EXEMPTION FROM MOTHERHOOD
To him whose thoughts go beyond the surface of life to its depths, the
demand for the right of motherhood is a sign of health, an evidence
of the existence in a nation of the strong, sound woman’s will to
people the earth, without which the nation shall no longer live upon
earth. Even if certain manifestations of this will fall short of the
life-enhancing purpose, in itself the will is only worthy of respect.
It is, however, significant of the confusion of ideas on this
subject that the evidence of health inspires terror in the guardians
of morality, while they regard with calmness that tendency of the
age which is charged with the materials of tragedy, alike for the
individual and for the nation—namely, the desire of exemption from
motherhood.
Christianity, with its extension of the idea of personality and
corresponding lack of consideration for the race, in opposition to the
world of antiquity, made marriage the affair of the individual. The
development of love has carried on the liberation that Christianity
began. As stated in the first chapter, the champions of Christianity
constantly admit the right both to remain unmarried and to limit the
birth of children, if both are only the result of abstinence.
To the evolutionist, on the other hand, only the cause, not the manner,
is the deciding point. Danger to the possible children or to the
mother herself; the fear of pecuniary or personal insufficiency for
the bringing-up of the children; the desire of using all one’s powers
and resources for an important life-work; a Malthusian point of view
in the question of population—these and other motives are regarded by
the evolutionist as good reasons for limiting or altogether abstaining
from parentage. And in this respect the individual is allowed freedom
of choice also as regards the method which best agrees with the opinion
of science on hygiene, and with his own on morality and fitness.
As soon as it is recognised that the individual is also an end in
himself, with the right and duty of satisfying in the first place his
own demands according to his nature, then it must remain the private
affair of the individual whether he will either leave altogether
unfulfilled his mission as a member of the race, or whether he will
limit its fulfilment.
But as the individual cannot attain his highest life-enhancement or
fulfil his own purpose otherwise than in connection with the race, he
acquires duties also towards it, and not least as a sexual being.
If life has given the individual a lot which renders moral parentage
possible, and conditions which are favourable to new lives, then the
only moral limitation of the number of children is one which—in and
by means of the individual’s own life-enhancement and that of the
children—is to the advantage of the whole community.
But when only petty and selfish reasons—such as considerations of
the children’s inheritance, personal good-living and voluptuousness,
beauty and comfort—determine fathers and mothers to keep the number of
their children below the average required to secure the due increase of
population, then their conduct is anti-social. A person, on the other
hand, who is content with few or no children, because he or she has a
work to perform, may be able to compensate society by the production of
another class of value.
To these now moral, now immoral, motives for having few children or
none at all, must be added woman’s desire to devote her purely human
qualities to other tasks. This, however, does not refer to those
wives who are obliged to establish their married life upon their own
bread-winning labour as well as their husband’s; a necessity which for
the present hinders them from motherhood although they are continually
dreaming of the future child. It is here a question only of women’s
personal self-assertion.
Women are no longer content to manage their husbands’ incomes, but wish
to earn their own; they will not use their husband as a middleman
between themselves and society, but will themselves look after their
interests; they will not confine their gifts to the home but will also
put them in public circulation. And in all these respects they are
right. But when, in order thus to be able to “live their life,” they
wish to be “freed from the burden of the child,” one begins to doubt.
For until automatic nurses have been invented, or male volunteers have
offered themselves, the burden must fall upon other women, who—whether
themselves mothers or not—are thus obliged to bear a double one. Real
liberation for women is thus impossible; the only thing possible is a
new division of the burdens.
Those already “freed” declare that, by making money, studying,
writing, taking part in politics, they feel themselves leading a
higher existence with greater emotions than the nursery could have
afforded them. They look down upon the “passive” function of bearing
children—and rightly, when it remains only passive—without perceiving
that it embodies as nothing else does the possibility of putting their
whole personality in activity. Every human being has the right to
choose his own happiness—or unhappiness.
But what these women have no right to, is to be considered equally
worthy of the respect of society with those who find their highest
emotions through their children, the beings who not only form the
finest subject for human art, but are at the same time the only work
by which the immortality of its creator is assured. Another thing
that these women who are afraid of children cannot expect is, that
their experience should be considered equally valuable with that
of women who—after they have fulfilled their immediate duties as
mothers—employ for the public benefit the development they have gained
in their private capacity.
There is no secret and infallible guide to natural instinct, any more
than there is to the tendency of civilisation. Both may lead the
individual as well as the race astray with regard to the goal which
both, consciously or unconsciously, are seeking: higher forms of life.
In motherliness, humanity has attained what is at present its most
perfect form of life within the race taken as a whole. Motherhood is
a natural balance between the happiness of the individual and of the
whole, between self-assertion and self-devotion, between sensuousness
and soulfulness. A great love, a power of creation amounting to genius,
may in solitary instances attain the same unity. But the immense
advantage of the mother is that, with her child in her arms,—without
being conscious of a struggle and without belonging to the favoured
exceptions,—she possesses that unity between happiness and duty which
mankind as a whole will attain in other departments only after endless
toil and trouble. But if this personal self-assertion, this personal
joy in woman’s consciousness be gradually released from its connection
with the child, then this unity will be broken up.
An incidental displacement of it was necessary; for the liberation
of woman—like every other movement of the kind—involved precisely
the disturbance of that equilibrium which had been produced by the
pressure of superior force and by hereditary inertness, an artificial
equilibrium, which could be maintained only by pressure on one side and
inertness on the other. It was necessary that daughters should rise up
against their fathers’ ideals of wives; sisters against the brothers’
share of inheritance, which had increased so greatly to their cost;
mothers against the view of their duties which kept them within the
sphere of female animals.
They must carry through that emancipation which has already made it
possible for them to use their brains—not only their hearts—in
fulfilling their eternal mission: that of fostering and preserving new
lives.
