et tout ce qui a rapport à l'accouchement, les plaisanteries dont
on use souvent à l'égard des femmes enceintes, sont un triste signe
de la dégénérescence et même de la corruption de notre civilization
raffinée. Les femmes enceintes ne devraient pas ce cacher, ni
jamais avoir honte de porter un enfant dans leur ventre; elles
devraient au contraire en être fières. Pareille fierté serait
certes bien plus justifiée que celle des beaux officiers paradant
sous leur uniforme. Les signes extérieurs de la formation de
l'humanité font plus d'honneur à leurs porteurs que les symboles de
sa destruction. Que les femmes s'imprègnent de plus en plus de
cette profonde vérité! Elles cesseront alors de cacher leur
grossesse et d'en avoir honte. Conscientes de la grandeur de leur
tâche sexuelle et sociale, elles tiendront haut l'étendard de notre
descendance, qui est celui de la véritable vie à venir de l'homme,
tout en combattant pour l'émancipation de leur sexe."
This passage recalls one of Ruskin's, which is to be found in "Unto This
Last":--
"Nearly all labour may be shortly divided into positive and
negative labour--positive, that which produces life; negative, that
which produces death; the most directly negative labour being
murder, and the most directly positive the bearing and rearing of
children; so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful
on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree
child-rearing is admirable, on the positive side of idleness."
Here is the right comment upon the swaggering display of the means of
death and the hiding as if shameful of the signs of life to come. What
has Mrs. Grundy to say to this? Will she consider the propriety of
urging in future that it is murder and the means of murder, and the
organized forces of capital and politics making for murder, that must
not be mentioned before children, and must be hidden as shameful from
the eyes of men; and while a woman may still glory in her hair,
according to that spiritual precept of St. Paul: "But if a woman have
long hair it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a
covering," perhaps she may be permitted even to glory in her motherhood,
contemptible as such a notion would doubtless have seemed to the Apostle
of the Gentiles.
XI
EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD
It is our first principle in this discussion that the individual exists
for parenthood, being a natural invention for that purpose and no other.
It has been shown further that this is more pre-eminently true of woman
than of man, she being the more essential--if such a phrase can be
used--for the continuance of the race. If these principles are valid
they must indeed determine our course in the education of girls. Some
incidental reference has already been made to this subject, but the
matter must be more carefully gone into here. We have seen that there
are right and wrong ways of conducting the physical training of girls,
according as whether we are aiming at muscularity or motherhood. We have
seen also that there is a thing called the higher education of women,
apparently laudable and desirable in itself, which may yet have
disastrous consequences for the individual and the race.
In a book devoted to womanhood, and written at the end of the first
decade of the twentieth century, the reader might well expect that what
we call the higher education of women would be a subject treated at
great length and with great respect. Such a reader, turning to the
chapter that professedly deals with the subject, might well be offended
by its brevity. It might be asked whether the writer was really aware of
the importance of the subject--of its remarkable history, its extremely
rapid growth, and its conspicuous success (in proving that women can be
men if they please--but this is my comment, not the reader's). Nor can
any one question that the so-called higher education of women is a very
large and increasingly large fact in the history of womanhood during the
last half century in the countries which lead the world--whither it were
perhaps not too curious to consider. Further, this kind of education
does in fact achieve what it aims at. Women are capable of profiting by
the opportunities which it offers, as we say. This is itself a deeply
interesting fact in natural history, refuting as it does the assertions
of those who declared and still declare that women are incapable of
"higher education," except in rare instances. It is important to know
that women can become very good equivalents of men, if they please.
Further, this higher education of women--and we may be content to accept
the adjective without qualification, since it is after all only a
comparative, and leaves us free to employ the superlative--may be and
often is of very real value in certain cases and because of certain
local conditions, such as the great numerical inequality of the sexes in
nearly all civilized countries. It is valuable for that proportion of
women, whatever it be, who, through some throw of the physiological
dice, seem to be without the distinctive factor for psychical
womanhood, the existence of which one has tentatively ventured to
assume. These individuals, like all others, are entitled to the fullest
and freest development of their lives, and it is well that there shall
be open to them, as to the brothers they so closely resemble,
opportunities for intellectual satisfaction and self-development.
Therefore, surely, by far the most satisfactory function of higher
education for women is that which it discharges in reference to these
women. Their destiny being determined by their nature, and irrevocable
by nurture, it is well that, though we cannot regard it as the highest,
we should make the utmost of it by means of the appropriate education.
Only because sometimes we must put up with second bests can we approve
of higher education for women other than those of the anomalous
semi-feminine type to which we have referred. At present we must accept
it as an unfortunate necessity imposed upon us by economic conditions.
So long as society is based economically, or rather uneconomically, upon
the disastrous principles which so constantly mean the sacrifice of the
future to the present, so long, I suppose, will it be impossible that
every fully feminine woman shall find a livelihood without some
sacrifice of her womanhood. This is a subject to which we must return in
a later chapter. Meanwhile it is referred to only because its
consideration shows us some sort of excuse, if not warrant, for the
higher education of woman, even though in the process of thus endowing
her with economic independence, we disendow her of her distinctive
womanhood, or at the very least imperil it; even though, more serious
still, we deprive the race of her services as physical and psychical
mother.
We have seen that there is just afoot a new tendency in the higher
education of women, and it is indeed a privilege to be able to do
anything in the way of directing public attention to this new trend. In
reference thereto, it was hinted that though this newer form of higher
education for woman is a great advance upon the old, and is so just
because it implies some recognition of woman's place in the world, yet
for one reason or another it falls short of what this present student of
womanhood, at any rate, demands. As has been hinted further, probably
those responsible for the new trend are by no means unaware that, though
their line is nearer to the right one, the direct line to the "happy
isles" has not quite been taken. But great is Mrs. Grundy of the
English, and those who devised the new scheme--one is willing to hazard
the guess--had to be content with an approximation to what they knew to
be the ideal. That is why we devoted the last chapter to the question of
prudery, inserting that between a discussion of the "higher education"
of women and the present discussion, which is concerned with the
_highest education_ of women.
Words are only symbols, but, like other symbols, they are capable of
assuming much empire over the mind. Man, indeed, as Stevenson said,
lives principally by catchwords, and though woman, beside a cot, is less
likely to be caught blowing bubbles and clutching at them, she also is
in some degree at the mercy of words. The higher education of women is
a good phrase. It appeals, just because of the fine word higher, to
those who wish women well, and to those who are not satisfied that woman
should remain for ever a domestic drudge. The phrase has had a long run,
so to say, but I propose that henceforth we should set it to compete
with another--the highest education of women. Whether this phrase will
ever gain the vogue of the other even a biased and admiring father may
well question. But if there is anything certain, having the whole weight
of Nature behind it, and only the transient aberrations of men opposed
thereto, it is that what I call the highest education of women will be
and will remain the most central and capital of society's functions,
when what is now called the higher education of women has gone its
appointed way with nine-tenths of all present-day education, and exists
only in the memory of historians who seek to interpret the fantastic
vagaries of the bad old days.
Perhaps it is well that we should begin by freeing the word education
from the incrustations of mortal nonsense that have very nearly obscured
its vitality altogether. Before we can educate for motherhood, we must
know what education is, and what it is not. We must have a definition of
it and its object; in general as well as in this particular case,
otherwise we shall certainly go wrong. Perhaps it may here be permitted
to quote a paragraph from a lecture on "The Child and the State," in
which some few years ago I attempted to express the first principles of
this matter:--
"Now, as a student of biology, I will venture to propose a definition
of education which is new, so far as I know, and which I hope and
believe to be true and important. Comprehensively, so as to include
everything that must be included, and yet without undue vagueness, I
would define education as _the provision of an environment_. We may
amplify this proposition, and say that it is the provision of a fit
environment for the young and foolish by the elderly and wise. It has
really scarcely anything in the world to do with my trying to make you
pay for the teaching to my children of dogmas which I believe, and you
deny. It neither begins nor ends with the three R's; and it does not
isolate, from that whole which we call a human being, the one attribute
which may be defined as the intellectual faculty. It is the provision of
an environment, physical, mental, and moral, for the whole child,
physical, mental, and moral. That is my _definition_ of education. Now,
what are we to say of the _object_ of education? In providing the
environment--from its mother's milk to moral maxims--for our child, what
do we seek? Some may say, to make him a worthy citizen, to make him able
to support himself; some may say, to make him fit to bear arms for his
king and country; but I will give you the object of education as defined
by the author of the most profound and wisest treatise which has ever
been written upon the subject--Plato, Locke, and Milton not forgotten.
'To prepare us for complete living,' says Herbert Spencer, 'is the
function which education has to discharge.' The great thing needed for
us to learn is how to live, how rightly to rule conduct in all
directions under all circumstances; and it is to that end that we must
direct ourselves in providing an environment for the child. _Education
is the provision of an environment, the function of which is to prepare
for complete living._"
Perhaps the only necessary qualification of the foregoing is that,
though it refers specially to the child, yet the need of education does
not end with childhood, becoming indeed pre-eminent when childhood ends.
So we may apply what has been said in the case of the girl, and we shall
find it a sure guide to the highest education of women.
First, education being the provision of an environment in the widest
sense of that very wide word, always misused when it is used less
widely, we must be sure that in our scheme we avoid the errors of past
or passing schemes which concern themselves only with some aspect of the
environment, and so in effect prepare for something much less than
complete living. It is not sufficient to provide an environment which
regards the girl as simply a muscular machine, as is the tendency, if
not actually the case, in some of the "best" girls' schools to-day; it
is not sufficient to provide an environment which looks upon the girl as
merely an intellectual machine, as in the higher education of women; it
is not sufficient to provide an environment which looks upon the girl as
a sideboard ornament, in Ruskin's phrase, such as was provided in the
earlier Victorian days. In all these cases we are providing only part of
the environment, and providing it in excess. None of them, therefore,
satisfies our definition of education, which conceives of environment
as the sum-total of all the influences to which the whole organism is
subjected--influences dietetic, dogmatic, material, maternal, and all
other.[10]
Who will question that, according to this conception of education, such
a thing as the higher education of women must be condemned as
inadequate? No more than a man is woman a mere intellect incarnate. Her
emotional nature is all-important; it is indeed the highest thing in the
Universe so far as we know. The scheme of education which ignores its
existence, and much more than fails to provide the best environment for
it, is condemnable. But the scheme of education which derides and
despises the emotional nature of woman, looking upon it as a weakness
and seeking to suppress it, is damnable, and has led to the
damnation--or loss, if the reader prefers the English term--of this most
precious of all precious things in countless cases.
