is vain. Have we in our weakened civilisation drifted so far from life that the inherent attributes of loyalty and discipline to the future are no longer with us in sufficient measure adequately to respond to the enduring realities of love? The answer is with women. ”

“ This rebellion of men, and their efforts to free themselves from the thrall of women has been of little avail. We have reached now a new stage in the age-long conflict of the sexes—the rebellion of the woman. There has come a time when the old cry, "Woman, what have I to do with you?" is being changed. It is woman who is whispering to herself and to her sisters, and, as she gains in courage, crying it aloud, "Men, what have we to do with you? We belong to ourselves." It is to this impasse in the confusion and antagonism of the present moment of transition that sex-differences are bringing us. ”

“ The touch of Nature that makes the whole world kin is nowhere more manifest than in sex; that absorption of the male by the female to which life owes its continuation, its ecstasy, and its pain. It has seemed to me it is here in the primitive relations of the sexes that we may find the clue to many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men. Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him helpless into her power. ”

“ The most hopeful sign of the woman's movement is a new solidarity that is surely killing the fatalism of a past acquiescing in wrongs, and is slowly giving birth to a fine spiritual apprehension of the great truth that what concerns any woman concerns all women, and, I would add, also all men. This last—that there can be no woman's question that is not also a man's question—is so essentially a part of any fruitful change in our domestic and social relationship that women must not permit themselves for a moment to forget it. ”

“ No one can have failed to note the immense egoism of the modern woman. Women are still in fear of life and love. They have been made ascetics through the long exercise of restraint upon their explosively emotional temperament. They have restrained their natures to remain pure. This false ideal of chastity was in the first place forced upon them, but by long habit it has been accentuated and has been backed up by woman's own blindness and fear. Thus to-day, in their new-found freedom, women are seeking to bind men up in the same bonds of denial which have restrained them. ”

“ Stripped of its masks, this phase of individual egoism was perhaps the most villainous page of recorded human history; yet, with strange confidence, it regarded itself as the very summit of civilisation. It may be that such a phase was necessary before the awakening of a social conscience could arise. Old conceptions have become foolish in a New Age. A great motive, an enlarging dream, a quickening understanding of social responsibility, these are what we have gained. ”

“ What is the future of woman? Are we able to recognise in the present upward development of the sex signs of real progress towards better conditions? Is it within the capacity of the female half of human-kind to acquire and keep that position of essential usefulness held by the females of all other species? Will women learn to develop their own nature and to express their own genius? ”

“ With all the evils that father-right has brought to woman, we have got to remember that woman owes the individual relation of the man to herself and her children to the patriarchal system. The father's right in his children (which, unlike the right of the mother, was not founded on kinship, but rested on the quite different and insecure basis of property) had to be established. Without this being done, the family in its full and perfect development was impossible. We women need to remember this, lest bitterness stains our sense of justice. ”

“ Marriage is itself in many cases a legalised form of prostitution. From the standpoint of morals, the woman who sells herself in marriage is on the same level as the one who sells herself for a night, the only difference is in the price paid and the duration of the contract. Nay, it is probably fair to say that at the lowest such sale-marriage results in the greater evil, for the prostitute does not bear children. If she has a child it has, as a rule, been born first; such is our morality that motherhood often drives her on to the streets! ”

“ Woman has been the cause of emotion in men, the fine instrument by which the poet has sung and the musician played his exquisite music; the sculptor, the painter, the writer, all have drawn their inspiration from her. Have men, then, any right to pride themselves to such a degree on their achievement in the arts? Could they without woman have advanced anything like so far? And this becomes abundantly evident if we look a little deeper and back to the beginning of the arts. ”

“ I desired freedom for women to enable them to live the same lives that men live and to do the same work that men do. I did not understand that this was a wastage of the force of womanhood; that no freedom can be of service to a woman unless it is a freedom to follow her own nature. ”

“ In particular I am indebted to the works of Havelock Ellis, of Iwan Bloch and Ellen Key. To these writers I would express my warmest thanks for the help and guidance I have gained from their work.
The opinions expressed are in all cases my own. I say this without any apology of modesty. I hold that the one justification of writing a book at all is to state those truths one has learnt from one's own experience of life. For we can give to others only what we have received ourselves; the vision rising in our own eyes, the passion born in our own hearts. ”

“ Yet we must remember that woman's emancipation is no new movement, but has always been with us, although with varying prominence at different times in history. In the past, civilisations have fallen, in part at least, because they failed to develop in equal freedom their women with their men. It is also certain that no civilisation in the future can remain the highest if another civilisation adds to the intelligence of its male population the intelligence of its women. This in itself is enough to condemn all ideas of sex inequality. ”