Already the educated—nay, even the uneducated—mother of the present
day makes use in her care of children of double the brain power but of
only half the muscular force that her grandmother employed. She knows
better how to differentiate between the essential and the unessential;
she can by circumspection obviate much toil and trouble. And when all
mothers receive the practical and theoretical training in nursing
children and the sick, which must be their form of universal service
corresponding to the military service of men, then the problem will be
even more simplified in the direction of the impersonal and more and
more extended in the direction of the personal. The mother must use her
intelligence and her imagination, her artistic sense and her feeling
for nature, her instincts in physiology and psychology, in order to
provide the child with the conditions under which it may develop itself
in the best and freest way; but, on the other hand, she must beware
of—remoulding the child. She will in this way gain much time which at
present is wasted in unnecessary attentions and harmful education.
But avoidance of the personal charge is impossible to the mother
without incurring the dishonour of a fugitive.
There are a number of women who think that the feeling of motherhood
can exist independently of a mother’s care and responsibility for
the child, and that the latter may therefore be taken charge of by
the community and still retain the treasure of motherly and fatherly
affection. These women can never have reflected that, with human
beings as with animals, parental affection is formed by care and
self-sacrifice; that it rises with these; that the less demand is made
upon it, the poorer it becomes. When a father for a time takes the
place of the mother, he becomes as tender as she; when a sick child
exhausts its mother’s strength, it is nearest her heart; and as the
child grows up, her affection becomes less spontaneously intimate,
although instead it may increase through personal intercourse. State
care of young children would mean a withering of the intimacy of
parental affection. The tenderness evoked by the child’s bodily
presence shows, better than any other feeling, the unity of soul and
senses. Without the sensuous presence, the psychical impression loses
its power, as does the bodily impression without the psychical. The
instinct of motherhood, like all others, has been formed through
constancy of external conditions. It is acquired through definite
sensations and associations of ideas. When certain of these emotions,
at first conscious, became unconscious, and were then performed by
lower nerve-centres, the higher nerve-centres, which had formerly been
occupied, were set at liberty for higher uses. But if the sensations
and associations of ideas, which originally formed the instinct,
are weakened, then the instinct loses its automatic sureness. What
worked easily, “of its own accord,” as popular speech rightly has it,
becomes once more laborious. With the displacement of the instinct,
corresponding dislocations result, though with extreme slowness, in the
organ with which it is connected. Thus nursing was perhaps an acquired
faculty, which became “natural.” It has now become so difficult that
among the upper classes the majority, even with the best will, can
scarcely perform this function for a couple of months, or perhaps
not at all. Science is already enquiring into the possibility of the
disappearance of the mammary glands and with them of the peculiar
character of woman’s breast.
It is often only the future that can decide what is progress and what
degeneration. But certainly nothing can be more unscientific than to
dismiss all anxiety about the future with the dogma: that the will to
live in offspring is so strong that only the degenerate do not possess
it, and that with a healthy woman nothing can injure the motherly
instinct.
To a thinker of the evolutionist school, everything is subject to
possible transformation, and nowhere is there anything at work which
can “make no difference.” There is not a brain, not a nervous system
which can evade even the involuntary impressions of the street. These
sink into the subconscious soul and thence may arise again after many
years. Not one person is the same—or will ever be the same,—when,
for instance, he comes away from a lecture, as he was when he went
to it. Some psychic waves have always been set in motion and this
motion is continued to infinity. If this is even true of a notice on a
shop-front, or of a momentary feeling of anger or joy, how much more
then must it be so of the impressions which dominate our days and
years. Our conceptions are forged from the true or false metal of our
moods and become in turn the implements by which the bronze or gold of
moods is wrought. All sanctity, all self-culture rest upon man’s power
of diverting certain thoughts, suppressing certain conceptions, turning
aside certain impulses of the will; of introducing other thoughts,
intensifying other conceptions, encouraging other impulses; in other
words, partly utilising and partly rejecting certain states of mind. In
this way, bad habits arise from one class of moods, good habits from
another. When these have acquired sufficient strength, new modes of
action, new plans of life gradually become “natural”; new instincts are
formed, in which willingness and reluctance often stand in an opposite
relation to that they occupied at the commencement of the process.
Sensuousness and soul are thus both the creations of development, and
it is the voluptuousness of many thousands of years that stirs in
the mother when she feels her child’s lips at her breast; it is the
tenderness of as many ages which bends in the shape of every new mother
over her child’s cot.
However powerful these emotions of the senses and of the soul may
have become, there is always the possibility—for the reasons just
given—that the mighty stream of tenderness may dry up, if its supply
be cut off, and that thus humanity may lose its most indispensable
motive power in the development of civilisation.
Our destiny is shaped, not only by what we have experienced, but also
by what we have turned aside to avoid experiencing.
Our conscious ego is made up of our states of mind, the images,
feelings, and thoughts which through our earlier life have become our
inner property; and which by certain processes are connected with each
other and with our present ego. The less these images, feelings, and
thoughts in a woman’s past life have been determined by the sense of
motherhood—intuitive or actual,—the less valuable will be the “ego”
she has to assert, or the destiny she shapes for herself. And the woman
whom no higher reason keeps from motherhood is a parasite upon the
parent stem. The majority of these women have not even a deeper meaning
in their claim to “live their own life.” They fritter themselves away
in many directions and do not get much profit by the process—since it
is only great feelings which give great rewards.
These women, who thus without more ado renounce motherhood, have
they ever held a child, not in their bosom, but even in their arms?
Have they ever felt the thrill of tenderness such a soft-limbed
creature, made, as it seems, of a flower’s soft surfaces and fair
tints, inspires? Have they ever fallen in worship before the great and
marvellous world that we thoughtlessly call “a little child’s soul”?
If they have not, then we can understand these poor women, who do
not perceive their poverty, wishing to make the rich as poor as
themselves—whereas all the poor should be made rich.
If this “liberation” of woman’s personality succeeds, it may go with
her as with the princess in the story, who found herself in the rain
outside the kingdom she had given up for a toy.
In a modern poem a woman, when offered as a consolation the thought
that childlessness will spare her many sufferings, exclaims:
_Spared! To be spared what I was born to have:
I am a woman and this my flesh
Demands its nature’s pangs, its rightful throes,
And I implore with vehemence these pains!_
(STEPHEN PHILLIPS.)
