From this point of view we can understand the large quantity of radical sentiment on sexual matters displayed in the life and literature of our time. The revolt against the relentless sentence passed upon the woman who violated the "moral law", has carried away the headlong progressives to the opposite side. Give the girl full liberty to love, they say. Motherhood is the highest function of woman and should not be made dependent on accidental circumstances favoring or impeding marriage. Single or wedded, the young human female must fulfil her loftiest duty to the race by bearing children. In England, George Bernard Shaw is the brilliant exponent of this idea. In his "pleasant play" called "Getting Married", he pleads for the right of free motherhood.
Many old maids would make excellent
mothers, he says, and it is a pity to let them waste fine opportunities. Husband or no husband,
they should not be restrained from realizing nature's purpose. "What we must fight for," he
exclaims, "is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant
conditions implied in the institution of marriage. What we need is freedom for people who
have never seen each other and never intend to see each other again, to produce children
under certain definite public conditions without loss of honor". Lyman Abbott comments
upon this outburst as follows: "The fact that Shaw gives this message to the twentieth century
and the twentieth century listens to it, is not without significance".
In France, Maxime Formant, in a novel called "The Sower", capitalizes this "right to free
motherhood" for the purpose of fiction. In his preface he remarks that modern philosophers
have recognized the right to every normal instinct to be satisfied and goes on to say: "But so
far we do not find any question as to the rights of motherhood regarded as a thing which is
desirable in itself. It seems to be considered lawful for a woman to love apart from marriage,
but no one has yet given a thought to the woman who, aspiring only to motherhood, is
compelled by circumstances to seek it apart from wedlock.
Without wishing to set up the
hierarchy of our instincts, may we not say that the particular one which provides for the
continuation of the species is quite as lawful and primordial as that which ministers to the
satisfaction of the individual?" The story itself deals with a girl who has been brought up to
recognize that maternity is the highest aim of woman, no matter how she comes by the child.
Accordingly, having failed to get a husband in the conventional way, she sets out from home
in search of a father for her future child, and, needless to say, has no difficulty in soon finding
him.
Other writers, while stopping short of advocating free motherhood, make a strong appeal
for greater leniency towards the girl who has "sinned" or has become a mother.
Thomas Hardy, especially, is fond of delving deeply into the psychology of man's
retrospective jealousy, and in "A Pair of Blue Eyes" he graphically depicts the pathetic
tragedy precipitated by the protagonist's irrational attitude towards a girl's previous escapade.
Misunderstanding her stammering confession, he leaps at the wildest conclusions and spurns
the girl he loves. Her affection and his own cannot stem the flood of his righteous
indignation. He will not bestow his heart upon a woman who has committed a faux pas, and
turns a stony ear to all her entreaties. The truth is revealed when it is too late for reparation.
In his other novels, Hardy returns to this motif, and again shows the sad consequence of
man's implacably unforgiving behavior on learning a woman's past.
More directly than Hardy, George Meredith pleads in nearly all his novels for more
toleration and equity on the part of the male sex. His treatment of this theme is characterized
as follows by W. C. Brownell ("Victorian Prose Masters"): "With Meredith all this is changed
by endowing women with an organization morally equivalent-and perhaps one may even
say ethically identical with that of men. He considers their responsibility the same, and as
a consequence, neither enjoys, in virtue of any singularity of native constitution, an immunity
denied to the other. They are played upon by an equally wide range of conflicting emotions,
desires, temptations. When they succumb, they fall no lower, having suffered no perversion
of their higher nature.
'Diana' is the book in which his ideal of the equivalence as
distinguished from the mere interdependence of the sexes is most explicitly exposed, tho
everywhere in his novels one finds evidence of it, and, as an important deduction in detail
from this general proposition, the according to women of a sentimental freedom corresponding
to the grosser liberty condoned in men. Meredith seems to say: What is this bloom of
innocence you prize so highly and possess so little of? M erely the desideratum of a crude, not
to say savage instinct of the masterful male. Evolution will inevitably dispose of it in due
season, and meantime it would be the part of wisdom in you to wince less and be worthier."