The case is quite different with the mother type, and her relation to the man is not the same; true, she also seeks and uses the man, the difference is not here. Woman is better equipped for the sex-battle than is man. There is nothing wrong in this. I hold that a woman should be able to take the man she loves as her right; she does take him now, but in ways that too often should make both herself and him ashamed. The mother-woman exercises her right of choice as the representative of Nature. She is the fount of the race, she seeks the man as her helper and because he will give life to the child she desires. Such a woman is not always faithful in marriage, but she wishes to be so, and she will be faithful in actual fact, if she is fortunate and finds in her lover the fitting father she seeks unconsciously for her children.
Of course, this is a purely arbitrary classification; the two types of character mingle in most women. There are traces of the siren in every woman, and no woman—though I am less certain here—is entirely devoid of the maternal instinct.
It is very difficult to know the truth. But it seems to me that, when from any cause the pleasure factor in sex becomes secretly over-accentuated, as it may so easily do under conditions where full sex expression is denied to many women, the normal sexual impulses are in some cases weakened or even atrophied through disuse, while in others satisfaction is gained in secret erotic practice, and by so doing the character and these deep impulses receive a twist in an unhealthy direction, leading or at least tending to an inflaming of the egoistical desires, which, if long continued, will increase to crowd out, like an overgrowth of some poisonous weed, the more tender plant of the parental instinct. While certainly not presuming to speak with authority on so difficult a subject, I think that the suggestion I have made may possibly afford an explanation of the poverty of the mother instinct in some women compared with its richness in other women. I plead for a patient recognition of the fact that in all these deep matters relating to sex we are still very ignorant.
Let me now give an example that quite recently came under my notice, of a woman who, though a mother, was without any glimmering flicker of maternal feeling. It seems to me to be worth recording as being the most striking case I have met of the siren type of woman, who, if I am right, is occupying a wrong place in any monogamous marriage. Facts speak more forcibly than any mere statements.