C. Gasquoine Hartley

“ Love is not walking round a rose-garden in the sunshine; it's living together, growing together. And the honeymoon is as trifling as the hors d'oeuvre in comparison with wedded-love, and as unable to satisfy the deep needs of women and men. Falling in love, wooing, and honeymooning are a short and easy episode, but marriage is long and always difficult. And the finding and maintaining happiness is a definite achievement and not an accident, for it is beyond accident. It is the result of a steadfast ideal and a diligent cultivation. ”

“ Nor do I believe there need be cause for fear in this idea of divorce by mutual consent. It is not nearly so easy to break a marriage that has lasted for any time as is usually thought by those who have never tried to do it. The habit of living together forges bonds you do not feel until you try to break them. The intimacy of marriage creates a thousand and one little every-day interests and ties, habits, preoccupations and memories in common; when they are torn it is like tearing thousands of little nerves that are far more painful than the one big hurt that caused them to be broken. ”

“ Most men, it is true, are not only tolerant of women's wiles; they like them. But most men succumb, I believe, against their will, and often against their inclination to this tyranny of lust. Men's chivalry as well as their pride has woven a cloak of silence around this question; this silence has protected women—even the worst.
There is such a thing as too much temptation for a man; temptation that a woman has no right to give unless she knows a man loves her and is ready to marry her. It is damnably hard on men. ”

“ Fix your ideal. Do not make the child's mistake and think that the desirable thing is to do just what you like. You can never find freedom or happiness in that way. Hold firm in your hearts that no gain of personal liberty counts as happiness to women. Treasure your womanly qualities—your sweetness, your gentleness, your shyness, your unlimited capacity for devotion, guard these as your greatest possession. Do not acknowledge your poverty by failing to honor yourself. Be the establishers of a revived feminist idealism, the founders of a new tradition of womanly service. ”

“ Yet this view is singularly untrue; for if we inquire into this question of men's lust, it is obvious that not they, but women, are the more responsible. How often it is woman who awakens this male lust, fans it to flame, feeds it to keep it at fever heat. Woman indeed must so act, since nature urges behind; but the prostitute uses this power without rest, she lives, not indeed sacrificed by men's lust, but kept alive by it. Always there is the invitation—"Come and find me." To be provocative is the one fixed simple rule of her life. Men's lust is a necessity to her very existence. ”

“ The standard of conduct must be fixed for women. Our children want something settled, not everything left uncertain. Our morals (I do not mean our sexual morals only, but our whole ethical and social conduct) has become like a skein of wool that has been unraveled by a puppy. We want a firm broad way in which it is good and possible for all of us to walk without hurting one another, not the horrid scramble that to-day we accept as life. ”

“ Only the workers in the darkest places of our great cities know how large illegitimacy looms as a factor in the social disintegration that leads to the prison, to the mad-house, to the hospitals, to the casual wards, and to the streets. Only the eye of the scientist can vision in the relation of the unhonored child to its mother the seed of that evil which one day shall become the dishonor of the dishonorable man. ”

“ Moral equality means equality in the will to serve—not self, but all. And the practical correlative of this conception must be a social organization [50] which secures equalities of opportunity for service to women and men. The only rights I desire to claim for my sex are those necessary to the discharge of its own duties; the fulfillment of the instinctive maternal craving; the realization of the deepest impulses of a woman's nature.
The pitiless war of every individual against his, or her, fellow waged with gold or with steel, can never make life other than mean and empty. ”

“ From the Strand and into the West End and beyond was one packed concourse of people, a never-ending stream spread from pavement to pavement across the way, in processions, in pairs, in groups, in taxi-cabs, on the top of taxi-cabs, in and on and all over motor-omnibuses, hanging to the backs of cabs, on great munition lorries—everywhere clustering and hanging like swarming flies. There were soldiers, crowds of Dominion boys, young officers and privates, old men and young men from civil life, and thousands upon thousands of women and girls of every age and representative of every class. ”