When this ceases to be the desire and the choice of woman, then the
prophecies of pessimistic thinkers of the voluntary extinction of the
human race will be in a fair way to be realised. But in that case women
would not possess the nobility which a logical reading of the world’s
processes implies: they would only operate like a wheel unconsciously
rolling towards the abyss.
To every thoughtful person, it is becoming increasingly evident that
the human race is approaching the parting of the ways for its future
destiny. Either—speaking generally—the old division of labour,
founded in nature, must continue: that by which the majority of women
not only bear but also bring up the new generation within the home;
that men—directly in marriage or indirectly through a State provision
for motherhood—should work for women’s support during the years they
are performing this service to society; and that women, during their
mental and bodily development, should aim, in their choice of work and
their habits of life, at preserving their fitness for their possible
mission as mothers.
Or, on the other hand, woman must be brought up for relentless
competition with man in all the departments of production—thus
necessarily losing more and more the power and the desire to provide
the race with new human material—and the State must undertake the
breeding as well as the rearing of children, in order to liberate her
from the cares which at present most hinder her freedom of movement.
Any compromise can only relate to the extent, not to the kind, of the
division of labour; for no hygiene, however intelligent, no altered
conditions of society with shorter hours of labour and better pay, no
new system of study with moderate brainwork can abolish the law of
nature: that woman’s function as a mother, directly and indirectly,
creates a need of caution, which at times interferes with her daily
work if she obeys the need; while if, on the other hand, she disregards
it, it revenges itself on her and on the new generation. Nor could any
improvements in the care of children and domestic arrangements prevent
what always remains above these things—if the home is to be more than
a place for eating and sleeping—from taking up time and thought,
powers and feelings. If, therefore, we are to retain the old division
of labour, under which the race has hitherto progressed, then woman
must be won back to the home.
But this involves more than a thorough transformation of the present
conditions of production; for we are here face to face with the
profoundest movement of the time, woman’s desire of freedom as a human
being and as a personality, and in this we are confronted with the
greatest tragic conflict the world’s history has hitherto witnessed.
For if it is tragic enough for an individual or a nation relentlessly
to seek out its innermost ego and to follow it even to destruction—how
tragic will it not be, when the same applies to half of humanity? Such
a tragedy is profound even when it occurs in the struggle between
what are usually called the “good” and “evil” powers in man—a form
of speech which followers of the religion of Life have given up,
since they know that so-called crime may also increase human nature
and human worth; that what is profoundly human may appear as evil and
yet be healthy and beautiful, since it involves the enhancement of
life. But infinitely greater will be the tragedy when the conflict
arises between powers unquestionably good—those in the highest sense
life-enhancing—and not even between secondary powers of this order,
but between the very highest, the fundamental powers themselves, the
profoundest conditions of being.
That is how woman’s tragic problem now stands, if we leave out of
consideration the egoists just alluded to and turn our eyes to the
majority: woman’s nature against man’s nature, exercise of power in
order to satisfy the claims of the member of the race or those of the
personality. If Shakespeare came back to earth, he would now make
Hamlet a woman, for whom the question “to be or not to be” would be
full of a double pathos: the eternal terror of the human race and the
new terror of the female sex before its own riddle; the bearer of the
most refined spiritual consciousness of the time, and therefore—while
forced by circumstances to make a decision—a victim of hesitancy,
doubt, and fortuity. As true as that all life is a development of
force, so is it that happiness is an ever more complete use of one’s
powers, ever richer in promise for the future, in the direction of
their greatest aptitude. But when these aptitudes lead in two contrary
directions, then the soul is in the same position as the wanderers in
the legend of Theseus, whom the “pine-benders” bound to the tops of two
trees.
The struggle that woman is now carrying on is more far-reaching than
any other; and if no diversion occurs, it will finally surpass in
fanaticism any war of religion or race.
The woman’s movement circles round the periphery of the question
without finding any radius to its centre, which is the limitation of
human existence to time and space; the limitation of the soul in the
power of simultaneously giving itself up to different spheres of
thought and feeling, and the limitation of the body in the capacity for
bearing a constantly increased burden.
The heaviest cause of degeneration at the present time—the necessity
for millions of women of earning their bread under miserable
conditions, and the risk that they may lose, some the possibility,
some the wish, for motherhood—may disappear, and nevertheless the
chief problem will remain unsolved for any woman who has attained
individually-human development.
In however high degree a woman may be bodily and mentally competent,
this can never prevent the time her outdoor work occupies being a
deduction from the time she can bestow on her home, since she cannot
simultaneously be in two places; she cannot have her thoughts and
feelings simultaneously centred upon and absorbed by her work and her
home. And all that is personal in her home life, all that cannot be
left to another, will thus necessarily interfere with her individual
freedom of movement, in an inward as well as an outward sense.
If the child and the husband mean anything at all in a woman’s life,
she cannot allow another to have the affection, the care, and the
anxiety about them: she must give her own soul to this.
But then, on the other hand, it will interfere with her book, her
picture, her lecture, her research, just as infallibly as would the
trouble of in her own person nursing and taking care of the child— a
trouble which she is really able to renounce, though with a great loss
of happiness and of insight into the child’s character.
In a word, the most momentous conflict is not between health and
sickness, development or degeneration, but between the two equally
strong, healthy, and beautiful forms of life: the life of the soul or
the life of the family.
Many women, who see the necessity of deciding for one or the other,
choose the former and thus avoid or limit their motherhood, since they
believe themselves to have another, richer contribution to make to
civilisation. But would not the race have gained more by the talents of
which these gifted women might have been the mothers?
We may pity for their own sake the barren women of the aristocracy
or plutocracy, who from pure selfishness have refused to become
mothers. But they do an involuntary service to the race, in that fewer
degenerate children are born.
Full-blooded women, in a mental or bodily sense, are, on the other
hand, the most valuable from the standpoint of generation. When these
are content with one child or none, because they wish to devote
themselves to their individual pursuits, then it is their work, not
the race, which receives the richness of their blood, the fire of
their creative joy, the sap of their thought, and the beauty of their
feelings.
But it may be—according to a very moderate calculation—that there are
annually produced by the women of the world a hundred thousand novels
and works of art, which might better have been boys and girls!