The only right education of women must be that which rightly provides
the whole environment. The simpler our conception of woman, the more we
underrate her complexity and the manifoldness of her needs, the more
certainly shall we repeat in one form or another the errors of our
predecessors.
Complete living is a great phrase; perhaps not for a lizard or a
mushroom, but assuredly for men and women. Perhaps it involves more for
women even than for men; indeed it must do so if we are to adhere to our
conception of women as more complex than men, having all the
possibilities of men in less or greater measure, and also certain
supreme possibilities of their own. Whatever complete living may mean
for men, it cannot mean for women anything less than all that is implied
in Wordsworth's great line--
"Wisdom doth live with children round her knees."
That line was written in reference to the unwisdom of a man, Napoleon,
the greatest murderer in recorded time, and I believe it to be true of
men, but it is pre-eminently true of women. There needs no excuse for
quoting from Herbert Spencer, since we have already accepted his
definition of the subject of education, a notable passage which is
perhaps at the present time the most needed of all the wisdom with which
that great thinker's book on education is filled:--
"The greatest defect in our programmes of education is entirely
overlooked. While much is being done in the detailed improvement of
our systems in respect both of matter and manner, the most pressing
desideratum, to prepare the young for the duties of life, is
tacitly admitted to be the end which parents and schoolmasters
should have in view; and, happily, the value of the things taught,
and the goodness of the methods followed in teaching them, are now
ostensibly judged by their fitness to this end. The propriety of
substituting for an exclusively classical training, a training in
which the modern languages shall have a share, is argued on this
ground. The necessity of increasing the amount of science is urged
for like reasons. But though some care is taken to fit youth of
both sexes for society and citizenship, no care whatever is taken
to fit them for the position of parents. While it is seen that, for
the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate preparation is
needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of
children no preparation whatever is needed. While many years are
spent by a boy in gaining knowledge of which the chief value is
that it constitutes the education of a gentleman; and while many
years are spent by a girl in those decorative acquirements which
fit her for evening parties, not an hour is spent by either in
preparation for that gravest of all responsibilities--the
management of a family. Is it that the discharge of it is but a
remote contingency? On the contrary, it is sure to devolve on nine
out of ten. Is it that the discharge of it is easy? Certainly not;
of all functions which the adult has to fulfil, this is the most
difficult. Is it that each may be trusted by self-instruction to
fit himself, or herself, for the office of parent? No; not only is
the need for such self-instruction unrecognized, but the complexity
of the subject renders it the one of all others in which
self-instruction is least likely to succeed."
If we were wise enough, therefore, we should recognize all education, in
the great sense of that word, to be _as for parenthood_. That ideal will
yet be recognized and followed for both sexes, as it has for long been
followed, consciously as well as unconsciously, by that astonishing race
which has survived all its oppressors, and is in the van of civilization
to-day as it was when it produced the Mosaic legislation. The time is
not yet when one could accept with a light heart an invitation to
lecture on fatherhood to the boys at Eton. Boys to-day are taught by
each other, and by those who give them what they call "smut jaws," that
what exists for fatherhood, and thus for the whole destiny of mankind,
is "smut." When such blasphemies pass for the best pedagogic wisdom, to
preach parenthood as the goal of all worthy education is to run the risk
of being looked upon as ridiculous. But the time will come when the
hideous Empire-wrecking Imperialisms of the present are forgotten, and
when we have a new Patriotism--which suggests, first and foremost, as
that word well may, the duty of fatherhood; and then, perhaps, "smut
jaws" will not be the phrase at Eton for discussion of those instincts
which determine the future of mankind.
But girls are our present concern, and we may indeed hope that, though
the day is still far when the motto of Eton will be education as for
fatherhood, yet the ideal of education as for motherhood may yet triumph
wherever girls are taught within even a few years to come. On all sides
to-day we see the aberrations of womanhood in a hundred forms, and the
consequences thereof. Wrong education is partly, beyond a doubt, to be
indicted for this state of things, and the right direction is so clearly
indicated by nature and by the deepest intuitions of both sexes that we
cannot much longer delay to take it.
Perhaps the reader will have patience whilst for a little we discuss the
facts upon which right education for motherhood must be based. Some may
suppose that by education for womanhood is meant simply one form or
other of instruction; say, for instance, in the certainly important
matter of infant feeding. At present, however, I am not thinking of
instruction at all, but of education--the leading forth, that is to say,
in right proportion and in right direction of the natural constituents
of the girl. If we are to be right in our methods we must have some
clear understanding of what those constituents are, and we must
therefore address ourselves now to getting, if possible, clear and
accurate notions of the material with which we have to deal; in other
words, we must discuss the psychology of parenthood. We shall perhaps
realize then that though the instruction of mothers in being is very
necessary and very important, that comes in at the end of our duty, and
that we shall never achieve what we might achieve unless we begin at the
beginning.
XII
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
The deeds of men and women proceed from certain radical elements of
their nature, some evidently noble, others, when looked at askew,
apparently ignoble. These elements are classed as instinctive. We are
less intelligent than we think. Reason may occupy the throne, but the
foundations upon which that throne is based are not of her making. To
change the image, reason is the pilot, not the gale or the engine. She
does not determine the goal, but only the course to that goal. We are
what our nature makes us; our likes and our dislikes determine our acts,
and we are guided to our self-determined ends by means of our
intelligence. More often, indeed, we use our intelligence merely to
justify to ourselves the likes and dislikes, the action and the
inaction, which our instinctive tendencies have determined.
Many of our natural instincts, impulses, and emotions bear only remotely
upon our present inquiry; as, for instance, the instinct of flight and
the emotion of fear, the instinct of curiosity and the emotion of
wonder, the instinct of pugnacity and the emotion of anger. Certain
others, however, are not merely radical and permanent parts of our
nature, but determine human existence, the greater part of its failures
and successes, its folly and wisdom, its history and its destiny. Two of
these--the parental and racial instincts--we must carefully consider
here, and also, very briefly, a supposed third, the filial instinct. I
am inclined to question whether such a specific entity as the filial
instinct exists at all; it is rather, I believe, a product, by
transmutation, of the parental instinct which, in its various forms and
potencies and through the tender emotion which is its counterpart in the
affective realm of our natures, is the noblest, finest, and most
promising ingredient of our constitution.
_Instinct and Emotion._--We must be sure, in the first place, that we
have a sound idea of what we mean by the word "instinct." It is absurd,
for instance, to speak of "acquiring a political instinct"--or any
other. That is the most erroneous possible use of the word. An instinct
is eminently something which cannot be "acquired"; it is native if
anything is native; as native as the nose or the backbone. Instincts may
be developed or repressed; it is the great mark of man that in him they
may even be transmuted--but _acquired_ never.
When we come to examine the laws of activity we find that, on the
application of certain kinds of stimulus, there are certain very
definite responses, and these we call instinctive. If the arm or the leg
of a sleeper be stroked or touched, or a cold breath of air blows
thereon, it will be withdrawn, and such withdrawal is what we call a
reflex action. Now, an instinctive action, as Herbert Spencer saw long
ago, is a "complex reflex action." It differs from a simple reflex, a
mere twitch, such as winking, but it is a complicated, and possibly
prolonged, action, which is, at bottom, of the nature of a reflex. One
may instance the instinct of flight, which is correlated with fear. In
crossing the street we hear "toot, toot," and we run. We do not
ratiocinate, we run. All the primary instincts of mankind act similarly.
Take, for contrast, the instinct of curiosity. Consider a child watching
a mechanical toy; the impulse of this instinct of curiosity is such that
he goes to the thing and examines it. By means of the transmutation,
which it is the prerogative of man to effect, this instinct may work out
into a lifetime devoted to the study of Nature. There is an unbroken
sequence from the interest in the unknown which we see in a kitten or a
child up to that which triumphs in a Newton or a Darwin.
Thus we begin to learn that human nature is largely a collection of
instincts, more or less correlated, and that at bottom we act on our
instincts--in accordance with certain innate predilections, likings, and
dislikings with which we were born, and which we have inherited from our
ancestors. Indissolubly associated therewith is what we call emotion.
For instance, in the exercise of the instinct of curiosity we feel a
certain emotion, which we call wonder. There is an ignoble wonder and
there is a noble wonder; but whether it be an astronomer watching the
stars, or the crowd at a cinematograph show, there exists an association
between the emotion of wonder and the instinct of curiosity. Dr.
McDougall, of Oxford, elaborated some few years ago, and has now
established, an extremely important theory of the relation between
instinct and emotion. He has shown that our emotions are correlated with
our instincts; that the emotion is the inward or subjective side of the
working of the instinct. Thus an instinct is more than a "complex reflex
action"; it is more than merely that, on hearing something, or seeing
something, certain muscles are thrown into action, because along with
the action there is emotion, and this is a natural and necessary
correlation. We should do well to carry about with us, as part of our
mental furniture, this idea of the correlation between instinct and
emotion.
Now, if it be true that man is not primarily a rational animal, if he be
rather, _au fond_, a bundle, an assemblage, _an organism of instincts_,
it behoves us to recognize in ourselves and in others the primary
instincts, because from them flows all that goes to make up human
nature, whether it be good or evil. Amongst these, certainly, is the
parental instinct.
Let us first consider its development in the individual, for this bears
on the question when to begin education for motherhood. We find it very
early indeed. It is commonly asserted that the doll instinct is the
precursor, the infantile and childish form, of the parental instinct.
Some psychologists, as we have already noted, assure us that this is
wrong, that a small child will be just as content to play with anything
else as with a doll; that the child gets fond of its possession, and
that what we are really witnessing is the instinct of acquisitiveness.
