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WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD
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BY DR. C. W. SALEEBY
WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD
HEALTH, STRENGTH AND HAPPINESS
THE CYCLE OF LIFE
EVOLUTION: THE MASTER KEY
WORRY: THE DISEASE OF THE AGE
THE CONQUEST OF CANCER: A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN
PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE
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WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD
A SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES
by
C. W. SALEEBY
M.D., F.R.S.E., Ch.B., F.Z.S.
Fellow of the Obstetrical Society of Edinburgh and formerly
Resident Physician Edinburgh Maternity Hospital;
Vice-President Divorce Law Reform Union; Member of the
Royal Institution and of Council of the Sociological Society.
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXI
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Copyright 1911 by
Mitchell Kennerley
Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co.
East Twenty-fourth Street
New York
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CONTENTS
PAGE
I. FIRST PRINCIPLES 1
II. THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME 34
III. THE PURPOSE OF WOMANHOOD 52
IV. THE LAW OF CONSERVATION 64
V. THE DETERMINATION OF SEX 72
VI. MENDELISM AND WOMANHOOD 81
VII. BEFORE WOMANHOOD 92
VIII. THE PHYSICAL TRAINING OF GIRLS 99
IX. THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 128
X. THE PRICE OF PRUDERY 132
XI. EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD 151
XII. THE MATERNAL INSTINCT 163
XIII. CHOOSING THE FATHERS OF THE FUTURE 193
XIV. THE MARRIAGE AGE FOR GIRLS 197
XV. THE FIRST NECESSITY 219
XVI. ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND 234
XVII. THE CONDITIONS OF MARRIAGE 258
XVIII. THE CONDITIONS OF DIVORCE 291
XIX. THE RIGHTS OF MOTHERS 296
XX. WOMEN AND ECONOMICS 327
XXI. THE CHIEF ENEMY OF WOMEN 348
XXII. CONCLUSION 386
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CHAPTER I
FIRST PRINCIPLES
We are often and rightly reminded that woman is half the human race. It
is truer even than it appears. Not only is woman half of the present
generation, but present woman is half of all the generations of men and
women to come. The argument of this book, which will be regarded as
reactionary by many women called "advanced"--presumably as doctors say
that a case of consumption is "advanced"--involves nothing other than
adequate recognition of the importance of woman in the most important of
all matters. It is true that my primary concern has been to furnish, for
the individual woman and for those in charge of girlhood, a guide of
life based upon the known physiology of sex. But it is a poor guide of
life which considers only the transient individual, and poorest of all
in this very case.
If it were true that woman is merely the vessel and custodian of the
future lives of men and women, entrusted to her ante-natal care by their
fathers, as many creeds have supposed, then indeed it would be a
question of relatively small moment how the mothers of the future were
chosen. Our ingenious devices for ensuring the supremacy of man lend
colour to this idea. We name children after their fathers, and the fact
that they are also to some extent of the maternal stock is obscured.
But when we ask to what extent they are also of maternal stock, we find
that there is a rigorous equality between the sexes in this matter. It
is a fact which has been ignored or inadequately recognized by every
feminist and by every eugenist from Plato until the present time.
Salient qualities, whether good or ill, are more commonly displayed by
men than by women. Great strength or physical courage or endurance,
great ability or genius, together with a variety of abnormalities, are
much more commonly found in men than in women, and the eugenic emphasis
has therefore always been laid upon the choice of fathers rather than of
mothers. Not so long ago, the scion of a noble race must marry, not at
all necessarily the daughter of another noble race, but rather any young
healthy woman who promised to be able to bear children easily and suckle
them long. But directly we observe, under the microscope, the facts of
development, we discover that each parent contributes an exactly equal
share to the making of the new individual, and all the ancient and
modern ideas of the superior value of well-selected fatherhood fall to
the ground. Woman is indeed half the race. In virtue of expectant
motherhood and her ante-natal nurture of us all, she might well claim
to be more, but she is half at least.
And thus it matters for the future at least as much how the mothers are
chosen as how the fathers are. This remains true, notwithstanding that
the differences between men, commending them for selection or rejection,
seem so much more conspicuous and important than in the case of women.
For, in the first place, the differences between women are much greater
than appear when, for instance, we read history as history is at present
understood, or when we observe and compare the world and his wife.
Uniformity or comparative uniformity of environment is a factor of
obvious importance in tending to repress the natural differences between
women. Reverse the occupations and surroundings of the sexes, and it
might be found that men were "much of a muchness," and women various and
individualized, to a surprising extent.
But, even allowing for this, it is difficult to question that men as
individuals do differ, for good and for evil, more than women as
individuals. Such a malady as hæmophilia, for instance, sharply
distinguishes a certain number of men from the rest of their sex,
whereas women, not subject to the disease, are not thus distinguished,
as individuals.
