Of course, I do not mean to suggest that, when any woman becomes a prostitute, it is because of an irresistible, inborn craving. Probably most women have both possibilities in them, the mother and the prostitute. What is to happen in cases of doubt depends on the man who is able to make the woman a mother, not merely by the physical act but by a single look at her. Schopenhauer said that a man’s existence dates from the moment when his father and mother fell in love. That is not true. The birth of a human being, ideally considered, dates from the moment when the mother first saw or heard the voice of the father of her child. Biological and medical science, under the influence of Johannes Müller, Th. Bischoff, and Darwin have been completely opposed, for the last sixty years, to the theory of “impression.” I may later attempt to develop such a theory. For the present I shall remark only that it is not fatal to the theory of impression that it does not agree with the view which regards the union of an ovum and spermatazoon as the only beginning of a new individual; and science will have to deal with it instead of regarding it as being opposed to all experience and so rejecting it. In an a priori science such as mathematics, I may take it for granted that even on the planet Jupiter 2 and 2 could not make 5, but biology deals only with propositions of relative universality. Although I support the theory of the existence of such a power of impression, it must not be supposed that I think that all malformations and abnormalities, or even any large number of them, are due to it. I go no further than to say that it is possible for the progeny to be influenced by a man, although physical relations between him and the mother have not taken place. And just as Schopenhauer and Goethe were correct in their theory of colour, although they were in opposition to all the physicists of the past, present, and future, so Ibsen (in “The Lady from the Sea”) and Goethe (in “Elective Affinities”) may be right against all the scientific men who deal with the problems of inheritance on a purely physical basis.
If a man has an influence on a woman so great that her children of whom he is not the father resemble him, he must be the absolute sexual complement of the woman in question. If such cases are very rare, it is only because there is not much chance of the absolute sexual complements meeting, and this is no argument against the truth of the views of Goethe and Ibsen to which I have just referred.
It is a rare chance if a woman meets a man so completely her sexual complement that his mere presence makes him the father of her children. And so it is conceivable in the case of many mothers and prostitutes that their fates have been reversed by accident. On the other hand, there must be many cases in which the woman remains true to the maternal type without meeting the necessary man, and also cases where a woman, even although she meets the man, may be driven none the less into the prostitute type by her natural instincts.
We have not to face the general occurrence of women as one or other of two distinct inborn types, the maternal type and the prostitute. The reality is found between the two. There are certainly no women absolutely devoid of the prostitute instinct to covet being sexually excited by any stranger. And there are equally certainly no women absolutely devoid of all maternal instincts, although I confess that I have found more cases approaching the absolute prostitute than the absolute mother.
The essence of motherhood consists, as the most superficial investigation will reveal, in that the getting of the child is the chief object of life, whereas in the prostitute sexual relations in themselves are the end. The investigation of the subject must be pursued by considering the relation of each type to the child and to sexual congress.
Consider the relation to the child first. The absolute prostitute thinks only of the man; the absolute mother thinks only of the child. The best test case is the relation to the daughter. It is only when there is no jealousy about her youth or greater beauty, no grudging about the admiration she wins, but an identification of herself with her daughter so complete that she is as pleased about her child’s admirers as if they were her own, that a woman has a claim to the title of perfect mother.
The absolute mother (if such existed), who thinks only about the child, would become a mother by any man. It will be found that women who were devoted to dolls when they were children, and were kind and attentive to children in their own childhood, are least particular about their husbands, and are most ready to accept the first good match who takes any notice of them and who satisfies their parents and relatives. When such a maiden has become a mother, it matters not by whom, she ceases to pay any attention to any other men. The absolute prostitute, on the other hand, even when she is still a child, dislikes children; later on, she may pretend to care for them as a means of attracting men through the idea of mother and child. She is the woman whose desire is to please all men; and since there is no such thing as an ideally perfect type of mother, there are traces of this desire to please in every woman, as every man of the world will admit.
Here we can trace at least a formal resemblance between the two types. Both are careless as to the individuality of their sexual complement. The one accepts any possible man who can make her a mother, and once that has been achieved asks nothing more; on this ground only is she to be described as monogamous. The other is ready to yield herself to any man who stimulates her erotic desires; that is her only object. From this description of the two extreme types we may hope to gain some knowledge of the nature of actual women.
I have to admit that the popular opinion as to the monogamous nature of women as opposed to the essential polygamy of the male, an opinion I long held, is erroneous. The contrary is the case. One must not be misled by the fact that a woman will wait very long for a particular man, and where possible will choose him who can bestow most value on her, the most noble, the most famous, the ideal prince. Woman is distinguished by this desire for value from the animals, who have no regard for value either for themselves and through themselves, as in the case of a man, or for another and through another, as in the case of a woman. But this could be brought forward only by fools as in any way to the credit of woman, since, indeed, it shows most strongly that she is devoid of a feeling of personal value. The desire for this demands to be satisfied, but does not find satisfaction in the moral idea of monogamy.
The man is able to pour forth value, to confer it on the woman; he can give it, he wishes to give it, but he cannot receive it. The woman seeks to create as much personal value as possible for herself, and so adheres to the man who can give her most of it; faithfulness of the man, however, rests on other grounds. He regards it as the completion of ideal love, as a fulfilment, even although it is questionable if that could be attained. His faithfulness springs from the purely masculine conception of truth, the continuity demanded by the intelligible ego. One often hears it said that women are more faithful than men; but man’s faithfulness is a coercion which he exercises on himself, of his own free will, and with full consciousness. He may not adhere to this self-imposed contract, but his falling away from it will seem as a wrong to himself. When he breaks his faith he has suppressed the promptings of his real nature.
For the woman unfaithfulness is an exciting game, in which the thought of morality plays no part, but which is controlled only by the desire for safety and reputation. There is no wife who has not been untrue to her husband in thought, and yet no woman reproaches herself with this. For a woman pledges her faith lightly and without any full consciousness of what she does, and breaks it just as lightly and thoughtlessly as she pledged it. The motive for honouring a pledge can be found only in man; for a woman does not understand the binding force of a given word. The examples of female faithfulness that can be adduced against this are of little value. They are either the slow result of the habit of sexual acquiescence, or a condition of actual slavery, dog-like, attentive, full of instinctive tenacious attachment, comparable with that necessity for actual contact
