The Truth About WomanHartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
History
The Truth About Woman
Hartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
Women; Women -- History; Women -- Social and moral questions
There is another group of women who wish to bear children, but who
seem to be anxious to reduce the father to the position of the
drone-bee. He is to have no part in the child after its birth. The
duty of caring for it and bringing it up is to be undertaken by the
mother, aided, when necessary, by the State. This is a terrible
injustice against the father and the child. It seems to me to be the
great and insuperable difficulty against any scheme of State Endowment
of Motherhood. I cannot enter into this question now, and will only
state my belief that a child belongs by natural right to both its
parents. The primitive form of the matriarchal family, which we shall
study later, is realised in its most exaggerated form by the bees and
ants. In human societies we find only imitations of this system. And
here, again, there is a lesson necessary for us to remember. Any
ideal that takes the father from the child, and the child from its
father, giving it only to the mother, is a step backward and not
forward.
And in case any woman is inclined still to admire the position of the
female worker-bees, so free in labour, being liberated from sexual
activity, it were well to consider the sacrifice at which such freedom
is gained. These workers have highly-developed brains, but most of
them die young. Nor must we forget that each one carries her poisoned
sting--no new or strange weapon, but a transformation of a part of her
very organ of maternity--the ovipositor, or egg-placer, with which the
queen-mother lays each egg in its appointed place.[36]
Do "the Intellectuals" understand what they really want? Those women
who are raising the cry increasingly for individual liberty, without
considering the results which may follow from such a one-sided growth
both to themselves and to the race--let them pause to remember the
price paid by the sterile worker-bee. Is it unfair to suggest that any
such shirking for the gains of personal freedom of their woman's right
and need of love and child-bearing may lead in the psychical sphere to
a result similar to the transformation of the sex-organ of the bee;
and that, giving up the power of life, they will be left the possessor
of the stinging weapon of death! Some such considerations may help
women to decide whether it is better to be a mother or a sterile
worker.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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