The rest may reason and welcome, but those who are fathers know. We
have only to watch a child to learn that it very soon differentiates its
doll, or rather, the shapeless mass it calls its doll, from other
things. Try with your own children and see if you can get them to like
anything else as well as they like a doll. They will not. There are few
settled questions as yet in psychology, but we may certainly be sure
that the parental instinct and its associated emotion may be
unmistakably displayed as the master-passion in a child who is not yet
two years old. In a case where the possibility of imitation was excluded
I have seen a little girl adore a small baby, stroke its hands, whisper
quasi-maternal sweet nothings to it--"mother it," in short--as plainly
as I have seen the sun at noon; and there is no reason to suppose that
this deeply impressive spectacle was exceptional.
The parental instinct is connected subtly with the racial instinct; and
it is undisputed that, except in utterly degraded persons, the object of
the feelings which are associated with the racial instinct becomes the
object of the feelings which are associated with the parental instinct.
The object of the emotion of sex becomes also the object of tender
emotion. Thus "love," in its lower sense, becomes exalted by Love in the
noble sense.
There is also in us an instinct of pugnacity, which especially appears
when the working of any other instinct is thwarted. We know that the
parental instinct when thwarted, as in the tigress robbed of her whelps,
shows itself in pugnacity--even in the female, which commonly has no
pugnacity; and in the emotion of anger. It is a reasonable supposition
that the fine anger, the passion for justice, the passion against, say,
slavery or cruelty to children--that these indignations which move the
world are at bottom traceable to the workings of the outraged parental
instinct. When we have tender emotion towards a child, or towards an
animal, whatever it be, this is really the subjective side of the
working of the parental instinct. Now, tender emotion is what has made
and makes everything that is good in the individual, and in human
society. It is the basis of all morality--all morality that is real
morality--everything that permits us to hold up our heads at all, or to
hope for the future of the race. That is why the study of the parental
instinct, its correlate or source, is as important and serious as any
that can be imagined.
Let us begin by a quotation from Dr. McDougall, author of the best and
most searching account of this instinct yet written:--
"The maternal instinct, which impels the mother to protect and
cherish her young, is common to almost all the higher species of
animals. Among the lower animals the perpetuation of the species is
generally provided for by the production of an immense number of
eggs or young (in some species of fish a single adult produces more
than a million eggs), which are left entirely unprotected, and are
so preyed upon by other creatures that on the average but one or
two attain maturity. As we pass higher up the animal scale, we find
the number of eggs or young more and more reduced, and the
diminution of their number compensated for by parental protection.
At the lowest stage this protection may consist in the provision of
some merely physical shelter, as in the case of those animals that
carry their eggs attached in some way to their bodies. But, except
at this lowest stage, the protection afforded to the young always
involves some instinctive adaptation of the parent's behaviour. We
may see this even among the fishes, some of which deposit their
eggs in rude nests and watch over them, driving away creatures that
might prey upon them. From this stage onwards protection of
offspring becomes increasingly psychical in character, involves
more profound modification of the parent's behaviour, and a more
prolonged period of more effective guardianship. The highest stage
is reached by those species in which each female produces at a
birth but one or two young, and protects them so efficiently that
most of the young born reach maturity; the maintenance of the
species thus becomes in the main the work of the parental instinct.
In such species the protection and cherishing of the young is the
constant and all-absorbing occupation of the mother, to which she
devotes all her energies, and in the course of which she will at
any time undergo privation, pain, and death. The instinct becomes
more powerful than any other, and can override any other, even fear
itself; for it works directly in the service of the species, while
the other instincts work primarily in the service of the individual
life, for which Nature cares little.... When we follow up the
evolution of this instinct to the highest animal level, we find
among the apes the most remarkable examples of its operation. Thus
in one species the mother is said to carry her young one clasped in
one arm uninterruptedly for several months, never letting go of it
in all her wanderings. This instinct is no less strong in many
human mothers, in whom, of course, it becomes more or less
intellectualized and organized as the most essential constituent of
the sentiment of parental love. Like other species, the human
species is dependent upon this instinct for its continual
existence and welfare. It is true that reason, working in the
service of the egotistic impulses and sentiments, often circumvents
the ends of this instinct and sets up habits which are incompatible
with it. But when that occurs on a large scale in any society, that
society is doomed to rapid decay. But the instinct itself can never
die out save with the disappearance of the human species itself; it
is kept strong and effective just because those families and races
and nations in which it weakens become rapidly supplanted by those
in which it is strong.
"It is impossible to believe that the operation of this, the most
powerful of the instincts, is not accompanied by a strong and
definite emotion; one may see the emotion expressed unmistakably by
almost any mother among the higher animals, especially the birds
and the mammals--by the cat, for example, and by most of the
domestic animals; and it is impossible to doubt that this emotion
has in all cases the peculiar quality of the tender emotion
provoked in the human parent by the spectacle of her helpless
offspring. This primary emotion has been very generally ignored by
the philosophers and psychologists; that is, perhaps, to be
explained by the fact that this instinct and its emotion are in the
main decidedly weaker in men than women, and in some men, perhaps,
altogether lacking. We may even surmise that the philosophers as a
class are men among whom this defect of native endowment is
relatively common."
Dr. McDougall goes on to show how from this emotion and its impulse to
cherish and protect spring generosity, gratitude, love, true
benevolence, and altruistic conduct of every kind; in it they have their
main and absolutely essential root without which they would not be. He
argues that the intimate alliance between tender emotion and anger is
of great importance for the social life of man, for "the anger invoked
in this way is the germ of all moral indignation, and on moral
indignation justice and the greater part of public law are in the main
founded."[11]
The reader may be earnestly counselled to acquaint himself with Dr.
McDougall's book, which, in the judgment of those best qualified,
definitely advances the science of psychology in its deepest and most
important aspects.
_The Transmutation of Instinct._--The last thing here meant by the
transmutation of instinct is that by any political alchemy it is
possible--to quote Herbert Spencer's celebrated aphorism--to get golden
conduct out of leaden instincts. But it is the mark of man, the
intelligent being, that in him the instincts are plastic, and even
capable of amazing transmutations. In the lower animals there is
instinct, but that instinct is an almost completely fixed, rigid, and
final thing. In ourselves there is a limitless capacity for the
development, the humanization of instinct along many lines, as when the
primitive infantile curiosity works out into the speculations of a
thinker. In other words, _we_ are educable, the lower animals are not,
or only within very narrow limits.
Yet in one respect the lower animals have the advantage over us. Their
instincts are often perfect. We cannot teach a cat anything about how to
look after a kitten; but parallel instincts amongst ourselves, though
not less numerous or potent, are not perfected, not sharp-cut. In the
cat there is no need for education; in woman there is eminent need for
it. Indeed it is the lack of education that is largely responsible for
our large infant mortality; not that woman is inferior to the cat, but
that, being not instinctive but intelligent, she requires education in
motherhood.
Human instincts in general are capable of modification; sometimes they
may take bizarre forms, and so we find that there are people without
children of their own--more commonly women--who will have twenty cats in
the house and look after them, or who will devote their whole lives to
the cause of the rat or the rabbit, or whatever it may be, while the
children of men are dying around them. These things are indications of
the parental instinct centred on unworthy objects. It is a common thing
to laugh at these aberrations--thoughtlessly, may we not say? While
orphans are to be found, we should do better if we try to bring together
the woman who needs to "mother" and the child who needs to be
"mothered."
Conduct is at least three-fourths of life, and the great business of
education is the direction of conduct. We have seen how modern
psychology illuminates what has been so long dark, by directing us to
our instincts as the sources of our needs, and by showing us that it is
the possibility of the education of instinct which essentially
distinguishes us from the lower animals.
We must therefore distinguish between education for motherhood and
education or instruction in motherhood. It is very important that a
woman should know the elements of infant feeding, but it is more
important that, in the first place, her whole life before she becomes a
mother--nay, even before she chooses her child's father--shall centre in
the education of her instincts for motherhood. Finding good evidence, as
we do, of the maternal instinct at a very early age, and recognizing its
importance in conduct and in the formation of ideals long before the
marriage age, we are justified in discussing the maternal instinct here
instead of postponing it, as some might argue, until after we have
discussed marriage. There is nothing which I wish to assert more
strongly than that we are radically wrong in this postponement, which is
indeed our customary practice. Partly because we are blind, partly
because of our most imprudent prudery, we ignore and pervert the due
sequence of development, but here I deliberately prefer to follow the
indications of nature, and to discuss the maternal instinct now because,
in the matter of the education of girls, this is precisely the most
important subject that can be named.
Let us now note some popular misconceptions which cumber our minds and
often interfere with the work of the reformer.
To begin with what is perhaps the oldest of these, though indeed
scarcely entitled to the appellation of popular, let us assure ourselves
once and for all that we are talking about a fact natural, innate, not
acquired. The modern criticism of ancient notions of human nature, such
as those expressed in the theologians' conception of "conscience," has
inclined some to the view that our best feelings are indeed not at all
innate. No one can for a moment analyze conscience without observing the
immense disparity between the facts and the theologians' theory. And
thus we are apt to fall into the opposite error of supposing that our
impulses towards good action are entirely the products of education,
training, public opinion, and so forth. Let the reader refer, for
instance, to such a celebrated work as John Stuart Mill's
"Utilitarianism," and it will be seen how wide of the mark it was
possible for even a great thinker to go, when his ideas of mind were
unguided by the light of evolution. Even in the greatest writer of that
time not a syllable do we find as to the parental instinct. "As is my
own belief," says Mill, "the moral feelings are not innate but
acquired." Yet we have seen convincing evidence which teaches us that
the moral feelings spring essentially from the root of the parental
instinct, without which mankind could not continue for another
generation, and than which there is nothing more fundamental and
essential in any type of human nature that can persist.
