CONCLUSION
The plan of this book has now been satisfied. The reader may be very far
from satisfied, but not, it is to be hoped, on the ground that many
subjects have been omitted which might quite well have been included
under the title of Woman and Womanhood. It was better to confine our
search to principles.
For it seems evident that civilization is at the parting of the ways in
these fundamental matters. The invention of aeroplanes and submarine and
wireless telegraphy and the like is of no more moment than the fly on
the chariot wheel, compared with the vital reconstructions which are now
proceeding or imminent. The business of the thoughtful at this juncture
is to determine principles, for principles there are in these matters,
if they can be discovered, as certain, as all-important as those on
which any other kind of science proceeds. Just as the physicist must
hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation
and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic
principles which determine the life and continuance of living things.
Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will
come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a
thousand times in the past.
None will dare dispute these assertions, yet what do we see at the
present time? On what grounds is the woman question fought, and by what
kind of disputants? It is fought, as everyone knows, on the grounds of
what women want, or rather, what a particular section of half-instructed
women, in some particular time and place, think they want,--or do not
want--under the influence of suggestion, imitation and the other
influences which determine public opinion. It is fought on the grounds
of precedent: women are not to have votes in England because women have
never had votes in England, or they are to have votes in England because
they have them in New Zealand. It is fought on party political grounds,
none the less potent because they are not honestly acknowledged: the
Liberal and the Conservative parties favour or disfavour this or that
Suffrage Bill, or whatever it may be, according to what they expect to
be its effect upon their voting strength. It is fought upon financial
grounds, as when we see the entire force of the alcoholic party arrayed
against the claims of women, as in the nature of things it always has
been and always will be. It is fought on theological grounds by clerics
who quote the first chapter of Genesis; and on anti-theological grounds
by half-instructed rationalists who attack marriage because they suppose
it was invented by the Church.
And whose voices never fail among the disputants? Loudest of all are
those of youth of both sexes, who know nothing and want to know nothing
and who have no idea that there is anything to know in attempting to
decide such questions as this. It is argued in the House of Gramophones
and such places, by common politicians of the type the many-headed
choose, who would do better to confine themselves to the soiled
questions of tariffs and the like, in which they find a native joy. It
is argued by vast numbers of men who hate or fear women, and women who
hate or fear men, as if any imaginable wisdom on this question or any
other could possibly be born of such emotions.
Yet all the while we are dealing with a problem in biology, with living
beings, obeying and determined by the laws of life, and with a species
exhibiting those fundamental facts of heredity, variation, bi-parental
reproduction, sexual selection, instinct and the like, which are mere
meaningless names to nine out of ten of the disputants, and yet which
determine them and their disputes and the issues thereof.
If these contentions be correct, there is plainly much need for an
attempt, however imperfect, to set forth the first principles of woman
and womanhood. Evidently the time for discussion of detailed questions
has not yet come, since, to take a single instance, there is not yet to
be heard on either side of the controversy a single voice asserting the
fundamental eugenic necessity that, at whatever cost, the best women
must be selected for motherhood, and the contribution of their
superiority to the future stock.
Let us briefly sum up the substance of the foregoing pages.
First, we have stated the eugenic postulate, failing to grant which we
and our schemes, our votes and our hopes, will assuredly disappear or
decay, as must all living races which are not recruited from their
best, Secondly, we have proceeded to analyze the nature of womanhood,
its capacities and conditions, assuming that we can scarcely discover
whither it should go unless we know what it is. To the party politician,
hungry for the prizes that suit his soul or stomach, such an assumption
is mere foolish pedantry; and the ardent suffragist will have little
more to say to it. That, however, cannot be helped. It is to be hoped
that all parties, _as parties_, will unite in banning the views herein
expressed, and then one may take heart of grace and dare to hope that
there is something in them.
They may be crystallized in the dictum that woman is Nature's supreme
organ of the future. This is not a theory, but a statement of evident
truth. It is an essential canon of what one might call the philosophy of
biology, and applies to the female sex throughout living nature. Birth
is of the female alone. No sub-human male, nor even man himself, can
directly achieve the future; the greatest statesman or law-giver or
founder of nations can only work, if he knew it, through womanhood. The
greatest of these, and their name is very far from legion, was evidently
Moses, as history shows, and he acted on this principle. On the other
hand, those who have sought to achieve the future, as Napoleon did,
failed because they defiled and flouted womanhood. The best men died on
the battlefield and the worst were left to aid the women in that supreme
work of parenthood by which alone, and only through the co-operation of
men and women, the future is made.