But the very case here cited serves to illustrate the fallacy of
studying the individual as an individual only, and teaches that there is
a second reason why the selection of women for motherhood is more
important than is so commonly supposed. In the matter of, for instance,
hæmophilia, men appear sharply contrasted among themselves and women all
similar. Yet the truth is that men and women differ equally in this very
respect. Women do not suffer from hæmophilia, but they convey it. Just
as definitely as one man is hæmophilic and another is not, so one woman
will convey hæmophilia and another will not. The abnormality is present
in her, but it is latent; or, as we shall see the Mendelians would say,
"recessive" instead of "dominant."
Now I am well assured that if we could study not only the patencies but
also the latencies of individuals of both sexes, we should find that
they vary equally. Women, as individuals, appear more similar than men,
but as individuals conveying latent or "recessive" characters which will
appear in their children, especially their male children, they are just
as various as men are. The instance of hæmophilia is conclusive, for two
women, each equally free from it, will respectively bear normal and
hæmophilic children; but this is probably only one among many far more
important cases. I incline to believe that certain nervous qualities,
many of great value to humanity, tend to be latent in women, just as
hæmophilia does. Two women may appear very similar in mind and capacity,
but one may come of a distinguished stock, and the other of an
undistinguished. In the first woman, herself unremarkable, high ability
may be latent, and her sons may demonstrate it. It is therefore every
whit as important that the daughters of able and distinguished stock
shall marry as that the sons shall. It remains true even though the
sons may themselves be obviously distinguished and the daughters may
not.
The conclusion of this matter is that scientific inquiry completely
demonstrates the equal importance of the selection of fathers and of
mothers. If our modern knowledge of heredity is to be admitted at all,
it follows that the choice of women for motherhood is of the utmost
moment for the future of mankind. Woman is half the race; and the
leaders of the woman's movement must recognize the importance of their
sex in this fundamental question of eugenics. At present they do not do
so; indeed, no one does. But the fact remains. As before all things a
Eugenist, and responsible, indeed, for that name, I cannot ignore it in
the following pages. There is not only to-day to think of, but
to-morrow. The eugenics which ignores the natural differences between
women as individuals, and their still greater natural differences as
potential parents, is only half eugenics; the leading women who in any
way countenance such measures as deprive the blood of the future of its
due contribution from the best women of the present, are leading not
only one sex but the race as a whole to ruin.
If women were not so important as Nature has made them, none of this
would matter. To insist upon it is only to insist upon the importance of
the sex. The remarkable fact, which seems to me to make this protest and
the forthcoming pages so necessary, is that the leading feminists do not
recognize the all-importance of their sex in this regard. They must be
accused of neglecting it and of not knowing how important they are. They
consider the present only, and not the composition of the future. Like
the rest of the world, I read their papers and manifestoes, their
speeches and books, and have done so, and have subscribed to them, for
years; but no one can refer me to a single passage in any of these where
any feminist or suffragist, in Great Britain, at least, militant or
non-militant, has set forth the principle, beside which all others are
trivial, that _the best women must be the mothers of the future_.
Yet this which is thus ignored matters so much that other things matter
only in so far as they affect it. As I have elsewhere maintained, the
eugenic criterion is the first and last of every measure of reform or
reaction that can be proposed or imagined. Will it make a better race?
Will the consequence be that more of the better stocks, _of both sexes_,
contribute to the composition of future generations? In other words, the
very first thing that the feminist movement must prove is that it is
eugenic. If it be so, its claims are unchallengeable; if it be what may
contrariwise be called _dysgenic_, no arguments in its favour are of any
avail. Yet the present champions of the woman's cause are apparently
unaware that this question exists. They do not know how important their
sex is.
Thinkers in the past have known, and many critics in the present, though
unaware of the eugenic idea, do perceive, that woman can scarcely be
better employed than in the home. Herbert Spencer, notably, argued that
we must not include, in the estimate of a nation's assets, those
activities of woman the development of which is incompatible with
motherhood. To-day, the natural differences between individuals of both
sexes, and the importance of their right selection for the transmission
of their characters to the future, are clearly before the minds of those
who think at all on these subjects. On various occasions I have raised
this issue between Feminism and Eugenics, suggesting that there are
varieties of feminism, making various demands for women which are
utterly to be condemned because they not merely ignore eugenics, but are
opposed to it, and would, if successful, be therefore ruinous to the
race.
Ignored though it be by the feminist leaders, this is the first of
questions; and in so far as any clear opinion on it is emerging from the
welter of prejudices, that opinion is hitherto inimical to the feminist
claims. Most notably is this the case in America, where the dysgenic
consequences of the _so-called_ higher education of women have been
clearly demonstrated.
The mark of the following pages is that they assume the principle of
what we may call Eugenic Feminism, and that they endeavour to formulate
its working-out. It is my business to acquaint myself with the
literature of both eugenics and feminism, and I know that hitherto the
eugenists have inclined to oppose the claims of feminism, Sir Francis
Galton, for instance, having lent his name to the anti-suffrage side;
whilst the feminists, one and all, so far as Anglo-Saxondom is
concerned--for Ellen Key must be excepted--are either unaware of the
meaning of eugenics at all, or are up in arms at once when the
eugenist--or at any rate this eugenist, who is a male person--mildly
inquires: But what about motherhood? and to what sort of women are you
relegating it by default?
