Divorce: If A Child Could Choose : Part 6

Women's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards
by C. Gasquoine Hartley

(Page 11 of 14)

During the next three years the little girl found renewed health and peace in her happy adopted home. Then her enemy - her mother - again took her away. For a year she kept this delicate, nervous and well-brought-up child with her in London under very adverse circumstances. Then she went off, leaving her daughter, now five years old, with no proper person to care for her and quite without means of support.

Case 2. - A girl of loose character, but not a regular prostitute, found herself pregnant. She did not know certainly who among her lovers was the father, but she decided on one man, who she knew was not the father. He was rich and kind, or rather as she told me "he was a softy." Accordingly she told him the baby was his. He arranged for the confinement, afterwards he took the baby and the mother to live in the home of his mother. They were kindly treated in every way, and the baby flourished. But the mother was bored by goodness: one day she went off: she did not take the baby. Unfortunately she left a letter - not I fear from conscience, but from mischief and a desire to insult goodness - telling the man she had tricked him and he was not the father of the child. The man was angry, disliking the knowledge of his having been duped; his mother was still more angry. Once more the child was the sufferer. It was sent away from the happy and rich home to an institution.

Case 3. - A working-class girl, belonging to a respectable country family, gave birth to a baby girl. The father was a soldier, but the girl did not know his name or where he was. During her confinement and afterward she remained at home with her mother and brother. The baby was ailing and became ill. The brother told his sister, the mother, that she must take it to the Infirmary in the neighboring town. She objected on the ground that she would have to go in with the baby. However, the brother insisted and arranged to meet her and the baby at the Infirmary gates the following evening. His sister was there, but not the baby. She told him that a friend was going to take care of the baby for her. The baby was never heard of again.

Case 4. - This time the mother was highly born and educated, but she belonged naturally to the promiscuous type of lover: she ought to have been a prostitute. She had many lovers and was strongly sexual, not passionate so much as voluptuous. By one of her lovers, and by mistake, a child was conceived, and though attempts were made to get rid of the mistake, a boy was born, fairly healthy. The father, a modern tired profligate, refused to accept the responsibilities of his fatherhood, though he did not deny the child was his, and continued as one of the lovers of its mother. The mother showed no sign of maternal love; the little one was much neglected and probably would have died, but, when about two months old, he was taken from the mother and cared for and most tenderly loved by one of the woman's other lovers. He left her as her indifference to her child killed his affection, but he took her child to bring up as his own son.

Case 5. - A record of this very revolting case appeared recently in the daily papers under the heading "£8000 Baby's End." I copy the story as it was told in the "Daily Mail": the date I do not remember.

"The love affair of a middle-aged painter, Charles Godin, with his model Georgette Belli, aged 16, has led to a remarkable charge of murder. Georgette became a mother, and when the painter died a few months later he left the child £8000.

"The girl married a young man named Emile Gourdon, and the baby was placed in the care of a grandmother. Later, when the young mother wished to get back her child, the grandmother refused to give it up on the ground that the young couple meant to destroy it in order to inherit the money, and produced letters and telegrams in support of her suspicion. Georgette, however, got an order from a court for the surrender of the baby, and went to live at Marseilles with her husband.

"One day, while walking on the jetty, the woman appeared to stumble and the child fell into the sea and was drowned. The couple have been arrested, the woman, it is alleged, having pretended to faint in order to make away with her child."

Now, I know that these five cases I have recounted are not exceptional, though some of their sordid details may be specially disagreeable. Give but a moment's attention to the facts that stand out, and at once you will grasp what is wrong. We are demanding too much from these unmarried mothers, and, by leaving the full power of parenthood in their weak hands, are jeopardizing the child's safety; we are also encouraging conditions harmful to society. It is like leaving a loaded gun in the hands of a little child. These cases speak for themselves. In No. 3 and No. 5 the child was killed by the direct act of the mother; in the former case there was some excuse from the harsh rule that the sick baby of an unmarried mother cannot be received into a hospital unless the mother goes in with it (the reason of this, of course, being that the mother will use this means of ridding herself of the baby) and will never come to reclaim it; but in the horrible case of No. 5 there is no ray of excuse. This case is especially interesting because it makes so abundantly plain the terrible need there is for the immediate establishment of safe legal adoption. In cases No. 2 and No. 4 we have the curious situation, by no means so uncommon as many might think, of the wrong man acting the part of father to an illegitimately born child; in the one case this was done through the trickery of the mother and was but temporary, the child suffering, while in the other case, more interesting and less common, vicarious fatherhood was voluntarily adopted. I would ask you to note that in none of the five cases was bad motherhood caused by poverty and homelessness. So frequently it is said: "Give these mothers a chance, and their mother-love will blossom like the rose" - or some similar and unproved tosh. It is not true. The good mother may be a bad mother by adverse circumstances, this I acknowledge readily, but that the most favorable circumstances can make the bad mother into a good mother, I emphatically deny. This is why it is so unsafe and so wrong of society to leave the child unprotected and unwatched, for the mother to do with it what she likes.

The first case, because it shows so clearly the adverse action of the mother's influence is, in my opinion, most instructive among the five cases I have given. Such changeableness on the mother's part, and interference with the child is just what is likely, and most often does take place, and will go on taking place, until the law protects these children by effective guardianship. I would specially point out that this mother was not in the least indifferent to her baby. If you had talked to her, probably your sentiment would have burned and glowed about the hardness of her case in being separated from her baby, and you would have said wonderful platitudes about the beauty of a mother's love. And yet the shameful hurt she did to her child can never be undone. Her undisciplined love was the cause of the child's undoing.

Copyright, 1920 by Frederick A. Stokes Company.
All Rights Reserved.