Thirdly, we have seen it to follow from this dedication of the greater
and vastly more valuable part of woman's energies to the future that,
just in proportion as she serves it and devotes herself thereto, she
needs present support. Biology teaches us that the male sex was invented
for this purpose; doubtless one should say for this "increasing
purpose," since it is scarcely more than foreshadowed at first in the
history of the male sex. The study of life has clearly proved that the
male sex is secondary and adjuvant, and that its essentially auxiliary
functions for the race have been increasing from the beginning until we
find them in perfection wherever two parents join in common consecration
and devotion to their supreme task, upon which all else depends and
without which nothing else could be.
And just as woman is mediate between man and the future, so man is
mediate between woman and the present. Woman is the more immediate
environment, the special providence, so to say, of childhood; and man,
in a rightly constituted society, is the special providence, the more
immediate environment of woman, standing between her and inanimate
Nature, guarding her, taking thought for her, feeding her, using his
special masculine qualities for her--that is to say, in the long run,
for the future of the race; this indeed being the purpose for which
Nature has contrived all individuals of both sexes. If we prefer such
phrases, we may say that the future or the children are parasitic upon
woman, and that woman is "parasitic upon the male," which is one woman's
way of putting it. Or we may say that these are the natural and
therefore divine relations of the various forms in which human life is
cast, and that our business is to make them more effective, more
provident and freer from the factors which in all ages have tended to
injure them.
Fourthly, we have everywhere seen cause to condemn sex-antagonism, and
it is my hope that no page or line or word of this book can be accused
of illustrating or justifying or inciting to or even attempting to
palliate either form of this wholly abominable spirit of the pit. If
such places there be, there assuredly is misdirection and falsity. This
spirit is one of the great enemies of mankind. As aroused in women
against men, it has done and is doing no little harm; as exhibited by
men against the righteous claims of women, it is one of the supremely
malign forces of history. Wherever and however displayed, it is false to
the first and most essential facts of life, from the moment of the
evolution of sex, hundreds of millions of years ago, until our own time.
All who display it, however excellent their intentions, are enemies of
mankind; all who work upon it for their own ends, political and
personal, without feeling it, are beneath disgust. These are things true
and necessary to be said, though they should not deter us from
sympathizing with the unhappy individuals, not a few, whose lives have
been blasted by individuals of the other sex, and who show the natural
but tragic tendency to make their private injury cause for resentment
against one-half of mankind. Surveying the pages that are past, I am
almost inclined to regret that, the plan of the book notwithstanding, a
special chapter was not devoted to Sex-Antagonism and to a demonstration
on biological grounds of its wickedness and pestilence wherever it be
found, and whatever plausible case for it may anywhere be made.
If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters,
let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am
an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I
call Eugenists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking
for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express
in one phrase the reason why this hope is justified, it is because the
long struggle between two antithetic conceptions of human society is
reaching a definite issue.
These radically opposed ideas may for convenience be called the
_organic_ and the _internecine_. The internecine conception of society
forever sets nation against nation, race against race, class against
class, sex against sex, individual against individual, on the ground
that the interest of one must be the injury of the other. It is false.
Nay, more, for man living his life on this earth as he must and will, it
is the Great Lie.
And it is being found out. Even international trade and commerce, from
which such a service could scarcely have been expected, are here
contributing to philosophy. Our fathers talked of the comity of nations;
we are beginning to discover their interdependence. The coming of that
discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very
long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of
nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the
patriarchal family was self-sufficient still further ago.
But the interdependence of the sexes is so far from being a new fact
that it is as old as the evolution of sex, and the decadence and
disappearance of parthenogenesis or reproduction from the female sex
alone. Once bi-parental reproduction becomes necessary for the
continuance of the race, both sexes sink with either, and neither can
swim but with both. Yet so far are we from realizing this most ancient
of facts to-day that, on both sides of the woman question, wonderful to
relate, are to be found controversialists who are seeking to deny this
continuous lesson of so many million ages. The reader may take his
choice of folly between them. On the one hand, there are the feminists
who seek to do without man,--except for the minimum physiological
purpose. The women are to sustain the present and create the future
simultaneously, and man is to be reduced, apparently, to the function of
the drone. Thus Mrs. Gilman in "Women and Economics." Over against her
and those who think with her are to be set the men, and women too, who
tell us that "men made the State,"--a sufficiently shameful
admission--and that women have no business with these things. Do not
their mothers blush for such; to have travailed so much, and to have
achieved so little?