I claim, therefore, that there is immediate need for the presentation of
a case which is, from first to last, and at whatever cost, eugenic; but
which also--or, rather, therefore--makes the highest claims on behalf of
woman and womanhood, so that indeed, in striving to demonstrate the vast
importance of the woman question for the composition of the coming race,
I may claim to be much more feminist than the feminists.
The problem is not easily to be solved; otherwise we should not have
paired off into insane parties, as on my view we have done. Nor will the
solution please the feminists without reserve, whilst it will grossly
offend that abnormal section of the feminists who are distinguished by
being so much less than feminine, and who little realize what a poor
substitute feminism is for feminity.
There is possible no Eugenic Feminism which shall satisfy those whose
simple argument is that woman must have what she wants, just as man
must. I do not for a moment admit that either men or women or children
of a smaller growth are entitled to everything they want. "The divine
right of kings," said Carlyle, "is the right to be kingly men"; and I
would add that the divine right of women is the right to be queenly
women. Until this present time, it was never yet alleged as a final
principle of justice that whatever people wanted they were entitled to,
yet that is the simple feminist demand in a very large number of cases.
It is a demand to be denied, whilst at the same time we grant the right
of every man and of every woman to opportunities for the best
development of the self; whatever that self may be--including even the
aberrant and epicene self of those imperfectly constituted women whose
adherence to the woman's cause so seriously handicaps it.
But it is one thing to say people should have what is best for them, and
another that whatever they want is best for them. If it is not best for
them it is not right, any more than if they were children asking for
more green apples. Women have great needs of which they are at present
unjustly deprived; and they are fully entitled to ask for everything
which is needed for the satisfaction of those needs; but nothing is more
certain than that, at present, many of them do not know what they should
ask for. Not to know what is good for us is a common human failing; to
have it pointed out is always tiresome, and to have this pointed out to
women by any man is intolerable. But the question is not whether a man
points it out, presuming to tell women what is good for them, but
whether in this matter he is right--in common with the overwhelming
multitude of the dead of both sexes.
As has been hinted, the issue is much more momentous than any could have
realized even so late as fifty years ago. It is only in our own time
that we are learning the measure of the natural differences between
individuals, it is only lately that we have come to see that races
cannot rise by the transmission of acquired characters from parents to
offspring, since such transmission does not occur, and it is only within
the last few years that the relative potency of heredity over education,
of nature over nurture, has been demonstrated. Not one in thousands
knows how cogent this demonstration is, nor how absolutely conclusive is
the case for the eugenic principle in the light of our modern knowledge.
At whatever cost, we see, who have ascertained the facts, that we must
be eugenic.
This argument was set forth in full in the predecessors of this book,
which in its turn is devoted to the interests of women as individuals.
But before we proceed, it is plainly necessary to answer the critic who
might urge that the separate questions of the individual and the race
cannot be discussed in this mixed fashion. The argument may be that if
we are to discuss the character and development and rights of women as
individuals, we must stick to our last. Any woman may question the
eugenic criterion or say that it has nothing to do with her case. She
claims certain rights and has certain needs; she is not so sure,
perhaps, about the facts of heredity, and in any case she is sure that
individuals--such as herself, for instance--are ends in themselves. She
neither desires to be sacrificed to the race, nor does she admit that
any individual should be so sacrificed. She is tired of hearing that
women must make sacrifices for the sake of the community and its
future; and the statement of this proposition in its new eugenic form,
which asserts that, at all costs, the finest women must be mothers, and
the mothers must be the finest women, is no more satisfactory to her
than the crude creed of the Kaiser that children, cooking and church are
the proper concerns of women. She claims to be an individual, as much as
any man is, as much as any individual of either sex whom we hope to
produce in the future by our eugenics, and she has the same personal
claim to be an end in and for herself as they will have whom we seek to
create. Her sex has always been sacrificed to the present or to the
immediate needs of the future as represented by infancy and childhood;
and there is no special attractiveness in the prospect of exchanging a
military tyranny for a eugenic tyranny: "_plus ça change, plus c'est la
même chose._"
One cannot say whether this will be accepted as a fair statement of the
woman's case at the present time, but I have endeavoured to state it
fairly and would reply to it that its claims are unquestionable and that
we must grant unreservedly the equal right of every woman to the same
consideration and recognition and opportunity as an individual, an end
in and for herself, whatever the future may ask for, as we grant to men.
But I seek to show in the following pages that, in reality, there is no
antagonism between the claims of the future and the present, the race
and the individual. On philosophic analysis we must see that, indeed, no
living race could come into being, much less endure, in which the
interests of individuals as individuals, and the interest of the race,
were opposed. If we imagine any such race we must imagine its
disappearance in one generation, or in a few generations if the clash of
interests were less than complete. Living Nature is not so fiendishly
contrived as has sometimes appeared to the casual eye. On the contrary,
the natural rule which we see illustrated in all species, animal or
vegetable, high or low, throughout the living world, is that the
individual is so constructed that his or her personal fulfilment of his
or her natural destiny as an individual, is precisely that which best
serves the race. Once we learn that individuals were all evolved by
Nature for the sake of the race, we shall understand why they have been
so evolved in their personal characteristics that in living their own
lives and fulfilling themselves they best fulfil Nature's remoter
purpose.