It is nearly always the best women who are confronted by the tragic
necessity of choosing one sphere or the other, or of dividing
themselves in an unsatisfied way between the two; for, the more they
increase their demands upon themselves, the more surely do they feel
this partition as a half-measure.
Partly by economical necessity, however, partly by the spirit of
the age, the choice is more and more often determined in favour of
work, when the two alternatives are evenly balanced in a woman’s
own feelings; for the emancipation of women has laid the stress of
feeling upon independence, social work, creation. This has raised
these considerations in the mind of woman to the same extent as it has
depreciated those of home life. Want of psychological insight makes
the champions of women’s rights candid when they declare that they
have never depreciated the tasks of the home, but on the contrary have
tried to educate woman for them. Schools of housekeeping deserve all
recognition, but as regards creating greater enthusiasm for domestic
duties they have not hitherto been signally successful. It is because
their enthusiasm has been directed to every manifestation of woman’s
desire to work in man’s former sphere, that the calling of wife and
mother has now lost in attraction.
Viewed historically, the work of emancipation must be advanced by this
one-sided enthusiasm. But now it is a question whether woman, in a
new way, will be capable of being inspired by devotion to her purely
womanly sphere of activity?
For nothing short of this would in the main be the solution of the
question. A return to the old ideal of womanliness would be as
unthinkable as it would be unfortunate. A continued struggle to get rid
of the ancient division of labour between the sexes is thinkable—and
equally unfortunate. That woman should apply her new will to her
ancient mission would be the most fortunate solution. But—is this even
thinkable?
The answer is unconditionally in the negative as regards exceptional
natures, such as now, in their increased vitality and capacity for
suffering, beat their heads against the limitation of life which
prevents their giving themselves wholly either to love, or to the joy
of motherhood, or to the mission of civilisation.
Here we are faced by the fundamental cause of the modern woman’s
nervosity. She lives year in and year out above her powers.
She still retains the old consciousness that a mother ought to be
unselfishly absorbed in her mission; that she ought to repose in it
with a profound calm; that she ought therefore to allow the inner
voices, which urge her to follow her instinct of personal development,
to remain unheard. Added to this, she has the new consciousness that
the bringing-up of a child demands the same undivided attention as the
production of a work; that the child is just as sensitive as the work
to a divided mind, a wandering attention. She wishes, as an authoress
has aptly said, “that she could be at the same time the mother of past
ages: the patiently bearing caryatid, who was always in her place, with
the bowl ready for the child’s thirsty lips; and the mother of the
present day: ever on the move, seeking out all new paths, quenching her
thirst at all the springs of life.” She becomes more and more unique,
by being ever more firmly and delicately individualised, and in the
process her desire increases to live her own life in every direction.
But at the same time her feeling of community with the race increases,
and therewith her consciousness of responsibility as mother and human
being becomes more and more aroused. The more “egocentric” she has
become, the less does she remain a family-egoist. The demands of her
personality become ever more definite, ever wider but at the same
time more fastidious in their choice, ever more difficult to satisfy.
Her growing sense of personal dignity imposes on her an ever stronger
self-control—while her whole being is quivering with an ever more
delicate sensitiveness.
And upon this new woman, who is already the embodiment of unrest,
thirst for life, and suffering, the hungry, violent spirit of the
present day flings itself like a cat seizing a bird. A hundred times a
day such a woman is forced to subordinate the claims of personality
to those of society; a hundred times the will of her personality
has to elude her feeling of responsibility. Perfected methods of
work may spare her hands and her footsteps, but they cannot prevent
her eyes from watching with increasing disquiet the balance wherein
affection, sympathy, and responsibility are weighed against her most
intimate longing, her creative joy, her thirst for solitude, and her
self-development. And as first one side of the balance rises and then
the other, it will always seem to her that the heavier one contains a
piece of living flesh cut from her heart; while the side which is—for
the moment—lighter has nothing but dead, though perhaps golden,
weights.
The brain-woman’s time-tables know nothing of collisions. Her
train-schedule is clear: nursing institute and kindergarten, school
and dormitory for the children, whose number is fixed according to the
requirements of society. The meals are served automatically from a
common kitchen; the housekeeping is done by adding up the cash-book. In
a costume designed for work or athletics, she goes to her study. When
the work is done, there is five minutes’ conversation on the telephone
with each of the children; two hours’ exercise in the open air. In the
afternoon, ten minutes’ conversation on the telephone with her husband,
thirty-five minutes’ pause for reception of ideas; the evening is given
up to meetings of a utilitarian or social nature. On Sundays, the
husband and children are invited, when three hours are set apart for
the elimination of their defects, the rest of the time for profitable
amusement. Such a woman never has a thought of the children while at
work; never wants to snatch ten minutes’ extra chat with her husband,
never has promptings at night. She wakes refreshed after the hygienic
number of hours’ sleep; everything goes like clockwork—better indeed,
for the woman of the future is never behind or ahead of time. But
love’s selection will probably not tend towards any great increase
of this type, whose present representatives seem physically and
psychically so little affected by motherhood, that for their part one
is inclined to believe in the stork! And with the other poor, weak, and
“sensual” creatures the blood will no doubt continue to be “a strange
sap,” which makes the head hot with anguish when it ought to be cool
for thought; which forces the heart to beat with longing, when it ought
to be still for deciding; which makes the nerves quiver with anxiety,
when they ought to be tense for creation.
And it is the consciousness of this which in her innermost heart makes
the new woman shy of the love for which she longs. A little emotion she
will not give; the great one would swallow up all the forces of her
soul, and what would then become of the revelation of her personality,
of the word she alone among all beings has within her, the word for the
pronouncement of which she was born?
Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile—interpreted by Barrès as _une
clairvoyance sans tristesse_—expresses, as someone has said, the
feminine individualism of the Renaissance. It is certain, on the
other hand, that the feminine individualism of the present day has a
clairvoyance that is sorrowful even to death.