Fortunately, however, the greater number of those who think and
determine the deeds of the mass are beginning, though the dawn is yet
very faint, to perceive that this truth of the interdependence of the
sexes, which is part of the greater truth that mankind is an organic
whole, is not only much truer than ever to-day, but is vital to our
salvation; and save us it will. In so far as we are keeping women
inferior to men, we must raise them; in so far as we are keeping men, in
other and certainly no less important respects, inferior to women, we
must raise them. The future needs and will obtain the utmost of the
highest of both sexes. Thus and thus only "springs the crowning race of
human kind": wherein, as we hasten to the dust, living for a day, yet
for ever, our eyes prophetic may behold the sure and certain hope of a
glorious resurrection.
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INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Adolescence, 124
---- and advertisements, 135
---- and alcohol, 228
Alcohol, 54, 100
---- accessibility of, 360
---- and expectant motherhood, 367
---- and breast-feeding, 371
---- and industrialism, 360, 377
---- and tobacco _versus_ children, 201, 251, 354
---- widows and orphans, 350
---- and womanhood, 348 _et seq._
Alcoholism and lead poisoning, 379
---- and offspring, 380
---- and Jewish survival, 382 _et seq._
Anti-Suffrage societies, 16
Asceticism, old and new, 102
Bees, arguments from, 31, 84, 322
Birth-rate, fall of, 288 _et seq._
---- and infant mortality, 301
---- and marriage-rate, 312
Board of Education Syllabus, 121
Breast feeding, 333 _et seq._
---- and alcohol, 371
"British Medical Journal" on meat, wines, etc., 361 _et seq._
Brooding instinct in fowls, 82
Canada's need of women, 269
Childless marriage, 244
Children Act, 265, 372
Climacteric, 21, 77, 98
Confirmation and adolescence, 124
Conservation of energy, 64
---- and higher education, 79
Contagious diseases, 219
Corset, 120, 186 _et seq._
Cycling for women, 119
Dancing, 120, 122
Degeneracy and inaction, 42
Determination of sex, 72 _et seq._
Divorce, conditions of, 291 _et seq._
---- _versus_ separation, 293
---- in Germany, 293
---- Law Reform Union, 293
Dolls and their significance, 95, 166
Education, definition of, 156
---- and instruction, 161, 172
---- for motherhood, 151, 158 _et seq._
Educational question, 43
Endowment of motherhood, 282 _et seq._, 308
Engagements, length of, 135
Eugenic feminism, 7
Eugenics, _passim_.
"Evolution of Sex," 67
Exercise in girls' schools, Herbert Spencer on, 104 _et seq._
Expectant mother, 143, 367
Fabian Society, 182
Femaleness, constitution of, 76
Games _versus_ dumb-bells, 110
---- mixed, 113
Gameto-genesis, 82
Germ cells and germ plasm, 27, 28, 81, 206, 367
---- its immortality, 29
---- and sex inheritance, 74
Girls' clubs, 123
---- clothing, 125
Gonorrh[oe]a, 223 _et seq._
Gymnastics _versus_ play, 109
Hæmophilia, 3
Happiness in marriage, 236
Heredity and responsibility, 195
Heredity of sex, 73
Higher education, 151
---- in London, 128
---- and marriage rate, 78
---- and conservation of energy, 79
Highest education, 154
Identical twins, 55
Illegitimacy, 148, 304, 336, 384
Infant mortality, 70, 172, 177, 194, 259, 325
Infant mortality and alcohol, 370
Insanity, 54, 225
Instinct and emotion, 164
Instinct, Spencer's definition of, 164
Insurance for motherhood, 315
Joy, physiological value of, 112
Kaiser's creed, 11
Knossos, 186
Law of multiplication, 66
Leprosy, 220
Maleness, constitution of, 76
"Man before speech," 39
Marriage age, 196
---- Metchnikoff on, 199
---- and quality of children, 204
---- conditions of, 258
---- and the "superfluous woman," 259 _et seq._
"Marriage as a Trade," 202
Marriage, social function of, 307
Married women's labour, 306
Mars, the parallel from, 50
Maternal instinct, 163 _et seq._
---- McDougall on, 168 _et seq._
---- in the cat, 171, 177
---- alleged decadence of, 174 _et seq._
Mendelism, 4, 67, 74, 75, 81 _et seq._, 330
Menstrual function, 108