To this universal and necessary law, without which life could not
persist anywhere in any of its forms, woman is no exception; and therein
is the reply to those who fear a statement in new terms of the old
proposition that women must give themselves up for the sake of the
community and its future. Here it is true that whosoever will give her
life shall save it. Women must indeed give themselves up for the
community and the future; and so must men. Since women differ from men,
their sacrifice takes a somewhat different form, but in their case, as
in men's, the right fulfilment of Nature's purpose is one with the right
fulfilment of their own destiny. There is no antinomy. On the contrary,
the following pages are written in the belief and the fear that women
are threatening to injure themselves as individuals--and therefore the
race, of course--just because they wrongly suppose that a monstrous
antinomy exists where none could possibly exist. "No," they say, "we
have endured this too long; henceforth we must be free to be ourselves
and live our own lives." And then, forsooth, they proceed to try to be
other than themselves and live other than the lives for which their real
selves, in nine cases out of ten, were constructed. It works for a time,
and even for life in the case of incomplete and aberrant women. For the
others, it often spells liberty and interest and heightened
consciousness of self for some years; but the time comes when outraged
Nature exacts her vengeance, when middle age abbreviates the youth that
was really misspent, and is itself as prematurely followed by a period
of decadence grateful neither to its victim nor to anyone else.
Meanwhile the women who have chosen to be and to remain women realize
the promise of Wordsworth to the girl who preferred walks in the country
to algebra and symbolic logic:--
Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A woman may be made.
Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
Where is the woman, recognizable as such, who will question that the
brother of Dorothy Wordsworth was right?
In the following pages, it is sought to show that, women being
constructed by Nature, as individuals, for her racial ends, they best
realize themselves, are happier and more beautiful, live longer and more
useful lives, when they follow, as mothers or foster-mothers in the wide
and scarcely metaphorical sense of that word, the career suggested in
Wordsworth's lovely lines.
It remains to state the most valuable end which this book might possibly
achieve--an end which, by one means or another, must be achieved. It is
that the best women, those favoured by Nature in physique and
intelligence, in character and their emotional nature, the women who are
increasingly to be found enlisted in the ranks of Feminism, and fighting
the great fight for the Women's Cause, shall be convinced by the
unchangeable and beneficent facts of biology, seen in the bodies and
minds of women, and shall direct their efforts accordingly; so that they
and those of their sisters who are of the same natural rank, instead of
increasingly deserting the ranks of motherhood and leaving the blood of
inferior women to constitute half of all future generations, shall on
the contrary furnish an ever-increasing proportion of our wives and
mothers, to the great gain of themselves, and of men, and of the future.
For in some of its forms to-day the Woman's Cause is _not_ man's, nor
the future's, nor even, as I shall try to show, woman's. But a Eugenic
Feminism, for which I try to show the warrant in the study of woman's
nature, would indeed be the cause of man, and should enlist the whole
heart and head of every man who has them to offer. For here is a
principle which benefits men to the whole immeasurable extent involved
in decreeing that the best women must be the wives. "The best women for
our wives!" is not a bad demand from men's point of view, and it is
assuredly the best possible for the sake of the future.
It is claimed, then, for the teaching of this book that, being based
upon the evident and unquestionable indications of Nature, it is
calculated to serve her end, which is the welfare of the race as a
whole, including both sexes. No one will question that the position and
happiness and self-realization of women in the modern world would be
vastly enhanced by the reforms for which I plead, though some men will
not think that game worth the candle. But I have argued that men also
will profit; nor can there be any question as to the advantage for
children. It is just because our scheme and our objects are natural that
they require no support from and lend no warrant to that accursed spirit
of sex-antagonism which many well-meaning women now display--doubtless
by a natural reflex, because it is the spirit of the worst men
everywhere. It is primarily men's desire for sex-dominance that
engenders a sex-resentment in women; but the spirit is lamentable,
whatever its origin and wherever it be found. It is most lamentable in
the bully, the drunkard, the cad, the Mammonist, the satyr, who are
everywhere to be found opposing woman and her claims. There is no
variety of male blackguardism and bestiality, of vileness and
selfishness, of lust and greed, whose representatives' names should not
be added to those of the illustrious pro-consuls and elegant peeresses
and their following who form Anti-Suffrage Societies. Before we
criticise sex-antagonism in women, let us be honest about it in men; and
before we sneer at the type of women who most display it, let us realize
fully the worthlessness of the types of men who display it. But if this
be granted--and I have never heard it granted by the men who deplore
sex-antagonism as if only women displayed it--we must none the less
recognize that this spirit injures both sexes, and that it is
necessarily false, since none can question that Nature devised the sexes
for mutual aid to her end. By this first principle sex-antagonism is
therefore condemned. This book, written by a man in behalf of
womanhood--and therefore in behalf of manhood and childhood--is
consistently opposed to all notions of sex-antagonism, or sex-dominance,
male or female, or of competing claims between the sexes. Man and woman
are complementary halves of the highest thing we know, and just as the
men who seek to maintain male dominance are the enemies of mankind, so
the women who preach enmity to men, and refusal of wise and humane
legislation in their interests because men have framed it, are the
enemies of womankind. At the beginning of the "Suffragette" movement in
England, I had the pleasure of taking luncheon with the brilliant young
lady whose name has been so prominent in this connection; and my
lifelong enthusiasm for the "Vote" has been chastened ever since by the
recollection of the resentment which she exhibited at every suggestion
of or allusion to any legislation in favour of women--notably with
reference to infant mortality and to alcoholism--whilst the suffrage was
withheld. Substitute "destroyed" or "reversed" for "chastened," and you
have a more typical result in quite well-meaning men of sex-antagonism
as many "advanced" women now display it.