Never has the earth seen a more complicated and contradictory being
than this woman, melancholy and wistful, cold and sensitive, thirsting
for life and tired of life at the same time. The blood dances otherwise
in her veins, sings another song in her ears, than it has in those of
any other woman since time began. She sees through her husband and is
a stranger to him; his desire seems brutal to her finely-shaded and
contradictory moods: she is not won, even when she allows herself to
be embraced. She fears the child, since she knows she cannot fulfil
its simple demands. When fate attempts to tune these fragile beings to
their full pitch, they break like harp-strings under a rough touch.
They are only able to live partially—but thus they do not find life
worth living.
Even if such a woman chooses this partial life and gives herself
entirely to work, she will nevertheless be still disturbed, in the
domain of personal self-assertion, by the woman’s nature she has in the
main suppressed; for she will often be confronted by the choice of not
succeeding at all or of succeeding by the means of man, the means she
abhorred in him before she herself discovered that it is the struggle
for existence which gives the bird of prey its beak and claws.
She is forced to lament in the choice between relentlessly seeking
her own or failing; between the necessity of being hammer or anvil,
of dividing herself in order to give, or collecting herself in order
to create. Until woman took up a position in the world of public
competition, she did not suffer from this necessity. It was thus
that—in a literal as well as a spiritual sense—she could afford to
develop affection, sympathy, goodness. It is therefore a melancholy
truth that woman’s nature, as it has become when removed from the
struggle for existence, is profoundly opposed to the condition which in
the present economical and psychological circumstances brings success
in this struggle, the condition, namely, of forcing one’s way over
others.
This conflict often begins in a field where woman cannot renounce her
relation to motherhood—that is, where she herself is the daughter.
Even in this character she has a choice to make, pain to inflict and to
suffer.
When we thus see the woman of the present day placed between insoluble
conflicts on every side—or agonising, if solved—we are no longer
tempted to agree with the poet’s dictum that woman’s name is weakness.
For in every fibre we feel that her name is pain.
Those men who, from the observation that woman’s professional and brain
work seems to stand in inverse proportion to her fecundity, have drawn
the conclusion that woman must “return to nature,” leave her brain
unemployed and exclusively bear children, are easily refuted. There
is no satisfactory evidence that mental work in itself need injure
woman’s capacity for easy and happy motherhood. In the animal world,
as among savages, the females easily bear motherhood together with
other great burdens. In civilised communities, on the other hand, it
is partly through a lower class, whose bodies are overworked, partly
through an upper class, who overwork their brains—or else do not work
at all,—that the physical difficulties of motherhood have arisen. That
the world’s greatest female geniuses have had few children or none,
is in full analogy with the great male geniuses—while these men as a
rule have had gifted and distinguished mothers, an experience which
alone is sufficient proof that woman’s “weak-mindedness” may not be
the most favourable state of mind for the enhancement of the race. No
conclusive evidence can be adduced against the statement that, when
brainwork is moderate and combined with proper care of the health, it
may have good effects also in women. The same is true of bodily labour.
But as both are carried on at present, the woman, no more than the man,
has been able to keep within the limit of her powers. Therefore at
present woman’s studies and bread-winning labour involve dangers which
have been increased under the spur of the dogma of equality, which
has driven woman on to show that she could bear everything that man
bears—that is to say, more than man or woman can endure.
But when once studies and labour have been somewhat organised, they do
not in themselves involve anything that will make the unmarried woman
any less fit to be a mother of the race; on the contrary, they are
certain to involve much that will make her more valuable. It is thus
not for the unmarried woman that the conflict is presented in the form
of a choice between renouncing—even in the uncertain possibility of
motherhood—the development or use of one’s purely human powers. And
when perfect candour as regards the sexual life has become the custom
between the sexes even from childhood, it will also be possible for
women, during work, study, or exercise, to have those considerations
for health which modesty has hitherto led them to neglect. In this
way, but not through the employment itself, many a woman has lost her
chances of motherhood.
Thus the conflict does not commence until marriage; and for the
exceptionally gifted, as we have already said, it may be tragic. For
the majority it will not become so unless the wife is obliged to
earn her living outside the home and at the same time wishes fully
to perform her duties as mother, or when she wishes to attend to her
personal business but is prevented by a large family from so doing.
The question is thus for the majority: either the abandonment of the
work which produces a living, or the limitation of the number of
children.
The first alternative will be dealt with later. As for the second, it
is here that the main conflict takes place.
It is from the point of view of the ennobling of the race, as well
as from that of the nation, that men implore women to “return to
nature”[4]; it is from that of civilisation that women now refuse
nature their allegiance.
Nothing—even from the national point of view—is more justified than
woman’s unwillingness to produce children by the dozen or score. The
former consumption of wives, for a man between fifty and sixty, was
seldom less than three wives in succession and as a rule half the
children of each of them. Limitation of the number of children—apart
from other sociological points of view—has above all the advantage,
that many children of poor quality return a low interest upon the
capital of working-powers and other expenses that their birth
and bringing-up cost, while a smaller number of fully efficient
children return a high rate of interest in the shape of increased
working-powers, as is sufficiently shown by the prosperity of France.
But when we turn to the question, up to what point the limitation may
be unattended with danger either to the nation or to the individual,
then opinion is so sharply divided that to any unprejudiced examination
it must seem premature at present to lay down the line of development
of the woman’s question as coinciding with the limitation of the number
of children. Even if it be finally agreed that a nation’s welfare
demands of the women who ought and can be mothers, the birth and
upbringing of but three or four children, it is not decided that the
enhancement of the race is thereby sufficiently provided for.
Besides which, the new woman does not want three or four children, but
only one or at most two.
Besides the danger, in this case incontestable, from the point of view
of the nation, and the possible danger from that of the race, there
is here a great danger for the children themselves. Their childhood’s
happiness demands a circle of brothers and sisters and the difference
in age between the children should preferably not be more than two
years. Not only their happiness but their development is aided by this.
The position of an only child, or of only son or daughter, usually
results in childhood in great selfishness, while in later years, on the
other hand, it produces frequently a heavy burden of duty, and thus, in
both cases, brings danger to harmonious development.