The importance of noting this can be clearly stated. We are here dealing
with something which is not for us to implant, but which is already part
of the plant, so to speak, and which it is for us to tend. Like other
innate features of mankind, its transmission from generation to
generation is notably independent of the effects of education, the
effects of use and disuse. This is a difficult thing of which to
persuade people, but it is the fact. Education, environment, training,
opportunity, habit, public opinion, social prejudice--all these and
such other influences may and do affect the maternal instinct in the
individual for good or for evil. No fact is more certain or important,
and that is precisely why we must study this instinct. But the effect
upon the individual does not involve any effect upon the native
constitution of the individual's children. From age to age the general
facts and features of the human backbone persist. We do not expect to
find notable differences between the generations in such a radical
feature of our constitution, no matter what particular habits of
posture, play, and the like we adopt. The maternal instinct is scarcely
less fundamental; it is certainly no whit less essential for the
species. It is the very backbone of our psychological constitution. Thus
it is nonsense to assert that, for instance, women are becoming less
motherly, if by this is meant that the maternal instinct is failing.
That bad education may affect it for evil no one can question, but we
must distinguish between nature and nurture. We may be perfectly
confident that so far as the _natural_ material of girl-childhood and
girlhood is concerned, there is no falling off; there will not, for
there cannot, be any falling off either in the quality or in the
quantity of the maternal instinct. On the contrary, it can, and will
later be shown that through the action of heredity this instinct will be
strengthened in the future, just in so far as motherhood becomes more
and more a special privilege of those women in whom this instinct is
strong, and who become mothers for the _only good reason_--that they
love to have children of their own.
I protest, then, against many critics, especially those who used to
raise their now silent voices in opposition to the beginnings of the
infant mortality campaign a few years ago, that we who criticize modern
motherhood and find in its defects the causes of many and great evils,
as we do, are asserting nothing whatever against the women of this day
as compared with the women of former days, so far as their natural
constitution is concerned; and if we criticize the results of bad
education, that is mainly criticism of the blindness, the stupidity, and
the carelessness of men, who are responsible for the parodies of
education and the misdirection of ideals which have so grossly
afflicted, and still afflict, childhood and girlhood in all civilized
communities.
Yet, again, there is another misconception of the maternal instinct as
it exists in our own species, which is still more serious in its
results. The argument is that, not only does the maternal instinct
exist, but it is a sure guide to its possessor, who therefore requires
no instruction--least of all at the hands of men. A woman being a woman
knows all about babies, a man being a man knows nothing. Against this
error the present writer has endeavoured to inveigh for many years past,
and it is always retorted that insistence upon the ignorance of mothers
is a very unwarrantable piece of discourtesy. It is nothing of the sort.
Native ignorance is the mark of intelligence. It is just because
instinct in us has not the perfection of detail which it has in, say,
the insects, that it is capable of that limitless modification which
shows itself in educated intelligence, and all that educated
intelligence has achieved and will yet achieve. It may be permitted to
quote from a former statement of this point:--[12]
"The mother has only the maternal instinct in its essence. That could
not be permitted to lapse by natural selection, since humanity could
never have been evolved at all if women did not love babies. But of all
details she is bereft. She has instead an immeasurably greater thing,
intelligence, but whilst intelligence can learn everything it has
everything to learn. Subhuman instinct can learn nothing, but is perfect
from the first within its impassable limits. It is this lapse of
instinctive aptitude that constitutes the cardinal difficulty against
which we are assembled. The mother cat not merely has a far less
helpless young creature to succour, but she has a far superior inherent
or instinctive equipment; she knows the best food for her kitten, she
does not give it 'the same as we had ourselves'--as the human mother
tells the coroner--but her own breast invariably. None of us can teach
her anything as to washing her kitten, or keeping it warm. She can even
play with it and so educate it, in so far as it needs education. There
are mothers in all classes of the community who should be ashamed to
look a tabby cat in the face."
The human mother has instinctive love and the uninstructed intelligence
which is the form, at once weak and incalculably strong, that instinct
so largely assumes in mankind. This cardinal distinction between the
human and all sub-human mothers is habitually ignored, it being assumed
that the mother, as a mother, knows what is best for her child. But
experience concurs with comparative psychology in showing that the human
mother, just because she is human, intelligent, which means more than
instinctive, does not know. This is the theory upon which all our
practice is to be based, and upon which the need for it mainly depends.
We must never forget the cardinal peculiarity of human motherhood, its
absolute dependence upon education, needless for the cat, needed by the
human mother in every particular, small and great, since she relies upon
intelligence alone, which is only a potentiality and a possibility until
it be educated. Educate it, and the product transcends the cat, and not
only the cat, but all other living things. As Coleridge said--
"A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive."
Perhaps the foregoing will make it clear that to insist upon the natural
ignorance of the human mother and upon the necessity for adding
instruction to the maternal instinct, and even to make comparisons with
the cat (which are, in point of fact, quite worth making, even though
some women resent them) is in no way to depreciate or decry womanhood,
but simply to demonstrate that it is human and not animal, suffering
from the disabilities or necessities which are involved in the
possession of the limitless possibilities of mankind.
What, then, is it in our power to do; and how are we to do it? It may be
argued that if the maternal instinct is a thing which cannot be made or
acquired, our study of it has little relation to practice. But indeed it
is eminently practical.
For, in the first place, this priceless possession, this parental
instinct and tenderness, is inheritable. We know by observation amongst
ourselves that hardness and tenderness are to be found running through
families--are things which are transmissible. Let us, then, make
parenthood the most responsible, the most deliberate, the most
self-conscious thing in life, so that there shall be children born to
those who love children, and only to those who love children, to those
who have the parental instinct naturally strong, and who will, on the
average, transmit a high measure of it to their offspring. In a
generation bred on these principles--a generation consisting only of
babies who were loved before they were born--there would be a proportion
of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract,
world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such
as no age hitherto has seen.
It was necessary to insert this eugenic paragraph because it expresses
the central principle of all real reform, as fundamental and
all-important as it is unknown to all political parties, and I fear to
nearly all philanthropists as well. But, for the present, our immediate
concern is the application, if such be possible, of our knowledge of the
parental instinct to the education of girls. Being indeed an instinct it
can be neither made nor acquired, but, like every other factor of
humanity that is given by inheritance, it depends upon the conditions in
which it finds itself. Education being the provision of an environment,
there is no higher task for the educator than to provide the right
environment for the maternal instinct in adolescence. We are to look
upon it as at once delicate and ineradicable. These are adjectives which
may seem incompatible, yet they may both be verified. Any one will
testify that, in a given environment, say that of high school or
university or that of the worst types of what is called society, the
maternal instinct may then and there, and for that period, become a
nonentity in many a girl. Hence we are entitled to say that it is
delicate; much more delicate, for instance, than what we have agreed to
call the racial instinct, which is far more imperious and by no means so
easily to be suppressed.
But, on the other hand, just because this is an instinct, part of the
fundamental constitution, and not a something planted from without, it
is ineradicable. I doubt whether even in the most abandoned female
drunkard it would not be possible to find, when the right environment
was provided, that the maternal instinct was still undestroyed. One is,
of course, not speaking of that rare and aberrant variety of women in
whom the instinct is naturally weak--naturally weak as distinguished
from the atrophy induced by improper nurture.
Our business, then, having recognized, so to speak, the natural history
of this instinct, and further, having come to realize its stupendous
importance for the individual and the race, is to tend it assiduously
as the very highest and most precious thing in the girls for whom we
care. As educators we must seek to provide the environment in which this
instinct can flourish. It is a good thing to be an elder sister, not
merely because the girl has opportunities of learning the ways of babies
and the details of their needs, but for a far deeper reason. Babies do
have very detailed and urgent needs, but these can be learnt without
much difficulty, and, if necessary, at very short notice. More important
is it for the whole development of the character and for the making of
the worthiest womanhood that an elder sister is provided with an
environment in which her maternal instinct can grow and grow in grace.
Much might be said on this head as to some of our present educational
practices. The kind of educationist with whom no one would trust a
poodle for half an hour may and does constantly assume, on a scale
involving millions of children, from year to year, that all is well if
the girl be taken from home and put into a school and made to learn by
heart, or at any rate by rote, the rubbish with which our youth is fed
even yet in the great name of education: though perchance whilst she is
thus being injured in body and mind and character, she might at home be
playing the little mother, helping to make the home a home, serving the
highest interests of her parents, her younger brothers and sisters and
herself at the same time--not to mention the unborn. Such a protest as
this, however, will be little heeded. There is no political party which
cares about education or even wants to know in what it consists. The
most persistent and clever and resourceful of those parties--of which, I
fear, the Fabian Society is far too good to be representative--only half
believes in the family, and is daily, and ever with more lamentable
success, seeking to substitute for the home some collective device or
other precisely as rational as that scheme of Plato's whereby the babies
were to be shuffled so that no mother should recognize her own baby,
while the fathers, need it be said, were to be as gloriously
irresponsible as under the schemes for the endowment of motherhood.
"Socialism intervenes between the children and the parents.... Socialism
in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual
must vanish before it, just as the old waterworks of private enterprise,
or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it." Thus Mr. H. G.
Wells.
Whilst this sort of thing passes for thinking, it is a task that has
little promise in it to demand a return to the study of human nature,
and insist that only by obeying it can we command it, as Bacon said of
Nature at large. Meanwhile the madness proceeds apace; nursery-schools,
wretched parody of the nursery, are advocated at length in even Fabian
tracts, and the writer who suggests that an elder sister may be
receiving the highest kind of education in staying at home and helping
her mother, would sound almost to himself like an echo from the dead
past did he not know that neither a Plato nor a million tons of moderns
can walk through human nature or any other fact as if it were not
there.
Whatever be our duty to the girl of the working-classes, no man can deny
the importance of performing it aright. She will become the wife of the
working-man. From her thus flows most of the birth-rate. If our
education of her is wrong, it is a very great wrong for millions of
individuals and for the whole of society. But let us look at the case of
her more fortunate sister.