Further, this book may be regarded as an appeal to those women who are
responsible for forming the ideals of girls. The idea of womanhood here
set forth on natural grounds is not always represented in the ideals
which are now set before the youthful aspirant for work in the woman's
cause. It is not argued that the principles of eugenics are to be
expounded to the beginner, nor that she is to be re-directed to the
nursery. It is not necessarily argued, by any means, that marriage and
motherhood are to be set forth as the goal at which _every_ girl is to
aim; such a woman as Miss Florence Nightingale was a Foster-Mother of
countless thousands, and was only the greatest exemplar in our time of a
function which is essentially womanly, but does not involve marriage. I
desire nothing less than that girls should be taught that they must
marry--any man better than none. I want no more men chosen for
fatherhood than are fit for it, and if the standard is to be raised,
selection must be more rigorous and exclusive, as it could not be if
every girl were taught that, unmarried, she fails of her destiny. The
higher the standard which, on eugenic principles, natural or acquired,
women exact of the men they marry, the more certainly will many women
remain unmarried.
But I believe that the principles here set forth are able to show us how
such women may remain feminine, and may discharge characteristically
feminine functions in society, even though physical motherhood be denied
them. The _racial_ importance of physical motherhood cannot be
exaggerated, because it determines, as we have seen, not less than half
the natural composition of future generations. But its _individual_
importance can easily be over-estimated, and that is an error which I
have specially sought to avoid in this book, which is certainly an
attempt to call or recall women to motherhood. It is not as if physical
motherhood were the whole of human motherhood. Racially, it is the
substantial whole; individually, it is but a part of the whole, and a
smaller fraction in our species than in any humbler form of life.
Everyone knows maiden aunts who are better, more valuable, completer
mothers in every non-physical way than the actual mothers of their
nephews and nieces. This is woman's wonderful prerogative, that, in
virtue of her _psyche_, she can realize herself, and serve others, on
feminine lines, and without a pang of regret or a hint anywhere of
failure, even though she forego physical motherhood. This book,
therefore, is a plea not only for Motherhood but for
Foster-Motherhood--that is, Motherhood all-but-physical. In time to come
the great professions of nursing and teaching will more and more engage
and satisfy the lives and the powers of Virgin-Mothers without number.
Let no woman prove herself so ignorant or contemptuous of great things
as to suggest that these are functions beneath the dignity of her
complete womanhood.
But many a young girl, passing from her finishing-school--which has
perhaps not quite succeeded, despite its best efforts, in finishing her
womanhood--and coming under the influence of some of our modern
champions of womanhood, might well be excused for throwing such a book
as this from her, scorning to admit the glorious conditions which
declare that woman is more for the Future than for the Present, and that
if the Future is to be safeguarded, or even to be, they must not be
transgressed. I have watched young girls, wearing the beautiful colours
which have been captured by one section of the suffrage movement, asking
their way to headquarters for instructions as to procedure, and I have
wondered whether, in twenty years, they will look back wholly with
content at the consequences. Some time ago the illustrated papers
provided us with photographs of a person, originally female, "born to be
love visible," as Ruskin says, who had mastered jiu-jitsu for
suffragette purposes, and was to be seen throwing various hapless men
about a room. And only the day before I write, the papers have given us
a realistic account of a demonstration by an ardent advocate of woman,
the chief item of which was that, on the approach of a burly policeman
to seize her, she--if the pronouns be not too definite in their
sex--fell upon her back and adroitly received the constabulary "wind"
upon her upraised foot, thereby working much havoc. No one would assert
that the woman's movement is responsible for the production of such
people; no reasonable person would assert that their adherence condemns
it; but we are rightly entitled to be concerned lest the rising
generation of womanhood be misled by such disgusting examples.
Nothing will be said which militates for a moment against the
possibility that a woman may be womanly and yet in her later years, when
so many women combine their best health and vigour with experience and
wisdom, might replace many hundredweight of male legislators upon the
benches of the House of Commons, to the immense advantage of the nation.