Monogamy and its critics, 272
Monogamy and polygamy, 261
"Morning Post," quotation from, 340
Mortality in childbirth, 217
Mosaic legislation, 147
Mother and child worship, 148
Motherhood, endowment of, 282
---- physical and psychical, 83
Motherhood insurance, 315
"Mrs. Warren's Profession," 138
Muscles, relative value of, for women, 117
Muscularity and vitality, 99
Natural selection, 32
Nature and nurture, 52, 214
Neanderthal skull, 38
Notification of Births Act, 132
Organic analysis by Mendelism, 81
Parental instinct, 95
Parthenogenesis, 72
Patent medicines and alcohol, 361 _et seq._
Physical fitness for marriage, 208
Physical training of girls, 99
Physiological division of labour, 87
Play centres, 22
Preventive eugenics, 24
Progress and the nervous system, 102
---- definition of, 37
---- the two kinds of, 38
Prudery, 130, 132 _et seq._
Psychical fitness for marriage, 211
Puberty, 98, 124
Racial instinct, 167, 180, 225
Racial poisons, 24, 382
Radium, 35
"Reproduction" and "parenthood," 141
Rescue homes, 137
"Richard Feverel," 191
Rights of mothers, 293 _et seq._
---- of women, 319
Scotland, educational strain at puberty, 115
Separation _versus_ divorce, 293
"Sex and Character," 68
Sex equality and sex identity, 56 _et seq._
Sex and breathing, 93, 94
Sex and the blood, 93
Sex in childhood, 92
Sex antagonism, 391
"Sexual instinct" and "racial instinct," 144 _et seq._
Sexual attraction, Spencer on, 240 _et seq._
Sexual selection, 144
Skipping, 122
Socialism, 182
---- and motherhood, 282
Socialism and responsibility, 309
Swedish gymnastics, 121
Swimming, 120
Syphilis, 54, 222 _et seq._
Terms of specialization, 87
Transmutation of instinct, 171
---- of sex, 251
Vacation schools, 22, 114
Variation within a sex, 89
---- amongst women, 90
Venereal diseases, 219 _et seq._
Venus of Milo, 120, 186
Vital imports and exports, 267
Vitality superior in women, 99
Widowhood, causes of, 217
---- and motherhood, 303
Women and colonization, 268 _et seq._
"Women's Charter," 311, 315
Women and economics, 327 _et seq._
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INDEX OF NAMES
Aristotle, 39
Aurelius, Marcus, 257
Bacon, 182
Ballantyne, Dr. J. W., 370
Bateson, 77
Bonheur, Rosa, 58
Botticelli, 184
Bouchard, 290
Brieux, 138, 221
Budin, Prof., 336
Bunge, Prof. von, 334, 371
Burke, 225
Burns, John, 325
Butler, Lady, 58
Carlyle, 8
Chesterton, G. K., 266, 333
Clouston, 21
Coleridge, 40, 178, 184
Croom, Sir Halliday, 119
Darwin, 26, 47
Duncan, Miss Isadora, 123
Duncan, Dr. Matthews, 210
Ehrlich, 233
Eliot, George, 58
Ellis, Dr. Havelock, 61, 93, 118, 119, 186
Evans, Dr. Arthur, 186
Fawcett, Mrs., 21
Forel, 86, 149
Galton, 7, 52, 203, 205, 208, 211
Geddes and Thomson, 65, 84
Gilman, Mrs. C. P., 327, 393
Goethe, 225
Haeckel, 82
Hamilton, Miss Cicely, 202
Haynes, E. S. P., 293
Helmholtz, 36
Horsley, 254
Huxley, 46
Kelvin, 35
Key, Ellen, 8, 59, 347
Kipling, 188
Laitinen, Prof. Taav, 381
Lamarck, 158
Lister, 20, 209
Maclaren, Lady, 315
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 325
Marshall, Prof. Alfred, 381
McDougall, Dr. W., 165
Meredith, 48, 142
Metchnikoff, 199
Mill, J. S., 174
Milne-Edwards, 87
Minot, 87
Mosso, 120
Mott, Dr. F. W., 356
Napoleon, 305
Nation, Carrie, 23
Newman, Sir George, 121
Newsholme, Dr. A., 384
Nightingale, Florence, 17
Pasteur, 217
Pearson, Karl, 205, 380
Phillpotts, Eden, 191
Plato, 2, 56, 182
Rotch, Prof. Morgan, 336
Ruskin, 19, 48, 150, 157, 189, 345
Sappho, 58
Scharlieb, Dr. Mary, 371
Shakespeare, 52
Spencer, Herbert, 6, 45, 48, 64, 81, 104, 129, 156, 159, 171, 240, 320
St. Francis, 46
St. Paul, 150
Stevenson, 154
Sullivan, Dr. W. C., 376, 381
Thales, 64
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 21
Ward, Lester, 72, 261
Weininger, 68
Weismann, 26, 28, 82
Wells, H. G., 182, 282, 310, 313
Westermarck, 186
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 14
Wordsworth, 13, 48, 159, 189, 256
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] "The Germ-Plasm." English translation in Contemporary Science
Series, London: New York.