The girl of the more fortunate classes is certain to be well cared for
in the matter of air and food and light and exercise. We have already
seen how this matter of exercise requires to be qualified and determined
as for motherhood--that is, unless we desire most suicidally to educate
all the most promising stocks of the nation out of existence. But now
what do we owe to her in the matter of providing the right kind of
intellectual, moral, spiritual, psychical environment? It is a pity to
flounder with so many adjectives, but nearly all the available ones are
forsworn and fail to express my meaning. Let us, however, speak of the
spiritual environment, seeking to free that word from all its lamentable
associations of superstition and cant, and to associate it rather with a
humanized kind of religion that deals with humanity as made by, living
upon, and destined for, this earth, whatever unseen worlds there may or
may not be to conquer.
It is our business, then, to provide the spiritual environment in which
the maternal instinct is favoured and seen to be supremely honourable.
If in the "best" girls' schools ideas of marriage and babies are
ridiculed, the sooner these schools be rubbed down again into the soil,
the better. There is no need to substitute one form of cant for
another, but it is possible--possible even though the head-mistress
should be a spinster, for whom physical motherhood has not been and
never will be--to incorporate in the very spirit of the school, as part
of its public opinion, no less potent though its power be not
consciously felt, the ideals of real and complete womanhood, which mean
nothing less than the consecration of the individual to the future, and
the belief that such consecration serves not only the future but also
the highest satisfaction of her best self.
If it were our present task to define and specify the details of a
school in which girls should be educated for womanhood, for motherhood,
and the future, it would not be difficult, I think, to show how the
services of painting and sculpture, of poetry and prose, should be
enlisted. A word or two of outline may be permitted.
There is, for instance, a noble Madonna of Botticelli which is supremely
great, not because of the skill of the painter's hand, nor yet the
delicacy of his eye, but because of the spirit which they express.
Botticelli speaks across the centuries, and is none other than an
earlier voice uttering the words of Coleridge, teaching that a mother is
the holiest thing alive. The master may or may not have perceived that
the Madonna was a symbol; that what he believed of one holy mother was
worth believing just in so far as it serves to make all motherhood holy
and all men servants thereof. The painter can scarcely have looked at
his model and appreciated her fitness for his purpose without realizing
that he was concerned with depicting a truth not local and unique, but
universal and commonplace. Whether or not the painter saw this, we have
no excuse for not seeing it. Copies of such a painting as this should be
found in every girls' school throughout the world.
Girls learn drawing and painting at school, and these are amongst the
numerous subjects on which the present writer is entitled to no
technical or critical opinion. But he sometimes supposes that a painting
is not necessarily the worse because it represents a noble thing, and
that it may even be a worthier human occupation to portray the visage of
a living man or woman than the play of light upon a dead wall or a dead
partridge. It might even be argued by the wholly inexpert that if the
business of art is with beauty, the art is higher, other things being
equal, in proportion as the beauty it portrays is of a higher order.
Thus in the painting of women, the ignorant commentator sometimes asks
himself in what supreme sense it was worth while for an artist to expend
his powers upon the portrait of some society fool who could pay him
twelve hundred pounds therefor; or in what supreme sense a painter can
be called an artist who prefers such a task, and the flesh-pots, to the
portrayal of womanhood at its highest. There are attributes of womanhood
which directly serve human life, present and to come--attributes of
vitality and faithfulness, attributes of body and bosom, of mind and of
feeling, which it is within the power of the great artist to portray;
and it is in worthily portraying the greatest things, and in this
alone, that he transcends the status of the decorator.
It is worth while also to refer here to sculpture; something can be
taught by its means. The Venus of Milo is not only a great work of art;
it is also a representation of the physiological ideal. Its model was a
woman eminently capable of motherhood. The corset is beyond question
undesirable from every point of view, and it may be of service by means
of such a statue as this to teach the girl's eye what are the right
proportions of the body. She is constantly being faced with gross and
preposterous perversions of the female figure as they are to be seen in
the fashion plates of every feminine journal. It is as well that she
should have opportunities of occasionally seeing something better.
A note upon the corset may not be out of place here. We know that its
use is of no small antiquity. We have lately come to learn that
civilization stepped across to Europe from Asia, using Crete as a
stepping-stone; and in frescoes found in the palace of Minos, at
Knossos, by Dr. Arthur Evans, we find that the corset was employed to
distort the female figure nearly four thousand years ago, as it is
to-day. There must be some clue deep in human nature to the persistence
of a custom which is in itself so absurd. Those who have studied the
work of such writers as Westermarck, and who cannot but agree that on
the whole he is right in the contention that each sex desires to
accentuate the features of its sex, will be prepared to accept Dr.
Havelock Ellis's interpretation of the corset. By constricting the
waist it accentuates the salience of the bosom and hips. This may simply
be an expression of the desire to emphasize sex, but it may with still
more insight be looked upon, as the latter writer has suggested, as the
insertion of a claim to capacity for motherhood. This claim is of course
unconscious, but Nature does not always make us aware of the purposes
which she exercises through us. Now, though the corset serves to draw
attention to certain factors of motherhood, in point of fact it is
injurious to that end, and is on that highest of all grounds to be
condemned. I return to the point that possibly the direct and formal
condemnation of the corset may be in some cases less effective than the
method, which must have some value for every girl, of placing before her
eyes representations of the female figure, showing beauty and capacity
for motherhood as completely fused because they are indeed one.
Constrain the girl to admit that that is as beautiful as can be, and
then ask her what she thinks the corset applied to such a figure could
possibly accomplish.
Surely the same principle applies to what the girl reads. Some of us
become more and more convinced that youth, being naturally more
intelligent than maturity, prefers and requires more subtlety in its
teaching. In addressing a meeting of men, say upon politics, a speaker's
first business is to be crude. He has no chance whatever unless he is
direct, unqualified, allowing nothing at all for any kind of
intelligence or self-constructive faculty in the minds of his hearers.
Let any one recall the catchwords, styled watchwords, of politics
during the last ten or twenty years, and he will see how men are to be
convinced.
But it is all very well to treat men as fools, provided that you do not
say so--the case is different with young people, and certainly not less
with girls than with boys. Mr. Kipling, in one of those earlier moments
of insight that sometimes almost persuade us to pardon the brutality
which year by year becomes more than ever the dominant note of his
teaching, once told us of the discomfiture of a member of Parliament, or
person of that kind, who went to a boys' school to lecture about
Patriotism, and who unfurled a Union Jack amid the dead silence of the
disgusted boys. He forgot that, for once, he was speaking to an
intelligent audience, which demands something a little less crude than
the kind of thing which wins elections and makes and unmakes governments
and policies.
There is certainly a lesson here for those who are entrusted with the
supreme responsibility, so immeasurably more political than politics, of
forming the girl's mind for her future destiny. Suggestion is one of the
most powerful things in the world, but we must not forget that inverted
form of it which has been called contra-suggestion. We all know how the
first shoots of religion are destroyed on all sides in young minds by
contra-suggestion. Crude, ill-timed, unsympathetic, excessive, religious
teaching and religious exercises achieve, as scarcely anything else
could, exactly the opposite of that which they seek to attain. Thus it
is not here proposed that we should take any course at home or at
school which should have the result of making motherhood as nauseous to
the girl's mind through contra-suggestion, as it easily could be made if
we did not set to work upon judicious lines.
If we are in any measure to gain, by means of books, our end of forming
right ideals in the girl's mind, I am certain that we must not expect to
accomplish much with the help of any but very great writers. We may very
well doubt the substantial value for the purpose of anything written for
the purpose. Such books may be of value for the teacher; they may
possibly be of value in disposing of curiosity that has become
overweening or even morbid, but their value as preachments I much
question. The kind of writing upon which the young girl's mind will be
nourished in years to come is best represented by the lecture on
"Queens' Gardens" in Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies," though in that
magnificent and immortal piece of literature there is nowhere any direct
allusion to motherhood as the natural ideal for girlhood. Yet if only
one girl in a hundred who read that lecture can be persuaded, in the
beautiful phrase to be found there, that she was "born to be love
visible," how excellent is the work that we shall have accomplished! A
chapter might well be devoted entirely to the teaching of Wordsworth
regarding womanhood. We need scarcely remind ourselves that this great
poet owed an immeasurable debt to his sister, and in lesser, though very
substantial, degree to his wife and daughters. He has left an abundance
of poetry which testifies directly and indirectly to these influences.
This poetry is not only utterly lovely as poetry; at once sane and
passionate, steadying and thrilling, but it is also not to be surpassed,
I cannot but believe, as a means for rightly forming the ideals of
girlhood. Every year sees an inundation of new collections of poetry.
The anthologist might do worse than collect from Wordsworth a small, but
precious and quintessential volume under some such title as "Wordsworth
and Womanhood." One would do it oneself but that literary people of a
certain school regard it as an impertinence that any one who believes in
knowledge should intrude into their sphere. Wordsworth, it is true, said
that "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the
impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." But
most literary people are so busy writing that they have no time to read,
and they forget these sayings of the immortal dead. Yet that is just a
saying which directly bears upon the present contention. We must be very
careful lest we insult and outrage girlhood with our physiology, not
that physiology is either insolent or outrageous, but that girlhood is
girlhood. It is the "breath and finer spirit" of our knowledge of sex
and parenthood that we must seek to impart to her. Poetry is its
vehicle, and the time will come when we shall consciously use it for
that great purpose.
But we cannot expect the adolescent girl to be content even with Ruskin
and Wordsworth. She must, of course, have fiction, and under this
heading there is more or less accessible to her every possibility in the
gamut of morality, from the teaching of such a book as "Richard
Feverel" down to the excrement and sewage that defile the railway
book-stalls to-day under the guise of "bold, reverent, and fearless
handling of the great sex problems." The present writer is one of those
old-fashioned enough to believe that it matters a great deal what young
people read. We are all hygienists nowadays, and very particular as to
what enters our children's mouths. But what is the value of these
precautions if we relax our care as to what enters their minds?