If our present purpose were medical in the ordinary sense, the reader
would come to a chapter on the climacteric, dealing with the nervous and
other risks and disabilities of that period, and notably including a
warning as to the importance of attending promptly to certain local
symptoms which may possibly herald grave disease. An abundance of books
on such subjects is to be had, and my purpose is not to add to their
number. Yet the climacteric has a special interest for us because the
special case of those women who have passed it is constantly ignored in
our discussions of the woman question--which is not exclusively
concerned with the destiny of girls and the claims of feminine
adolescence to the vote. The work of Lord Lister, and the advances of
obstetrics and gynecology, largely dependent thereon, are increasing the
naturally large number of women at these later ages--naturally large
because women live longer than men. At this stage the whole case is
changed. The eugenic criterion no longer applies. But though the woman
is past motherhood, she is still a woman, and by no means past
foster-motherhood. Though her psychological characters are somewhat
modified, it is recorded by my old friend and teacher, Dr. Clouston,
that never yet has he found the climacteric to damage a woman's natural
love for children: the maternal instinct will not be destroyed. See,
then, what a valuable being we have here; none the less so because, as
has been said, she now begins to enjoy, in many cases, the best health
of her life. Whatever activities she adopts, there is now no question of
depriving the race of her qualities: if they are good qualities, it is
to be hoped they are already represented in members of the rising
generation. The scope of womanhood is now extended. The principles to be
laid down later still apply, but they are entirely compatible with, for
instance, the discharge of legislative functions. The nation does not
yet value its old or elderly women aright. We use as a term of contempt
that which should be a term of respect. Savage peoples are wiser. We
need the wisdom of our older women. It would be well for us to have Mrs.
Fawcett and Mrs. Humphry Ward in Parliament. The distinguished lady who
approves of woman's vote in municipal affairs, and fights hard for her
son's candidature in Parliament, but objects to woman suffrage on the
ground that women should not interfere in politics, could doubtless find
a good reason why women should sit in Parliament; and though she would
scarcely be heeded on matters of political theory, her splendid
championship of Vacation Schools and Play Centres would be more
effective than ever in the House, and might instruct some of her male
_confrères_ as to what politics really is.
The prefatory point here made is, in a word, that the following
doctrines are perhaps less reactionary than the ardent suffragette might
suppose, compatible as they are with an earnest belief in the fitness
and the urgent desirability of women of later ages even as Members of
Parliament. It may be added that, on this very point, there is a
ridiculous argument against woman suffrage--that it is the precursor of
a demand to enter Parliament, which would mean (it is assumed), women
being numerically in the majority, that the House would be filled with
girls of twenty-two and three. Men of a sort would be likelier than
women, it could be argued, to vote for such girls; but the wise of both
sexes might well vote for the elderly women whose existence is somehow
forgotten in this connection.
No chapter will be found devoted to the question of the vote. The
omission is not due to reasons of space, nor to my ever having heard a
good argument against the vote--even the argument that women do not want
it. That women did not want the vote would only show--if it were the
case--how much they needed it. Nor is the omission due to any
lukewarmness in a cause for which I am constantly speaking and writing.
My faith in the justice and political expediency of woman suffrage has
survived the worst follies, in speech and deed, of its injudicious
advocates: I would as soon allow the vagaries of Mrs. Carrie Nation to
make me an advocate of free whiskey. Causes must be judged by their
merits, not by their worst advocates, or where are the chances of
religion or patriotism or decency?
The omission is due to the belief that votes for women or anybody else
are far less important than their advocates or their opponents assume.
The biologist cannot escape the habit of thinking of political matters
in vital terms; and if these lead him to regard such questions as the
vote with an interest which is only secondary and conditional, it is by
no means certain that the verdict of history would not justify him. The
present concentration of feminism in England upon the vote, sometimes
involving the refusal of a good end--such as wise legislation--because
it was not attained by the means they desire, and arousing all manner of
enmity between the sexes, may be an unhappy necessity so long as men
refuse to grant what they will assuredly grant before long. But now, and
then, the vital matters are the nature of womanhood; the extent of our
compliance with Nature's laws in the care of girlhood, whether or not
women share in making the transitory laws of man; and the extent to
which womanhood discharges its great functions of dedicating and
preparing its best for the mothers, and choosing and preparing the best
of men for the fathers, of the future. The vote, or any other thing, is
good or bad in so far as it serves or hurts these great and everlasting
needs. I believe in the vote because I believe it will be eugenic, will
reform the conditions of marriage and divorce in the eugenic sense, and
will serve the cause of what I have elsewhere called "preventive
eugenics," which strives to protect healthy stocks from the "racial
poisons," such as venereal disease, alcohol, and, in a relatively
infinitesimal degree, lead. These are ends good and necessary in
themselves, whether attained by a special dispensation from on high, or
by decree of an earthly autocrat or a democracy of either sex or both.
For these ends we must work, and for all the means whereby to attain
them; but never for the means in despite of the ends.
This first chapter is perhaps unduly long, but it is necessary to state
my eugenic faith, since there is neither room nor need for me to
reiterate the principles of eugenics in later chapters, and since it was
necessary to show that, though this book is written in the interests of
individual womanhood, it is consistent with the principles of the divine
cause of race-culture, to which, for me, all others are subordinate, and
by which, I know, all others will in the last resort be judged.