“ You will tell me again of the splendid work done by these girls and young women, you will speak of their recognition as citizens of the State, of how life has opened to them, and of the new liberty they have gained in so many directions. I do not mind. I care nothing for the liberty in outside things that leaves the soul in chains. I tell you they are dissatisfied because the soul of woman is crushed, unable to come up from its dark hiding, and breathe the sun and light to see that life is good. Why cannot the old faith come back? ”

“ We are only just now coming at all to understand how immensely fateful to the whole later development are the first few years of infant life, and further, how everything is colored—it would be truer to say "decided"—by the character and actions of the mother; how any hurt done, or mistake made then, can never be undone. Even an unwise expression of too fond and emotional affection may act to cause ruin in the after years. All who have even a slight acquaintance with the enlightening work of Freud, will know the folly of "trying to save the illegitimate mother through the agency of the child." ”

“ A society parched for honesty cannot suffer the ignominious and chaotic conditions of our sexual lives to go on as they have been lately among us, for it is plain to me that our moral code—that marriage itself cannot stand, and, indeed, is not standing, the strain of our [215] dishonesties. Our social life is worm-eaten and crumbling into rottenness with secret and scandalous hidden relationships; these dark and musty by-ways and corners of sexual conduct want to be spring-cleaned and made decent. Never before have we needed so urgently to put our house in order. ”

“ Women and men must learn again to regard themselves as part of a mightier whole, one of the human race, and, as we feel in moments of deeper insight, of the universe, which is a unity in spite of all the discords it contains.
It follows from this, that I am not greatly concerned with what any individual woman, or group of women, can do, or cannot do, should be encouraged to do, or be restrained from doing, in competition with men and with each other, but rather what is most right and worth while for all women, as women, to do. I do not want freedom for each woman to do what she wants. ”

“ Now, I resent the romantic idea that marriage should be a hazardous mystery—at least to the woman. The more shrewdly girls can judge men and men can judge girls (not by mere talking and abstract discussion of sex problems, there has been too much of that kind of futility) , but the more calmly the young lovers can find agreement with each other, the more simply they can accept the facts of marriage, the more chance there will be of permanency of affection.
The conventions of to-day are false, are bound up with concealments or with an equally untruthful openness. ”

“ I have not great patience with abstract theories of right and wrong, rather I would test every law and every institution by its usefulness in helping men and women. However imperfectly I have succeeded, I have set this aim of helpfulness steadfastly before me in every proposal I have made for changes in our marriage laws and in the hindering laws which regulate personal conduct. I do not want to discuss and consider humanity, life, or anything else as I would like them to be, but, as honestly as I can, I would observe and then help them as they are. ”

“ Even those little inclined to be deceived by the customary exaggerations of politicians, and little disposed to believe in sudden conversions, had hoped that the immense effort of this Great War was to awaken the deadened conscience of the world; to leave a permanent improvement in social and international relations; making class and individual and sex competition, as also national rivalry, a less pronounced feature in the new order; replacing greed by desire for service, war by a League of Nations to enforce justice. But a war of justice was followed by a peace of trickery and injustice. ”

“ Every woman should be asked at the moment to believe in simple things; in her home, her children, her husband, and her country. The only hope is in unity, and for unity you must have discipline, and for discipline, for the present, at least, you must accept authority. Much, incalculably much, depends upon the young. The generation to which I belong is passing, we have to hand on to you who are younger the torch of life. ”

“ Is it any wonder if in such circumstances boys turn to petty robberies and other unsocial acts, while girls display some of the less estimable characteristics of the prostitute?
Our ideal is to ignore sex in industry; to deny the strong and necessary separations that nature's wisdom places as barriers between boy and girl, between man and woman. We make our sons and daughters compete in education and in industry. No doubt education and industry are ill-fitted for males, but at any rate they were intended for males. Intellectually inferior to the boy or the man, the girl or woman is not. ”