One or two children have a poorer, and also a more dangerous, childhood
than those who among a number of brothers and sisters learn the
value of mutual consideration, of shared joys and troubles. Thus,
without any risk of loss of individuality, awkwardness is polished
and sensitiveness strengthened, which otherwise in later life would
cause great losses of power. For a circle of school-fellows can only
imperfectly take the place of the nursery’s first education in social
humanity.
Besides which it may easily happen that parents lose an only child, or
the only son or daughter.
Thus perhaps from the point of view of the nation, always from that of
the children, and most frequently from that of the parents, the normal
condition for the majority of healthy, well-to-do married people must
be, that the number of children shall not fall short of three or four.
But in this case a mother must reckon that her children will occupy
about ten years of her life, if she will herself give them the nursing
and care which will make them fully efficient. And during these
years—if her contribution in either direction is to have its full
value—she must neither divide her powers by working for a living nor
by constant public activity. During these years, she may continue
her own general development; she may take occasional part in social
work; now and then she may have time for mental production. But
any continuous and exhausting work outside the home will, at least
indirectly, diminish her own vital force and that of her children.
Thus the majority of women will never avoid a conflict, lasting
for years, between the renewal of the race and their own outward
self-assertion, in whatever direction the latter may go; just as little
as they can avoid the conflict of the double burden, now laid with
increasing frequency upon women: that of bread-winning and the increase
of the race.
When to all this is added the need, for both husband and wife, of
mutual converse, and finally the cares of housekeeping, then every
thoughtful person must see that woman—and with her society—is
confronted by a problem in the form of “either—or,” not of “both—and.”
Only by society undertaking the support of those women who by well
fulfilling the duties of motherhood have produced the highest social
asset, can the question of married women’s bread-winning be solved.
And only if women put their personal creative desire into their mission
as mothers during their children’s first years, will the problem be
solved of woman’s self-assertion and of her simultaneous devotion to
the mission of the race.
No, is the answer of Charlotte Perkins Stetson[5] and of many others
with her; the solution is State care of children. Look at all the
wretched homes, where the children lack the most necessary mental and
bodily conditions for healthy development. The collective rearing of
all children would be both better and cheaper. Only those women who
are liberated from the toils of the nursery and the kitchen are really
free. To the woman accustomed to public activity, the tasks of the home
are monotonous and tiresome. On the other hand, as a calling freely
chosen, the care of children would satisfy those who have the gift
for it. The majority of mothers are only ape-mothers to their little
children, and, as the latter grow bigger, this vague affection is
replaced by an obstinate misunderstanding.
This is what one hears over and over again at the present time. And the
more it is repeated, the more certain do women become that all these
half-truths are—the truth.
Thus it is the mothers who are not good enough to bring up their
own children, that are expected to provide the new illustrious
leaders of the community. It is the parents who themselves lack the
talent and inclination for bringing up children, that—directly or
indirectly—will have to superintend and select the persons who, in
their place, will perform the duties of parents. In other words, they
are to discover and appreciate qualities that they do not themselves
possess. The trouble that a woman cannot take for the children to whom
she has herself given life, is to be borne by other women for ten,
twenty, or thirty children, who are not their own.
Even to-day, there is sometimes to be found a kind of primitive
type of womanliness, so widely maternal, with such a superfluity of
strength, of tenderness, of talent for organisation that it is too
powerful for a single home; a type which really possesses the immense
wealth of spiritual elasticity, joy, and warmth, that is necessary
in order that every such child should have its full share of these.
But most women probably do not possess any more of these things than
is just sufficient for their own children. And with these “elected
mothers,” quickly worn out as they would be, ten, twenty, or thirty
children would be as badly off mentally as they would be bodily if a
single mother’s milk had to be divided among them all. It is even now
a serious loss to society that so many human beings are enfeebled for
life by insufficient nourishment in childhood. But according to the
plan we have been discussing, which now has so many adherents, everyone
would be starved in childhood as regards affection. It is even now a
serious loss to culture that school-life makes children uniform. Still
more irreparable would be the harm if their fashioning were in the
hands of a thorough-going State care of children.
The danger of uniformity is inseparable from the present tendency to
a hard-and-fast organisation of society, with an ever greater need of
co-operation, an ever closer connection, an ever more intimate feeling
of relationship between its component parts. The organisation must
go on, because, amongst other reasons, it is only in this way that
the individual can now gain increased freedom for development and the
use of his personal powers. But if these increased possibilities of
satisfying personal needs and using personal powers are to be of value
to the individual—and through him to the whole community—then we
must also have some individualities left who will be capable of taking
advantage of their possibilities.
And now it is certain that the home—with its changing conditions of
good and evil—is first and foremost the best means of forming an
organically developing sense of solidarity with the whole community.
Life itself creates in the home an inter-dependence among its members,
a sympathy for others’ destiny, a contact with the realities of life,
and with the seriousness of work, which no institution can create. It
is by the efforts of a father and a mother that the joys of home are
provided; it is affection for all which counter-balances the mutual
rights of all; which gives to each his weight and his counterpoise in a
way so natural that the methodical arrangements of an institution would
never be able to imitate it. And furthermore, different homes, with
the variety of different impressions they offer, are the best means of
forming different characters and peculiarities. However straitened and
poor in every sense a home may be, it nevertheless, as a rule, provides
more personal freedom of movement and results in less uniformity than
a collective system of bringing-up.
If this is even true of those homes where there can be no question of
education in a higher sense, then in better homes the watchfulness and
warmth of affection, its understanding and sensitiveness, will be the
forces which will induce and protect individuality of character, and
which will most surely discover what ought to be counteracted and what
left alone for self-development. To this must be added the insight
which the parents’ knowledge of themselves and of each other gives into
their children’s character, an insight which no stranger can possess.
To this it is objected that, if every quarter of a town and every few
square miles of country had its “State nursery,” parents would often
be able to see to their children, as well as to take them home and
thus have an opportunity of using their influence. But apart from the
circumstance that the relationship would then in most cases resemble
that of the French _petite bourgeoisie_ visiting their children _en
nourrice_—that is to say, that affection would be shown in a desire
to amuse and deck out the child, to caress and play with it—the most
important point is forgotten. This is that time, more time, and still
more time, is one condition of education, and quiet the other. Souls
are not to be tended like maladies, in fixed hours of treatment.