[2] "Parenthood and Race-Culture: An Outline of Eugenics."
[3] "The Obstacles to Eugenics," published in the _Sociological Review_,
July 1909.
[4] See his "Pure Sociology."
[5] _I. e._ marrying cells.
[6] Here, as in many other cases, I am indebted to that invaluable
repertory of facts, Dr. Havelock Ellis's "Man and Woman."
[7] This may be obtained from any bookseller at the price of 9d.
[8] Further particulars may be obtained from the Vice-Principal, King's
College (Women's Department), 13 Kensington Square, London, W.
[9] From _La Question Sexuelle_, French edition, p. 62. The author wrote
the book first in German and then in French.
[10] The modern use of the word environment really dates from Lamarck's
original phrase. In his discussion of the characters of living beings,
he spoke of the _milieu environnant_. The higher the type of organism
the more comprehensive must the term become, not only quantitatively but
qualitatively.
[11] "An Introduction to Social Psychology," by William McDougall, M.A.,
M.B., M.Sc., Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy in the University of
Oxford.
[12] From the writer's paper, "The Human Mother," in the Report of the
Proceedings of the National Conference on Infantile Mortality, 1908, p.
30.
[13] It it well to quote here the most recent comment of the late Sir
Francis Galton upon this subject. It is to be found in his celebrated
Huxley lecture, now published by the Eugenics Education Society,
together with much of the illustrious author's other work, under the
title, "Essays in Eugenics." The passage relevant to our discussion runs
as follows:--
"There appears to be a considerable difference between the earliest age
at which it is physiologically desirable that a woman should marry and
that at which the ablest, or at least the most cultured, women usually
do. Acceleration in the time of marriage, often amounting to seven
years, as from twenty-eight or twenty-nine to twenty-one or twenty-two,
under influences such as those mentioned above, is by no means
improbable. What would be its effect on productivity? It might be
expected to act in two ways:--
"(1) By shortening each generation by an amount equally proportionate to
the diminution in age at which marriage occurs. Suppose the span of each
generation to be shortened by one-sixth, so that six take the place of
five, and that the productivity of each marriage is unaltered, it
follows that one-sixth more children will be brought into the world
during the same time, which is roughly equivalent to increasing the
productivity of an unshortened generation by that amount.
"(2) By saving from certain barrenness the earlier part of the
child-bearing period of the woman. Authorities differ so much as to the
direct gain of fertility due to early marriage that it is dangerous to
express an opinion. The large and thriving families that I have known
were the offspring of mothers who married very young."
[14] An unavoidable delay in the publication of this book makes possible
reference to Professor Ehrlich's synthetic compound of arsenic, known as
"606," the anti-syphilitic potency of which will render even less
excusable the cowardice and neglect against which the foregoing is a
protest.
[15] This is a libel upon poor people everywhere. There has been some
confusion between drink and poverty.
[16] "T. P.'s Weekly," Christmas Number, 1909.
[17] The first treatise on Infant Mortality in English, written by Sir
George Newman at the present writer's request, and published in his New
Library of Medicine in 1906, gives abundant and trustworthy information
as to the initial incidence of this disproportionate mortality.
[18] "Socialism and the Family," Sixpenny Edition, p. 59.
[19] The address of this Union is 20, Copthall Avenue, London, E. C.
[20] "The primal physical functions of maternity."
[21] W. Claassen in the Archiv für Rassen-und-Gesellschafts-Biologie,
Nov.--Dec., 1909. See the Eugenics Review, July, 1910, p. 154.
[22] We decided to reprint the Report of that Conference, and a few
copies of the reprint are still obtainable.
[23] In his "Alcoholism." 1906.
[24] In the articles, "Racial Poisons: Alcohol," Eugenics Review, April,
1910, and "Professor Karl Pearson on Alcoholism and Offspring," British
Journal of Inebriety, Oct., 1910.
[25] This study has only just begun, but remarkable results have already
been obtained. The interested reader should refer to the Proceedings of
the Twelfth International Congress on Alcoholism held in London in 1909.
[26] This Report, published in 1910, can readily be obtained through any
bookseller. Its number is Cd. 5263, and the price only 1s. 3d.
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Transcriber's Notes:
1. Original chapter titles were inconsistently named. For example
"CHAPTER VI" was followed by simply "VII" without the "CHAPTER"
designation. The original printing has been retained.
2. p. 269: word omitted in original ("on") has been added:
"I have recently been on a tour throughout Canada...."