“ Do not instincts arise in us, too, that demand expression, free from all coercion of convention? And if we stifle them are we really the better—the more moral sex? I doubt this, as I have come to doubt so many of the lies that have been accepted as the truth about women.
The true hope of the future lies in the undivided recognition of responsibility in love, which alone can make freedom possible. Freedom for all women—the women of the home and the women of the streets. The prostitute woman must be freed from all oppression. ”

“ Some will deny this mastery of the male. It may be said that woman sways man more than he rules her. This is true. The influence of woman is important—fearfully important. Yet the fitting answer to such glossing—if it be necessary really to point out that sexual privilege is not personal power—is that such government is exercised in one direction alone, and arises not from woman's strength, but out of her subjection. Women have rendered back to men the ill that this long sex domination has wrought upon them. None the less have we to reckon with the despotism of the male side of life. ”

“ Yes, we women cannot burk the truth—the seduction and flattery of man by woman is writ large over the face of our present society, it speaks in our literature and in our art. It is to this prostitution of love that sex-differences have carried us.
There is, of course, nothing new in these conditions; and there have always been times when men have rebelled against this sexual tyranny of woman. Misogyny is an old story. It is Euripides who betrays to us the real meaning of such revolt. In a fragment of his we read, The most invincible of all things is a woman! ”

“ The truth is that woman's time had not come, but now her unconscious evolution must give place to a conscious development. Happiness for women! That must imply wholly independent activities, and complete freedom for the exercise of her work of race production. Woman's duty to society is paramount, she is the guardian of the Race-body and Race-soul. But woman must be responsible to herself; no longer must she follow men. The natural growth force needs to be liberated. Woman must be freed as woman; she must die to arise from death a full human being. ”

“ As we have examined the often-confused mass of evidence, as it throws light on the position of woman in these four great civilisations of antiquity, we find that, in spite of the apparent differences which separate their customs and habits in the sexual relationships, the evidence, when disentangled, all points in one and the same direction. In the face of the facts before us one truth cries out its message: "Woman must be free face to face with man." ”

“ Now, from this view of the sex relationship I most utterly dissent. I believe that any difference in virtue, even where it exists in woman, is not fundamental, that it is against Nature's purpose that it should be so; rather it has arisen as a pretence of necessity, because it has been expected of her, nourished in her, and imposed on her by the unnatural prohibitions of religious and social conventions. The female half of life has not been pre-ordained to suffer any more than the male half: this belief has done more to destroy the conscience of woman than any other single error. ”

“ With full knowledge, woman will fulfil her great central purpose of breeding the race—ay, breeding it to heights now deemed impossible, not dreamt of even by those of us who look forward through the darkness to the clear sunlight of that time when the sex relation shall be freed from economic pressure and from all coercion of a false morality, and the universal creative energy, no longer finding gratification alone in personal ends, shall at last reach its goal and give birth to a race of new women and new men. ”

“ Woman without man at her side, after obtaining her freedom, will advance even less far than man has advanced with his freedom, without her help. To deny this is to show an absurd misunderstanding of the problem. Neither the male-force alone, nor the female-power is sufficient; no theory of sex-superiority shall prevail. The setting up of women against men, or men against women, to the disadvantage of one or the other, belongs to a day that is over. We must recognise that both the work of women and the work of men are in equal measure essential to satisfy the needs of the State ”

“ But in reality the source of all love is the same; throughout the entire relations of the sexes we find this cell-hunger instinct; in every case, it matters not how fine and ennobling the love may be, the single, original, impelling motive is the union of two cells—the male element and the female driven to seek one another to continue life. I find it necessary to insist on this physical basis of all love. Women are so apt to go astray. It is one of the vicious tendencies of the female mind to think that the needs of sex are something to be resisted. ”

“ Do not treat rudely a woman in her house when you know her perfectly; do not say to her, 'Where is that? bring it to me!' when she has set it in its place where your eye sees it, and when you are silent you know her qualities. It is a joy that your hand should be with her. The man who is fond of heart is quickly master in his house. ”

“ May it not be that in the garden of woman's inheritance there are buried seeds, lying dormant, which at the liberating touch of opportunity may reawaken and assert themselves as forgotten flowers? Yes, to-day this seems a practical fact that already is being accomplished, and not a futile speculation. The re-birth of woman is no dream. At last she is realising the arrest in her development that has followed the acceptance of a position which forces her to be a parasite and a prostitute. ”

“ It is this wastage of the Life-force that, as I believe, above all else has driven women into revolt.
The free power of Selection in Love! Yes; that is the true Female Franchise. It must be regained by woman, to be used by her to ennoble the sex relation and thereby to cleanse society of the unfit. The means by which this most important end can be attained will be brought about by giving woman such training and education and civic rights, as well as the framing of such laws and changes in the rights of property inheritance, as shall render her economically independent. ”