There is no sphere—as parents are still too apt to forget—in which
the psychological moment is more important than in education. The
action which a mother has seen in the morning, should often be first
mentioned by the child’s bedside at night; the confidence which at the
right moment might have burst from the child’s lips, will never be
given if the father has not availed himself of that moment; the words
which pained the mother this week, must perhaps wait till next before
a natural opportunity of effectively combating them occurs. The caress
for which a little head feverishly longs this evening, will perhaps
to-morrow leave it indifferent. The word of affection which might have
been all-powerful at one moment, is powerless a couple of hours later.
And above all, direct advice or correction is worthless in comparison
with the unpremeditated words that parents let fall in the course of
the day, with the result that the child simply sees the full human life
of its parents.
Only living together on week-days and holidays deepens the immediate
influence of parents; only this makes it possible for the parents
to distinguish in the child the accidental from the essential, the
newly-acquired from the intrinsic in its changing moods.
And finally, when we think we have found that children receive too
much warmth at home, and that they ought rather to be hardened against
life—have we then not observed such “hardened” ones? Have we not seen
how they are beautified when they are admitted to a corner in a home;
have we not discovered that, though in intelligence they may be far in
advance of their time, their feelings are still on a level with those
of the savage?
So far from homes being too warm, they are seldom sufficiently
warmed by the only love that lasts for life, that of knowledge and
comprehension. Never yet was a human being too much loved, but only too
little, or not in the right way. The whole spirit of the age is now
opposed to the fatherly and motherly feelings of older times, which
were related to the blind affection of animal parents. The affection
that is left must be intensified, not weakened.
The child’s splendid, unconscious happiness is in making others happy;
in being answered by the smiles it produces; in showing outbursts of
affection and receiving affection in return; in feeling the security
and pride of itself owning and belonging to its father or mother; in
allowing this delight to show itself in play and caresses and being
met with the same delight without its being empty. For in a home,
where some seriousness prevails, a child soon learns that affection
also means work and sacrifice for others. From such affection the
psychically personal tie of blood is formed, while the “natural” one
grows weak, as it is not renewed by the apparently unimportant daily,
hourly influence of the intangible, invisible things, through which,
as even the _Edda_ tells us, the indestructible ties are formed. In
a word, the home of one’s childhood is for the development of human
feelings, what one’s native place is for the development of patriotism.
Even now home-life suffers in a disquieting degree from the school’s
increasing grasp of the older children; from the indifference to and
disconnection from the home which occurs when it sees the children only
at meal-times, on Sundays, and during the holidays. But if even the
little children were to be placed in the same situation, then this evil
would be extended to the most decisive years of their lives.
To turn now from parents and children to the new foster-mothers of
the town and country nurseries, how is it intended that these shall
suffice for their own children, if they are mothers, how—if they are
motherly—are they to content themselves with the children of others,
which they will furthermore be compelled to lose over and over again?
Have the women who want to be “freed” ever given a thought to the
sufferings of these others?
The only possibility of endurance for such nurses will be to give the
children only that general kindness that is not enough for them. Love
they will not be able to give. No word is more abused than love, not
least by the interpreters of Christianity, who attenuate it into a
wafer for the nourishment of all, under the name of universal love. But
there is no such thing as universal love, or love of humanity; there
cannot be such a thing; it would be as much a contradiction in terms
as a quadrilateral triangle. There is a charity which pours itself
out like oil upon all wounds; there is sympathy in joy and sorrow
between individuals; mutual help and mutual responsibility in society;
a common feeling of rejoicing or suffering with our nation or with
humanity at great moments. But all love from one human being to another
which deserves that name, is in the highest degree individual; it is
a selection, a separation. If it is not this, it is nothing. A woman
chooses her children even when she chooses their father; and she often
shows her preference among the children themselves. An individually
developed mother rightly asserts her privilege of not loving all her
children equally. She gives them all the affection they need in the
same degree; she is capable of the same broad justice towards them all,
but she has for one of them a more personal love than for the rest.
The profound tragedy in the relations between parents and children
is precisely this, that this relationship is often as passionate as
personal love, but without the latter’s understanding; that it involves
the claims of a great emotion, but not the power that an individual
feeling has of becoming intensified in the same degree as the claim is
increased.
Individual love is alone sufficient for a child’s needs. An “elected
mother” may perhaps once, or several times, be able to feel such a love
for one or more of the children entrusted to her. But she cannot have
this love for all of them, and she will herself be torn asunder when
one after the other the children she loves are taken from her.
The mothers for the State institution must furthermore be found by
thousands, if the whole of society is to be constructed on this plan.
And then it will be with them as with the clergy, who in the earliest
congregations were called by the Holy Spirit, but afterwards by the
congregation. It would be more and more rarely the proved personal
aptitude and inner necessity that would decide the choice, but in its
place the accepted standard of professional training.
It is by means of these professional mothers, as is now the opinion,
that children would have better conditions of life than in their own
homes, where, in spite of all shortcomings, personal responsibility
and personal affection render imperfection in the higher grades of
education less dangerous than perfection in a lower grade.
Exceptional circumstances exist, to provide for which the crèche, the
kindergarten, the asylum, and the industrial school must continue for
the present. But instead of trying to make these expedients universal,
we ought to endeavour to eradicate the causes which render them
necessary. This would be road-making in the right direction. The other
is a short cut, which will infallibly take us longer round.
It is true that poverty now gives many children unhealthy homes. Attack
the causes of poverty then, instead of taking away the children and
leaving the parents in misery. It is true that much parental affection
is injudicious. Then educate people to be parents. It is true that
parents now increase the inheritance of certain children at the cost of
the others. Then lessen the possibility of this.
But do not deprive all children of their rightful inheritance: home
feelings and memories of home, home sorrows and home joys, all that
gives its peculiar tone, colour, and perfume to every human being’s
disposition.
Do not abolish the most important of all collective education, that
of the children through the parents and of the parents through the
children.