* * * * *
The whole teaching of this book, from social generalizations to the
details of the wise management of girlhood, is based upon a single and
simple principle, often referred to and always assumed in former
writings from this pen, and in public speaking from many and various
platforms. If this principle be invalid, the whole of the practice which
is sought to be based upon it falls to the ground; but if it be valid,
it is of supreme importance as the sole foundation upon which can be
erected any structure of truth regarding woman and womanhood. Our first
concern, therefore, must be to state this principle, and the evidence
therefor. This will occupy not a small space: and the remainder will be
amply filled with the details of its application to woman as girl and
mother and grandmother, as wife and widow, as individual and citizen.
Woman is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and it is as such that
she will here be regarded. The purpose of adding yet another to the many
books on various aspects of womanhood is to propound and, if possible,
establish this conception of womanhood, and to find in it a
never-failing guide to the right living of the individual life, an
infallible criterion of right and wrong in all proposals for the future
of womanhood, whether economic, political, educational, whether
regarding marriage or divorce, or any other subject that concerns
womanhood. A principle for which so much is claimed demands clear
definition and inexpugnable foundation in the "solid ground of Nature."
Cogent in some measure though the argument would be, we must appeal in
the first place neither to the poets, nor to our own naturally implanted
preferences in womanhood, nor to any teaching that claims extra-natural
authority. Our first question must be--Do Nature and Life, the facts and
laws of the continuance and maintenance of living creatures, lend
countenance to this idea; can it be translated from general terms,
essentially poetic and therefore suspect by many, into precise, hard,
scientific language; is it a fact, like the atomic weight of oxygen or
the laws of motion, that woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the
future? If the answer to these questions be affirmative, the evidence of
the poets, of our own preferences, of religions ancient and modern, is
of merely secondary concern as corroborative, and as serving curiosity
to observe how far the teachings of passionless science have been
divined or denied by past ages and by other modes of perception and
inquiry. Therefore this is to be in its basis none other than a
biological treatise; for the laws of reproduction, the newly gained
knowledge regarding the nature of sex, and the facts of physiology,
afford the evidence of the essentially biological truth which has been
so often expressed by the present writer in the quasi-poetic terms
already set forth. Let us, then, first remind ourselves how the
individual, whether male or female, is to be looked upon in the light of
the work of Weismann in especial, and how this great truth, discovered
by modern biology and especially by the students of heredity, affects
our understanding of the difference between man and woman. Setting forth
these earlier pages in the year of the Darwin centenary, and the jubilee
of the "Origin of Species," a writer would have some courage who
proposed to discuss man and woman as if they were unique, rather than
the highest and latest examples of male and female: their nature to be
rightly understood only by due study of their ancestral forms, ancient
and modern. The biological problem of sex is our concern, and we may
have to traverse many past ages of "æonian evolution," and even to
consider certain quite humble organisms, before we rightly see woman as
an evolutionary product of the laws of life.
But, first, as to the individual, of whatever sex. Observing the
familiar facts of our own lives and of the higher forms of life, both
animal and vegetable, with which we are acquainted, we must naturally at
first incline to regard as worse than paradoxical the modern biological
concept of the individual as existing for the race, of the body as
merely a transient host or trustee of the immortal germ-plasm. Since
life has its worth and value only in individuals, and since, therefore,
the race exists for the production of individuals, in any sense that we
human beings, at any rate, can accept, we must be reasonable in
expressing the apparently contrary but not less true view that the
individual exists for the race. After all, that does not mean that
individuals exist and are worth Nature's while merely in order to see
the germ-plasm on its way. To say that the individual exists for the
race is to say that he, and, as we shall see, pre-eminently she, exist
for future individuals; and that is not a destiny to be despised of any.
Let us attempt to state simply but accurately what biologists mean in
regarding the individual as primarily the host and servant of something
called the germ-plasm.
When the processes of development and of reproduction are closely
scrutinized, we find evidence which, together with the conclusions based
thereon, was first effectively stated by August Weismann, of Freiburg,
in his famous little book, "The Germ-Plasm."[1] The marvellous cells
from which new individuals are formed must no longer be regarded, at any
rate in the higher animals and plants, as formerly parts of the parent
individuals. On the contrary, we have to accept, at least in general and
as substantially revealing to us the true nature of the individual, the
doctrine of the "continuity of the germ-plasm," which teaches that the
race proper is a potentially immortal sequence of living germ-cells,
from which at intervals there are developed bodies or individuals, the
business and _raison d'être_ of which, whatever such individuals as
ourselves may come to suppose, is primarily to provide a shelter for the
germ-plasm, and nourishment and air, until such time as it shall produce
another individual for itself, to serve the same function. This is
another way of saying what will often be said in the following
pages--that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent.
We shall later see that this great truth by no means involves the
condemnation of spinsterhood, but since it determines not only the
physiology, but also the psychology, of the individual, and especially
of woman, it will guide us to a right appreciation of the dangers and
the right direction of spinsterhood, and the means whereby it may be
made a blessing to self and to others. This must be said lest the reader
should be deterred by the unquestionably true assertion that the
individual is meant by Nature to be a parent, and has no excuse for
existence in Nature's eyes except as a parent. If we are to regard the
body as a trustee of the germ-plasm, it is evident that the body which
carries the germ-plasm with itself to the grave--the "immortality of the
germ-plasm" being only conditional and at the mercy of the acts of
individuals--has stultified Nature's end; and it will be a serious
concern of ours in the present work to show how, amongst human beings,
at any rate, this stultification may be averted, many childless persons
of both sexes having served the race for evermore in the highest degree.
