Motherhood and the Relationships of the SexesHartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
Philosophy
Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes
Hartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
Mothers; Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions
As a first movement of reform, I would recommend one to three years’
rest from the usual school work for every girl, during the period when
her sexual life is becoming established. This is not, of course, to
advocate idleness. I am not upholding any form of invalidism for girls;
the adolescent always should have plenty of healthy occupation, but
that is a far different thing from the strain of the ordinary school
course, foolishly arranged for girls on the same lines as that for
boys, and without any regard to the important function of menstruation.
There should be attached to every school for girls a special class for
adolescents, and this should be the most important class in the school.
At the onset of puberty the girls would enter this class, in which they
would stay for two years or longer. The sexual life would not be, as now
it is, ignored; rather the chief work of the school would be the healthy
establishment of the menstrual function, upon which the future well-being
of the girl depends, and to the interests of which everything else should
for a time be secondary.
There must be a new valuation of education, with an entire change of
attitude, which will make possible more openness between the teacher and
her pupils. The difficulties here will, I know, be great. If the mothers
do not know how to help their daughters, and usually they do not; if the
girls do not know how to help themselves, and dumb and untaught they are
helpless, the task of the teachers cannot fail to be hard. And especially
will this be the case wherever the mother has failed in her duty and a
girl has received no kind of sexual training in the home.
I know of what I am writing here, and how real is the prejudice that will
have to be overcome. In my own school I was met with this trouble again
and again. The girls resented any mention of their menstrual function,
and expressed often real anger and disgust when I required them to tell
me the dates of their monthly periods, so that I might see they had extra
food, more rest, and lighter studies. The answer that usually was given
to me was this: “My mother never wanted me to tell her; I took no notice
when I was at home.” What an unconscious indictment of the mothers!
Often it was after long and patient effort only that I gained my way,
and brought my girls to speak to me naturally about this function. I had
the very hardest work to free their thoughts from the deeply implanted
feelings of shame and disgust: in many cases I failed altogether, and
I cannot, indeed, be sure that I ever fully succeeded. Of course, my
failures were the result of harm that had been done much earlier in the
home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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