Doubtless, love’s freedom will bring about more complicated family
relations than at present. From this point of view there seems to be an
evident advantage to the children in State institutions, where their
lives would not be so immediately affected by dislocations in those of
their parents. But to deprive the majority of children of their homes,
because the minority might thus lose theirs, would be a worse expedient
than that of connecting the home more closely with the mother and
developing human beings so that they may remain friends even when they
have ceased to be husband and wife, and may thus continue to be capable
of co-operating for the welfare of the children.
In a word, it is not the family that ought to be abolished, but
the rights of the family that must be reformed; not education by
parents that ought to be avoided, but education of parents that must
be introduced; not the home that ought to be done away with, but
homelessness that must cease.
The State rearing of children would work like the feeding of foundlings
on Pasteurised milk: they sickened when they were thus deprived of
certain indispensable bacilli. The people who were brought up on
the germ-free milk of universal benevolence, in the untainted air
of uniform order; who had their origin in the love of the majority,
their nourishment from the automatic machine of the institution, their
education in the mould of the school, their occupation as wax-makers
in the social hive—these unfortunate creatures might find existence
so tame and so empty that those of them whom weariness of life had not
driven to suicide before the age of twenty might use their atavistic
longing for happiness in burning down the institutions and rebuilding
homes for human beings.
Can people not understand that State care of children would force upon
the young generation life’s last and hardest experience, that of not
being the most important or the nearest to anyone, and that this heavy
fruit—under which old trees may give way—might deform the young ones
for ever? Do not people see that, even if many homes are now hell,
we should not sink to the lowest circle of hell—which Dante’s fancy
made ice-cold—until the warmth was quenched which the hearths of home
still throw out, and their place was taken by the steam-heating of the
institution? When existence is made up of beings with starved hearts,
frozen souls, obliterated characteristics—what materials will these
afford for constructing the society of which they will form part?
Will they even care to produce children as raw material for the human
factories; or the necessaries for the maintenance of that life in which
the elements of personal happiness are wanting? Will they even have the
energy to take a decision about the order of society which robs them of
life’s greatest values?
So wonderfully strong is in man the need of having some place of his
own, of being among his own, feeling himself at home in one poor corner
of the world, in a single poor heart, that this feeling has even the
power of clearing a morass into a spring by subterranean ways.
On a railway journey in the South I once saw a woman, whose face,
figure, and manners betrayed the completest downfall. This mother had
a beautiful six-year-old daughter. Never was it more horrible to see
a child at her mother’s knee; never did an amulet seem more powerless
than the saint’s image that a pitying hand had hung about the child’s
neck. But when the child leaned towards her mother, she was embraced
by the drunken harlot with a tender emotion, which restored to her a
spark of human dignity. And when the child read in the looks of her
fellow-travellers the disgust her mother inspired, her dark eyes glowed
with angry sorrow and she took up before her mother a position of
protesting affection. No one could doubt that this child ought to be
taken out of such unclean hands. But I wonder whether a better guardian
would be able to give her the great emotion which at that moment
dilated the child’s soul? If in a case like this one can even hesitate
about the line between disadvantage and advantage, then in many other
cases one will be convinced that it is not necessarily where a child
has the best food, the cleanest bed, the most uninterrupted care, that
it will thrive best, but rather where its soul may be expanded by
the warmest and greatest emotions. Moreover it is one of the sacred
mysteries of life that most parents, in themselves and towards one
another, are worse than the child sees them; for the last being before
whom a wretch casts off his protecting rags of human dignity is his
child.
Against the wickedness of parents, however, as against their
ill-treatment, the child must be protected, and that in a much greater
degree than now by a constant extension of the right and duty of
society’s intervention in these cases. But, when it can be avoided, the
children ought just as little to be deprived of the protection of home
as the home should be deprived of the protection children give to it,
by compelling the parents to at least some measure of self-discipline,
self-control, and self-sacrifice, whereby their souls are extended
beyond the individual ego. In the day when the “hardening” atmosphere
of the State institutions encompasses all children, human virtue will
sink with even greater rapidity them human happiness.
All that has been said above does not imply any blindness to the fact
that even the best homes are now penitentiaries in comparison with what
they may become when the formation of a home has become a science and
an art. At present the home is fortunately—or unfortunately—neither
inspected nor rewarded with prizes. But perhaps this time is coming—as
already in France the seventh child is brought up at the cost of the
State, and decorations are proposed for those women who have borne and
brought up the greatest number of efficient children. Then, if not
before, will the “liberated” women perhaps regain some interest in the
development of their powers in the direction of the home.
What now frequently diminishes externally the value even of good
homes, is that they are arranged to promote a kind of “aspiration,”
diametrically opposed to genuine life-enhancement, whose first
condition is that the home in a material respect should bear a
relation to the health and comfort of its own members, not the habits
of life of outsiders. What again detracts in a spiritual respect
from even the very best homes is that their members still retain the
family rudeness and want of consideration of older days, a rudeness
which—owing to the new sensitiveness, the deeper strength of personal
consciousness—causes even from childhood daily pain that, as
infallibly as the grosser faults of bad homes, poisons air and food.
People still allow themselves within the home circle a scornfulness
of each other’s peculiarities, a silencing of each other’s opinions,
a prying into each other’s secrets, a betrayal of each other’s
confidences, which in daily life place the members of the circle on a
footing of armed neutrality. In good homes, affection, and in inferior
ones fear, stops them from breaking out into open war; for in both
cases all know each other’s vulnerable spots so well, that they are
perfectly well aware how severe the conflict would be for themselves as
well as for the others.
But so long as homes, even the best ones, have these faults,
institutions must exhibit similar results—since both will be formed
of the same human material. The institutions, on the other hand, would
not possess the advantages which in the case of homes outweigh the
faults. These faults may be gradually diminished by a higher spiritual
culture. But nothing could compensate for what mankind would lose by
the abolition of the home.
The conclusion is thus that—however differently the conflict must
be resolved in exceptional cases between woman’s personal claims and
her motherly feelings—in the main those women who, in order to serve
humanity, renounce motherhood or its cares, are conducting themselves
like a warrior who should prepare for the battle of the morrow by
opening his veins the evening before.