It is my misfortune to be scarcely acquainted at all with fiction, and I
can presume to offer no detailed guidance in this matter. The name of
Mr. Eden Phillpotts must certainly be mentioned as foremost among those
living writers who care for these things. In the Eugenics Education
Society it was at one time hoped to see the formation of a branch of
fiction in the library which might form the nucleus of a catalogue, well
worth disseminating if only it could be compiled, of fiction worthy the
consumption of girlhood. Perhaps it would hardly be necessary for the
present writer to protest that the didactic, the unnaturally good, the
well-meaning, the entirely amateur types of fiction, including those
which ignore the facts of human nature, and, above all, those which
decry instead of seeking to deify the natural, would find no place in
this catalogue. It is possible, though I much doubt it, that there may
be many books unknown to me of the order and quality of "Richard
Feverel." At any rate, that represents in its perfection--save, perhaps,
for the unnecessary tragedy of its close, which the illustrious author
himself in conversation did not find it quite possible to defend--the
type of novel whose teaching the Eugenist and the Maternalist must
recommend for the nourishment of youth of both sexes.
As has been already hinted, discourses on how to wash a baby are less in
place here; and in the following chapter the argument will be set forth
in detail that the sequence of the common schemes for the education of
girlhood and womanhood is, in one essential respect, logically and
practically erroneous.
XIII
CHOOSING THE FATHERS OF THE FUTURE
We live in a social chaos of which the evolution into anything like a
cosmos is scarcely more than incipient. In such a case the reformer has
to do the best he may; in the only possible sense in which that phrase
can be defended, he has to take the world as he finds it. Heartless
heads will of course be found to comment upon the logical error of his
ways, to which his only reply is that, while they stand and comment,
what can be done he now will do.
In this whole matter of the care and culture of motherhood--which is,
verily, the prime condition, too often forgotten, of the care and
culture of childhood--we have to do what we can, when and as we can. We
live in a society where mankind, held individually responsible for all
other acts whatsoever, is held entirely irresponsible for the act of
parenthood which, being more momentous than any other, ought to be held
more responsible than any other. Marriage, the precedent condition of
most parenthood, is thus regarded as the concern of the individuals and
the present. Individuals and the present therefore decide what marriages
shall occur; but by some obscure fatality which no one had thought of,
the future appears upon the scene: and when it is actually present, or
rather not only present but visible, the responsibility for it is
recognized. We have not yet gone so far as to see that a girl may be a
good mother, in the highest sense, in her choice of a mate. But as
things are, it is agreed that we are to act like blind automata, as
improvident and irresponsible as the lower fishes, until the actual
birth of the future. The philosophic truth that the future is nascent in
the present--a truth so genuinely philosophic that it is also
practical--is still hidden from us, and thus we are faced, in town and
country alike, with ignorant motherhood, set to the most difficult,
responsible, and expert of tasks--the right nurture of babyhood;
babyhood, a ridiculous subject for grown men, yet somehow the condition
of them and all their doings.
In this state of affairs, those who began the modern campaign against
infant mortality, or rather that small section of them who were not to
be beguiled by secondaries, such as poverty, alcoholism, and the like,
set to work to remedy maternal ignorance. Having been engaged in this
campaign for many years, one is not likely to decry it now, nor is there
any occasion to do so. The movement for the instruction of motherhood
and for the instruction even of girls in the duties of actual
motherhood, is now not only started but making real progress, and will
assuredly prosper.
But here our business is to think a little in front of action done and
doing, and we shall very soon discover that there is more for public
opinion yet to learn, while we may be very certain that this last lesson
will be less easily learnt than the former was, for it is based upon
evidence much less obvious. I have long maintained that the movement
against infant mortality must precede in logic and in practice movements
for the physical training of boys and girls, for the medical inspection
and treatment of school children, and so forth. Relatively to these I
have always asserted that the right care of babies has the immense
superiority that it means beginning at the beginning, but I have always
denied that it means beginning at the absolute beginning, if such a
phrase be permitted.
Given the world as it is, the conditions of marriage as they are, the
economic position of woman, the power of prudery, and the conventional
supposition that babies occur by providential dispensation, we must act
as if we really made the assumption that human parenthood, until the
moment of birth, is as irresponsible as any sequence of events in the
atmosphere or the world of electrons. But we who are thinking in front
for humanity must make no such assumption. We must look forward to and
hasten the time when we can act upon the _true_ assumption, which is
that the more the knowledge the greater the responsibility, and more
especially that our knowledge of heredity, so far from abolishing human
responsibility--as the enemies of knowledge declare--immeasurably
extends and deepens it. In the present volume we are proceeding upon the
true assumption, and therefore in the study of womanhood we must now
proceed, in defiance of conventional assumptions, to study the
responsibility and duties of motherhood _as they exist for maidenhood_.
To this end, it will be necessary that we remind ourselves of certain
great biological facts which are of immense significance for mankind,
and are doubtless indeed more important in their bearing upon ourselves
than upon any other living species.
The first of these is the fact of heredity; the second the fact that
hereditary endowment, whether for good or for evil, or, as is the rule,
both for good and for evil, goes vastly further than any one has until
lately realized, in determining individual destiny. These are amongst
the first principles of Eugenics or race culture, and as they have been
discussed at length elsewhere, one may here take them for granted.
Scarcely less important is the fact that the conditions of mating in the
sub-human world--conditions which beyond dispute make for the
continuance, the vigour, the efficiency, and therefore the happiness of
the species--are largely modified amongst ourselves in consequence of
certain human facts which have no sub-human parallel. The parallels and
the divergences between the two cases are both alike of the utmost
significance, and cannot be too carefully studied. It will here be
possible, of course, merely to look at them as briefly as is compatible
with the making of a right approach to the subject now before us, which
is the girl's choice of a husband.
But in right priority to the question of choice, we may for convenience
discuss first the marriage age. The choice at one age may not be the
choice at another, and in any case the question of the marriage age is
so important for the individual woman, and so immensely effective in
determining the composition of any society, that we cannot study it too
carefully.
XIV
THE MARRIAGE AGE FOR GIRLS
Let us clearly understand, in the first place, that in this chapter we
discuss principles and averages, and that, supposing our conclusions be
accepted as true, they cannot for a moment be quoted as decisive in
their bearing upon special cases. The impartial reader will not suppose
that such folly is contemplated, but those who discuss and advocate new
views very soon learn that many readers are not impartial, and that for
one cause or another they do not fail of misrepresentation. This is not
a case, then, of "science laying down the law," and ordering this
individual to marry at this age, and that not to marry at another; and
yet though this rigorous individual application of our principles is
absurd, they are none the less worth formulating, if it be possible.
The question before us is very far from simple: it is not in the nature
of human problems to be simple, the individual and society being so
immeasurably complex. We have to consider far more points than occur on
first inspection. We have to ascertain when the average woman becomes
fit for marriage. But we must remember that we are dealing with marriage
under the conditions imposed by law and public opinion. Therefore, fit
for mating and fit for marriage are not synonymous, and to ascertain the
age of physiological fitness for mating, though an important
contribution to our problem, is not the solution of it. We have further
to consider how the taste and inclination of the individual vary in the
course of her development. We have to ask ourselves at what age in
general she is likely to make that choice which her maturity and middle
age will ratify rather than for ever regret. We have to consider the
relations of different ages to motherhood, both as regards the quality
of the children born, and as regards their probable number under natural
conditions. These are questions which certainly affect the individual's
happiness profoundly, and yet that is the least of their significance.
Again, we have to observe how the constitution of society varies as
regards the age of its members, according as marriage be early or late.
In the former case more generations are alive at the same time, and in
the latter case fewer. The increasing age at marriage would have more
conspicuous results in this respect if it were not for the great
increase in longevity; so that, though the generations are becoming more
spread out, we may have as many representatives of different generations
alive at the same time as there used to be; but of course there is the
great difference that society is older as a whole. This is a fact which
in itself must affect the doings and the prospects of civilization. An
assemblage of people in the twenties will not behave in the same way as
those in the forties. The probable effect must be towards conservatism,
and increasing rigidity. It is a question to be asked by the historian
of civilization how far these considerations bear upon the history of
past empires.
Another and most notable result of the modified relation between the
generations which ensues from increasing the age at marriage, is that
the parents, under the newer conditions, must necessarily be, on the
average, psychologically further from their children. The man who first
becomes a father at twenty-five, shall we say, may well expect still to
have something of the boy in him at thirty, especially as children keep
us young. He is thus a companion for his child and his child for him.
The same is true of women. It is good that a woman who still has
something of girlhood in her should become a mother. When the marriage
age is much delayed, people of both sexes tend to grow old more quickly
than if they had children to keep them young, and then when the children
come the psychological disparity is greater than it ought to be--greater
than is best either for parents or children.
Before we consider the question of individual development, let us note
the general trend of the marriage age. There is no doubt that this is
progressively towards a delay in marriage. We have only to study the
facts amongst primitive races, and in low forms of civilization, to see
that increase in civilization involves, amongst other things, increasing
age at marriage. In his book, "The Nature of Man," Professor Metchnikoff
quotes some statistics, now very nearly fifty years old, showing the age
at first marriage in various European countries. The figure for England
was nearly 26 for males and 24.6 for females; in France, Norway,
Holland, and Belgium the figures for both sexes were considerably
higher, the average age in Belgium being very nearly 30 for men and more
than 28 for women. In England the age has been rising for many years
past, and probably stands now at about 28 for men and 26 for women. It
need hardly be pointed out that this increase in the age of marriage is
one of the factors in the fall of the birth-rate, which is general
throughout the leading countries of the world, proceeding now with great
rapidity even in Germany.
On the whole, it is further true that the marriage age rises as we
ascend from lower to higher classes within a given civilization, though
a very select class among the wealthy offer an exception to this.
Now nothing is more familiar to us all than that there is a disharmony,
as Professor Metchnikoff puts it, between these ages for marriage and
the age at which the development of the racial instinct is unmistakable
and parenthood is indeed possible. The tendency of civilization is to
increase this disharmony, and it is impossible to believe that this
tendency can be healthy either for the civilization or for the
individual.