“ At the same time, before explaining what practical measures should, in my opinion, be taken to lessen the evils, I should like to refer briefly, and I know inadequately, to the deeper causes, which are rooted in our attitude of life, as well as dependent on our hidden desires. Man, and of course I include woman, as a whole is estimated at too low a value. It is a paradoxical consequence that the parts of man, I mean his separate organs, rise in value. His brain, his sex, his stomach—each strives for mastery in attention; a faithless age has manias of sexuality, of intellect, of gastronomy. ”

“ Thus in England there is very little to disturb a comfortable feeling; protected by our moderation and exclusiveness, there is no force inside from ourselves, or outside from observers, to make us revise our position, consider the right or the wrong of our moral attitude, to give up our illusions of comfort. That is one reason why we so often stand aside from the ugly reality of things as they are, "hold high the banner of the ideal," which is the untruthful way in which we allude to things as we want them to be. ”

“ When you stand at the threshold of this new difficult world, knowing, as I do, that the milestones marking the backward path tell you, with certainty, that the greater part of your life and your work lies behind you, then, in these waiting days of urgency, you will want to hold a reckoning with yourself and with life, in humility to question everything, your own faith and what you have tried to teach to others with all the honesty you have. ”

“ Even if all vulgar and evil desires could by some magician's wand be transformed into their opposites, so that all of us bubbled and seethed with virtues, I do not believe we could count on the results. Our very virtues might hasten us to perdition: both higher and lower aims, if ill-adjusted to form a complete life, may lead astray. The savage in us all has to be reckoned with as the angel, and the dreamer who ever looks to heaven often stumbles over a tiny stone. ”

“ I tell you women everywhere among us are being starved of sacrifice and service. Sacrifice lives in the soul of a woman, and not alone in the separate spirit of the individual woman to whom it is communicated only through a losing of herself, which marks her union with the greatest powers of life. ”

“ That is why I am advocating, as a first most necessary reform, simpler and more decent facilities of divorce. I plead for a greater breadth of toleration, with a more honest facing of the facts, because I have known in my experience the degradation, the falsity and the absurdities that are going on to-day; the deceptions into which everyone is driven who is unfortunate enough to have to seek relief, under the present disgraceful divorce laws, from a marriage that has failed. There are conditions which degrade and embitter and make honorable conduct very difficult. ”

“ Are we really concerned with the prevention of our high infantile death-rate, with all the futile suffering without any sense of purpose or compensation that it must entail to children and to mothers? Let us pray to care more passionately, to see a vision of motherhood such as will force us to [30] act differently; a vision which, as when the mists clear away among the mountains, will show a wide world lit by the sun. It would not then be difficult for us to know what to do; we should decide unhesitatingly as to the mother in industry, that she ought not to be there. ”

“ So far, I have ignored the real difficulty of divorce—the child or children. At once the situation alters; when children are born both the practical needs and moral values are different. A marriage that becomes creative cannot be broken without grave disaster; for all creative things are eternal. What, then, must be done? Frankly, I know of no one workable plan, and I can suggest nothing except that in all cases the welfare of the children should be taken as the standard to which the desire of the parents should be subordinate. ”

“ Marriage is not a religion to us: it is a sport.
I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we know better how to engage a servant, how to [62] buy a house, how to set up in business—how, indeed, to do every unimportant thing in life better than we know how to choose a partner in marriage. We require a character with our cook or our butler, we engage an expert to test the drains of our house, we study and work, and pass examinations to prepare ourselves for business, but in marriage we take no such sensible precautions, we even pride ourselves that we do not take them. ”

“ For myself, I assert without a shadow of hesitation, that I would quite gladly be wrongfully accused of street soliciting, submit to medical examination, be mistakenly detained in prison or any other indignity, if by so doing I knew I lessened by ever so little the chance of a syphilitic child being born.
Is the evil to remain uncorrected from one generation to another? That is the question. Uncorrected evil multiplies itself, and the sum is a huge national disaster. ”