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
And a further result would follow in the treatment by the males of this
new order. The women by obtaining and preparing food would gain an
economic value. Wives would become to the husband a source of riches
indispensable to him, not only on account of his sex needs, but on
account of the more persistent need of food. Thus the more women he
possessed the greater would be his own comfort, and the physical
prosperity of the group.
And again, a further result would follow. The greater the number of
women in the group the stronger would become their power of combination.
I attach great importance to this. Working together for the welfare of
all, the maternal instinct of sacrifice would be greatly strengthened in
the women so that necessarily they would come to consider the collective
interests of the family. Can it be credited that such conditions could
have acted upon the males, whose conduct would still be inspired by
individual appetite and selfish inclination? I maintain such a view to be
impossible.
Another advantage, I think, would arise for the women. From the
circumstances of the family their interest in sex must have been less
acute in consciousness than that of the male. They must have gained
freedom from being less occupied with love, and from being less jealously
interested in the male than he was in them. Doubtless each woman would
be attracted by the male’s courageous action in fighting his rivals
for possession of her, but when the rival was the woman’s own son such
attraction would come into strong conflict with the deeper maternal
instinct. Thus the unceasing sexual preoccupation of the male, with the
emotional dependence it entailed on the females, must, I would suggest,
have given the women an immense advantage. They would come to use their
sex charms as an accessory of success. And if I am right here, the
husband would be in the power of his women, much more surely than they
would be in his power.
From the standpoint of physical strength the male was the master, the
tyrant ruler of the family, who, doubtless, often was brutal enough.
But the women with their children, leading an independent life to some
extent, and with their mental ingenuity developed by the conditions of
their life, would learn, I believe, to outwit their masters by passive
united resistance. The mothers and daughters may even have asserted
their will in rebellion. I picture, indeed, these savage women ever
striving for more privilege, and step by step advancing through peaceful
combination to power.
Such conditions as those I have briefly pictured could not fail to
domesticate the women. They must have acted also in strengthening the
bonds between the mothers and their children and in making more conscious
the strong instinct of maternal sacrifice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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