Still concerning ourselves with the more general aspects of the
question, let it be observed that, as regards men, this unnatural delay
of marriage very frequently brings consequences which, bearing hardly on
themselves, later bear not less hardly on hapless womanhood. The later
the age to which marriage is delayed, the more are men handicapped in
their constant struggle to control the racial instinct under the
unnatural conditions in which they find themselves. The great majority
of men fail in this unequal fight, and of those who fail an enormous
number become infected by disease, with which, when they marry, they
infect their wives, sometimes killing them, often causing them lifelong
illness, often destroying for ever their chances of motherhood, or
making motherhood a horror by the production of children that are an
offence against the sun. These are facts known to all who have looked
into the matter, but there is no such thing as decent public opinion on
the subject, and the author or speaker who dares to allude to them takes
his means of living, if not his life, into his hands.
No doubt men are largely responsible themselves for the rising marriage
age, but women are also responsible in some measure. This must mean on
the whole an injury to themselves as individuals, to their sex, and to
society. Both sexes demand a higher standard of living; the man spends
enough in alcohol and tobacco, as a rule, to support one or two
children, and then says he is too poor to marry. There is everything to
be said for the doctrine that people should be provident, and should
bring no more children into the world than they are able to support; but
before we accept this plea in any particular case, we should first
inquire how the available income is being spent. At present, every
indication goes to show that we are following in the track of all our
predecessors, spending upon individual indulgence that which ought to be
dedicated to the future, and thereby compromising the worth or the
possibility of any future at all.
In the light of these considerations and many more, some of which we
shall later consider, I deplore and protest against with all my heart,
as blind, ignorant, and destructive, the counsel of those women, some of
them conspicuous advocates of the cause of woman's suffrage--in which I
nevertheless believe--who advise women to delay in marriage, or who
publish opinions throwing contempt upon marriage altogether. Later, we
must deal in detail with marriage; here we are only concerned with the
marriage age. It will then be argued that the conditions of marriage
must sooner or later be modified in so far as they are at present
inacceptable to a certain number of women of the highest type. This may
be granted without in any degree accepting the deplorable teaching of
such writers as Miss Cicely Hamilton, in her book entitled "Marriage as
a Trade." Every individual case requires individual consideration, and
no less than any individual case ever yet received. But in general those
women who counsel the delay of the marriage age are opposing the facts
of feminine development and psychology. They are indirectly encouraging
male immorality and female prostitution, with their appalling
consequences for those directly concerned, for hosts of absolutely
innocent women, and for the unborn. Further, those who suppose that the
granting of the vote is going to effect radical and fundamental changes
in the facts of biology, the development of instinct, and its
significance in human action, are fools of the very blindest kind. Some
of us find that it needs constant self-chastening and bracing up of the
judgment to retain our belief in the cause of woman's suffrage, of the
justice and desirability of which we are convinced, assaulted as we
almost daily are by the unnatural, unfeminine, almost inhuman blindness
of many of its advocates.
We have constantly to remind ourselves that our immediate concern and
duty are not with the world as it might be, or ought to be, or will be,
but with the world as it is. There are many good arguments, admirably
adapted to an imaginary world, why the marriage age should be increased.
But these forget the possible, nay the inevitable, consequences, if such
an increase show itself in one nation and not in another, in one class
of society and not in another. It is a good thing, and it is the ideal
of the eugenist, as I ventured to formulate some years ago, that every
child who comes into the world should be desired, designed, and loved in
anticipation. But if in France, shall we say, such a tendency begins to
obtain a generation earlier than it does in Germany, there will come to
be a disparity of population which, continuing, must inevitably mean
sooner or later the disappearance of France.
Or again, difference in the marriage age in different classes within a
given community has very notable consequences, as Sir Francis Galton
showed in his book, "Hereditary Genius," and later, in more detail, in
his "Inquiries into Human Faculty." He shows that, other things being
equal, the earlier marrying class or group will in a few generations
breed down the others and completely supplant them. If the natural
quality of the one class differ from that of the other, the ultimate
consequences will be tremendous. It has been proved up to the hilt that
in Great Britain these differences in marriage in different classes
exist, and that, on the whole, the marriage age varies directly as the
means of support for the children, to say nothing of natural and
transmissible differences in different classes. One can only, therefore,
repeat what was said some time ago in contribution to a public
discussion on this subject that, "considering the present distribution
of the birth-rate, nothing strikes a more direct blow at the future of
England than that which tends to increase the marriage age of the
responsible, careful, and provident amongst us whilst the improvident
and careless multiply as they do."
Let us now consider another possible factor in this question, and then
we must proceed to look at the individual woman as the question of the
marriage age affects her.
_The Marriage Age and the Quality of the Children._--Both from the point
of view of the race and from that of the individual who desires happy
parenthood it is necessary to learn, if possible, how the age of the
parents affects the quality of their offspring. If motherhood is to be a
joy and a blessing, the children must be such as bring joy and blessing.
My provisional judgment on this matter is that we are at present without
anything like conclusive evidence proving that the age of the parents
affects the quality of their children.
Let us look at some of the arguments which have been advanced. The
school of biometricians, represented most conspicuously in latter years
by Professor Karl Pearson, have desired us to accept certain conclusions
which are singularly incompatible with the opinion of their illustrious
founder, Sir Francis Galton, in favour of early marriages among those of
sound stock. By their special procedure, as rigorously critical in the
statistical treatment of _data_ as it is sweetly simple in its innocent
assumption that all _data_ are of equal value, they have proposed to
show that the elder members of a family are further removed from the
normal, average, or mean type than the younger members. This, according
to them, may sometimes work out in the production of great ability or
genius in the eldest or elder members, but oftener still shows itself in
highly undesirable characters, whether of mind or of body, the latter
often leading to premature decease. There is hence inferred a powerful
argument against the limitation of families, which means a
disproportionate increase amongst the aberrant members of the
population.
This argument really offers as good an example as can be desired of the
almost unimaginable ease with which these skilful mathematicians allow
themselves to be confused. Their inquiry has ignored the age of the
parents at marriage--or, better still, at the births of their respective
children--and has assumed that the number of the family was the
all-important point: a good example of that idolatry of number as number
which is the "freak religion" of the biometrician. Supposing that the
conclusion reached by this method be a true one--which it would need
more credulity than I possess to assert--we must conclude that, somehow,
primogeniture, as such, affects the quality of the offspring, and, on
the other hand, that to be born fifth or tenth or fifteenth involves
certain personal consequences of a special kind. Evidently we here
approach less sophisticated forms of number-worship, as that which
attached a superstitious meaning to the seventh son of a seventh son.
It seems, therefore, necessary to point out--surprising though the
necessity be--that, if the biometrical conclusion be valid, what it
demonstrates must surely be not the occult working of certain changes in
the germ-plasm, for instance, of a father, because a certain number of
his germ-cells, after separation from his body, have gone to form new
individuals (changes which would not have occurred if those germ-cells
had perished!), but rather a correlation between the _age_ of the
parents and the quality of their offspring. How cleverly the
biometricians have involved one muddle within another will be evident
not only from considering the evident absurdity of supposing--as their
argument, analyzed, necessarily supposes--that a man's body can be
affected by the diverse fates of germ-cells that have left it, but also
when we observe that one of the commonest and most obvious causes of the
reduction in the size of families is the increasing age at marriage of
both sexes. Two persons may thus marry and become parents at the age of
say thirty, their child ranking as first-born, of course, in the
biometricians' tables; but had they married ten years sooner, a child
born when the parents were thirty might rank as the tenth child, and
would be so reckoned by the biometricians. One does not need to be a
biologist to perceive that conclusions based upon assumptions so
uncritical are worth nothing at all, and it is tempting to suggest that
the biometricians are so called, on a principle long famous, because
they measure everything but life.
It is plainly unnecessary, therefore, for us to trouble about collecting
the innumerable instances where children late in the family sequence
have turned out to be illustrious, or have proved to be idiots. It is
unnecessary because the most obvious criticism of the contention before
us disposes of the proof upon which it is sought to be based.
Nevertheless, of course, though the particular contention about the size
of the family must necessarily be meaningless, unless, as is so very
improbable, it should be shown some day that the bearing of children
affects the maternal organism in some way so as to cause subsequent
children to approximate ever nearer to the type of the race; yet it is
quite conceivable, though quite unproved, that the age of the parents
involves changes in the body which affect, for good or for evil, either
the construction or the general vigour of the germ-cells. As to this
nothing is known, but a great weight of evidence suggests that little
importance, if any, can be attached to this question. Women marrying at
forty or more may give birth to splendid specimens of humanity or to
indifferent ones, and the same may be said of the girl of seventeen,
though as to this more must be said. Similarly, also, it is impossible
to make any general contrasts between the offspring of fathers of
eighteen or fathers of eighty. Correlations may exist, but we know
nothing of them yet.
Our conclusion then is that, with regard to the quality of the children
of any given mother, we cannot say that she should marry at any
particular age, within limits, rather than another. On the other hand,
it is evident that if she be highly worthy of motherhood we shall desire
her to have a large family, and therefore must encourage her early
marriage, as the late Sir Francis Galton so long maintained.
_Physical Fitness for Marriage._--We must carefully distinguish between
the question we have just been discussing and that of the marriage age
from the mother's point of view. We shall find that the best age for
marriage, so far as this question is concerned, is neither puberty, on
the one hand, nor the average marriage age amongst civilized women, on
the other hand.
If things were as we should like them to be, there would be a harmony
between the occurrence of puberty and fitness for marriage. But there
can be no question that the goal of evolution, which is perfect
adaptation, has not yet been attained by mankind, and indeed reason can
be given to show that the goal recedes as we advance towards it. The
practice of lower races, amongst whom the girls often marry at puberty
or before it, is much less injurious to the individual and the race than
we might suppose; but the harmony between the maternal body and the
maternal function is much less imperfect in lower races of mankind than
it is among ourselves. Just as we find that, among the lower animals,
the phenomena of motherhood are simple, easy, and almost painless, so we
find that, though owing to the erect attitude, as much cannot be said
for human beings anywhere, yet these phenomena are far less severe among
the lower races of mankind than among ourselves. The reason is to be
found in the astonishing progressive increase in the size of the human
head in the higher races. The large size of the head in adult life is
foreshadowed in its size at birth, and this it is which constitutes the
_crux_ of motherhood among the higher races. It is undoubtedly true that
the maternal body, by a process of natural selection, has been evolved
in the direction of better correspondence with, and capacity for, that
enlarged head of which civilization is the product. But at the present
stage in evolution the great function of giving birth to a human being
of high race--more especially to a boy of such a race--is graver, more
prolonged, and more hazardous than the maternal function has ever been
before. The gravity of the process has increased proportionately with
the worth of the product.