We must ask in what directions especially may woman, most profitably for
herself or for others, seek to express herself apart from motherhood. It
will appear, if our leading principle be valid, that it affords us a
sure guide in the welter of controversy and baseless assertion of every
kind, in which this vastly important question is at present involved.
This conception of the individual as something meant to be a parent will
not be questioned by anyone who will do himself or herself the justice
to look at it soberly and reverently, without a trace of that tendency
to levity or to something worse which here invariably betrays the vulgar
mind, whether in a princess or a prostitute. For it needs little
reflection to perceive that the most familiar facts of our experience
and observation never fail to confirm the doctrine based by Weismann
upon the revelations of the microscope when applied to the developmental
processes of certain simple animal and vegetable forms. The doctrine
that the individual body was evolved by the forces of life, acted on and
directed by natural selection, as guardian and transmitter of the
germ-plasm, assumes a less paradoxical character when we perceive with
what unfailing art Nature has constructed and devised the body and the
mind for their function. We flatter ourselves hugely if we suppose that
even our most enjoyable and apparently most personal attributes and
appetites were designed by Nature for us. Not at all. It is the race for
which she is concerned. It is not the individual as individual, but the
individual as potential parent, that is her concern, nor does she
hesitate to leave very much to the mercy of time and chance the
individual from whom the possibility of parenthood has passed away, or
the individual in whom it has never appeared. Our appetites for food and
drink, well devised by Nature to be pleasant in their satisfaction--lest
otherwise we should fail to satisfy them and a possible parent should be
lost to her purposes--are immediately rendered of no account when there
stirs within us, whether in its crude or transmuted forms, the appetite
for the exercise of which these others, and we ourselves, exist, since
in Nature's eyes and scheme we are but vessels of the future. In later
chapters we shall have much occasion, because of their great practical
importance in the conduct of woman's life from girlhood onwards, to
discuss the physiological and psychological facts which demonstrate
overwhelmingly the truth of the view that the individual was evolved by
Nature for the care of the germ-plasm, or, in other words, was and is
constructed primarily and ultimately for parenthood.
Nor is this argument, as I see it and will present it, invalidated in
any degree by the case of such individuals as the sterile worker-bee;
any more than the argument, rightly considered, is invalidated by any
instance of a worthy, valuable, happy life, eminently a success in the
highest and in the lower senses, lived amongst mankind by a non-parent
of either sex. On the contrary, it is in such cases as that of the
worker-bee that we find the warrant--in apparent contradiction--for our
notion of the meaning of the individual, and also the key to the problem
placed before us amongst ourselves by the case of inevitable
spinsterhood. Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high
and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but,
in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which
she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to
represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far
from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive
characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility. But when we
come to ask what are her distinctive characters and utilities we find
that they are all designed for the future of the race. She is, in fact,
the ideal foster-mother, made for that service, complete in her
incompleteness, satisfied with the vicarious fulfilment of the whole of
motherhood except its merely physical part. The doctrine, therefore,
that the individual is designed by Nature for parenthood, the
individual being primarily devised for the race, finds no exception,
but rather a striking and immensely significant illustration in the case
of the worker-bee, nor will it find itself in difficulties with the case
of any forms of individual, however sterile, that can be quoted from
either the animal or the vegetable world. Natural selection, of which
the continuance of the race is the first and never neglected concern,
invariably sees to it that no individuals are allowed to be produced by
any species unless they have survival-value, a phrase which always
means, in the upshot, value for the survival of the race--whether as
parents, or foster-parents, protectors of the parents, feeders or slaves
thereof. Our primary purpose throughout being practical, it is
impossible to devote unlimited time and space to proceeding formally
through the known forms of life in order to marshal all the proofs or a
tithe of them, that all individuals are invented and tolerated by Nature
for parenthood or its service.
We shall in due course consider the peculiar significance of this
proposition for the case of woman--a significance so radical for our
present argument, even to its _minutiæ_ of practical living, that it
cannot be too early or too thoroughly insisted upon. But before we
proceed to the special case of woman it is well that we should clearly
perceive as a general guiding truth, which will never fail us, either in
interpretation, prediction, or instruction, the unfailing gaze of
Nature, as manifested in the world of life, towards the future. There is
no truth more significant for our interpretation of the meaning of the
Universe, or at least of our planetary life: there is none more relevant
to the fate of empires, and therefore to the interests of the
enlightened patriot: there is none more worthy to be taken to heart by
the individual of either sex and of any age, adolescent or centenarian,
as the secret of life's happiness, endurance, and worth. It may be
permitted, then, briefly to survey the main truths, and, therefore, the
main teachings of the past, as they may be read by those who seek in the
facts of life the key to its meaning and its use.