There are yet further consequences of the development which will
convince us how important it is that we should come to right conclusions
regarding the physical fitness of girls for marriage. Even to-day, when
the work of Lord Lister has been done, and when maternity hospitals--far
more dangerous than a battlefield less than two generations ago--can
show records from year to year without the loss of a single mother, the
fact remains that several thousands of women in Great Britain alone lose
their lives every year in the discharge of their supreme duty. It is
also the case that large numbers of infants lose their lives during, or
shortly after, birth, owing to causes inherent in the conditions of
birth, and practically beyond any but the most expert control. In many
cases no skill will save the child. A considerable preponderance of the
victims are of the male sex, so that there is thus early begun that
process of higher male mortality, which is the chief cause of the female
preponderance that is so injurious to womanhood and to society. There
are thus many and weighty reasons, individual and social--reasons in the
present generation and in the next--which conduce to the importance of
discovering the best age for marriage from the physical point of view.
We may probably accept the long-standing figures of Dr. Matthews Duncan,
one of Edinburgh's many famous obstetricians, who found that the
mortality rate in childbirth, or as a consequence of it, was lowest
among women from twenty to twenty-four years of age. Therefore it may
safely be said that, on the average, and looking at the question, for
the present, solely from this point of view, a girl of twenty-one to
twenty-two is by no means too young to marry. Of course it would be
monstrously absurd to take such a statement as this and regard it as
conclusive, even had it been communicated from on high, for any
particular case; but as an average statement it may be confidently put
forward. At this age, the all-important bones of the pelvis have reached
all the development of which they are capable. This may be accepted,
notwithstanding the fact that, especially in men, the growth of the long
bones of the limbs continues to a considerably later age. Women reach
maturity sooner than men, and the pelvis reaches its full capacity at
the age stated. Obstetricians know further that if motherhood be begun
at a considerably later date, there is less local adaptability than when
the bones and ligaments are younger. The point lies in the date of the
beginning of motherhood, for this is in general a conspicuous instance
of the adage that the first step is the most costly.[13]
_Psychical Fitness for Marriage._--At the beginning of this chapter it
was insisted that we must carefully distinguish between physical or
physiological fitness for mating and complete fitness for
marriage--which, though it includes mating, is vastly more. Few will
question the proposition that physical fitness for marriage is reached
only some years after puberty; so complete psychical fitness for
marriage may well be later still. We should thus have a second
disharmony superposed upon the first. But, instead, when we look round
us, we may often be inclined to ask whether, for many girls and women,
the age of psychical fitness for marriage is ever reached at all; and we
have to ask ourselves how far this delay or indefinite postponement of
such fitness is due to natural conditions, or how far it is due to the
fact that we bring up our girls to be, for instance, sideboard
ornaments, as Ruskin said a generation ago.
I believe that this disparity between the age of physical fitness for
marriage and the attainment of that outlook upon life and its duties,
without which marriage must be so perilous, is one of the most important
practical problems of our time, and that its solution is to be found in
the principle of education for parenthood, which we have already
considered at such length. It is a most serious matter that marriage
should be delayed as it is beyond the best age for the commencement of
motherhood; it is injurious to the individual and her motherhood, and
whether delay occurs, as it does, disproportionately in different cases,
or disproportionately within a nation, in the different classes of which
it is composed, the consequences, as we have seen, are of the most
stupendous possible kind.
Yet observe what a difficulty we are faced with. Perceiving the
injurious consequences of delay in marriage--consequences which, as we
have seen, if considered only as they show themselves in the most
horrible department of pathology, would be sufficient to demand the most
urgent consideration--we may almost feel inclined to agree with the
utterly blind and deplorable doctrine too common amongst parents and
schoolmistresses, who should know so much better, that it is good to see
the young things falling in love, and that the sooner they are married
the better. Every one whose eyes are open knows how often the
consequences of such teaching and practice are disastrous; and if there
is anything which we should discourage in our present study, it is that
marriage in haste and repentance at leisure to which these blind guides
so often lead their blind victims.
Very different, however, will the case be when the victims are no longer
blind. The condemnation of their blind guides at the present time is not
that they regard it as right and healthy that young people should mate
in their early twenties, but it is that by every means in their power,
positive and negative, these blind guides have striven to prevent the
light from reaching their victim's eyes. The day is coming, however,
when the principles of education for parenthood--for which, if for
anything, this book is a plea--will be accepted and practised, and then
the case will be very different.
Convinced though I certainly am of the vast importance of nature or
heredity in the human constitution, I am not one of those eugenists who,
to the grave injury of their cause, declare that there are no such
things as nurture and education, in that they effect nothing; nor do I
believe it in any way inherently necessary that perhaps ten years after
puberty a girl should still be irresponsible in those matters which,
incomparably beyond all others, demand responsibility; or incapable,
with wise help or even without it, of guiding her course aright. It is
we, as I repeat for the thousandth time, who are to blame, for our
deliberate, systematic, and disastrous folly in scrupulously excluding
from her education that for which the whole of education, of any other
kind, should be regarded as the preparation.
No one can attach more than its due importance to woman's function of
choosing the fathers of the future; rejecting the unworthy and selecting
the worthy for this greatest of human duties. It would be a most serious
difficulty for those who hold such a creed if it were that a girl's
taste and judgment could be trusted, if at all, only some years after
she had reached physical maturity for motherhood. It may be that in the
present conditions of girls' education, such right direction of this
choice as occurs, is just as likely to occur at the earlier age as at
any later one, when indeed it may happen that considerations more
worldly and prudential, less generally natural and eugenic, may come to
have greater weight. One can, therefore, only leave it to the reader's
consideration whether it is not high time that we should so seek to
prepare the girl's mind, that when her body Is ready for marriage her
mind may, if possible, be ready also to guide her towards a worthy
choice which the whole of her future life may ratify, and the life of
her descendants thereafter.
It must be insisted again that this question has many ramifications, and
that not the least important of them are those which concern themselves
with the kinds of disease already referred to. Some enemy of God and man
once invented a phrase about the desirability of young men sowing their
wild oats, and subsequent enemies of life and the good and progress, or
perhaps mere fools, animated gramophones of a cheap pattern, have
repeated and still propagate that doctrine. It is poisonous to its core;
it never did any one any good, and has done incalculable harm. It has
blinded the eyes of hundreds of thousands of babies; it has brought
hundreds of thousands more rotten into the world. Hosts of dead men,
women, and children are its victims. It is indeed good that a man should
be a man, and not a worm on stilts; it is indeed good that women should
prefer men to be men, and that as soon as possible they should cease to
accept in marriage the feeble, the cowardly, the echoers, and the sheep.
But this is a very different thing from asserting that it is good for
young men, before marriage, to adopt a standard of morality which would
be thought shameful beyond words in their sisters, and which has all the
horrible consequences that have been alluded to, and many more. Now,
vicious though the wild oats doctrine be in itself and in its
consequences, we have to grant that there is little need of it, for
young manhood needs the insertion of no doctrines from without to
encourage it towards the satisfaction of what are in themselves natural
and healthy tendencies. Our right procedure therefore should
be--notwithstanding the unhealthy tendency of high civilization in this
respect, and notwithstanding the terrible folly, traitorous to their
sex, of those women who decry marriage, and seek to delay it--to prepare
girlhood and public opinion, and even to modify, so far as may be
necessary, economic conditions, in order that the girls who are worthy
to marry at all shall do so at the right age, and shall join themselves
for life with rightly chosen men.
One more point may be conveniently considered here, though it is not
strictly a matter of the marriage age for girls. The point is as to the
most generally desirable age relation between husband and wife. Here,
again, we must remind ourselves that it is impossible to lay down the
law for any case, and that that is not what we are now attempting to do.
As every one knows, there is an average disparity of some few years in
the ages of husband and wife. This may be referred probably to economic
conditions in part, and also to the fact that girlhood becomes womanhood
at a somewhat earlier age than boyhood becomes manhood. The girl is more
precocious. Thus though she be twenty and her husband twenty-three, she
is as mature.
It is probable that the economic tendencies of the day are in the
direction of increasing this disparity, since more is demanded of the
man in the material sense, and he therefore must delay. Some authorities
consider that seniority of six or eight years on the part of the husband
constitutes the desirable average. But there are considerations commonly
ignored that should qualify this opinion in my judgment.
It is not that science has any information regarding the consequence
upon the sex or quality of offspring of any one age ratio in marriage
rather than another. On subjects like this wild statements are
incessantly being made, and we are often told that certain consequences
in offspring follow when the husband is older than the wife, and others
when he is younger, and so forth. As to this, nothing is known, and it
is improbable that there is anything to know. But it has usually been
forgotten, so far as I am aware, that the disparity of age has a very
marked and real consequence, which is, in its turn, the cause of many
more consequences.
We have seen that the male death-rate is higher than the female
death-rate. At all ages, whether before birth or after it, the male
expectation of life is less than the female. This is more conspicuously
true than ever now that the work of Lord Lister, based upon that of
Pasteur, has so enormously lowered the mortality in childbirth. Even
now that mortality is falling, and will rapidly fall for some time to
come, still further increasing the female advantage in expectation of
life; the more especially this applies to married women. If now, this
being the natural fact, we have most husbands older than their wives,
it follows that in a great preponderance of cases the husband will die
first; and so we have produced the phenomenon of widowhood. The greater
the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a
society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of
life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment
of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age
at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his
seniority--contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.
We therefore see that, as might have been expected, this question of the
age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from the average
point of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. First,
for herself, the greater her husband's seniority, the greater are her
chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous
preponderance of married women. But further, the existence of widowhood
is a fact of great social importance because it so often means unaided
motherhood, and because, even when it does not, the abominable economic
position of woman in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is not
necessary to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is
well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter
consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked.