Now the right to bear children without taking a husband could not be
confined to women who are superfluous in the monogamic reckoning. There
is the practical difficulty that although in our population there
are about a million monogamically superfluous women, yet it is quite
impossible to say of any given unmarried woman that she is one of the
superfluous. And there is the difficulty of principle. The right to bear
a child, perhaps the most sacred of all women's rights, is not one that
should have any conditions attached to it except in the interests of
race welfare. There are many women of admirable character, strong,
capable, independent, who dislike the domestic habits of men; have no
natural turn for mothering and coddling them; and find the concession of
conjugal rights to any person under any conditions intolerable by their
self-respect. Yet the general sense of the community recognizes in these
very women the fittest people to have charge of children, and trusts
them, as school mistresses and matrons of institutions, more than women
of any other type when it is possible to procure them for such work. Why
should the taking of a husband be imposed on these women as the price of
their right to maternity? I am quite unable to answer that question.
I see a good deal of first-rate maternal ability and sagacity spending
itself on bees and poultry and village schools and cottage hospitals;
and I find myself repeatedly asking myself why this valuable strain in
the national breed should be sterilized. Unfortunately, the very women
whom we should tempt to become mothers for the good of the race are the
very last people to press their services on their country in that way.
Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with
sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties
to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing; and yet we
have taken his instruction so little to heart that we are at present
suffering acutely from government by gentlemen who will stoop to all the
mean shifts of electioneering and incur all its heavy expenses for the
sake of a seat in Parliament. But what our sentimentalists have not
yet been told is that exactly the same thing applies to maternity as to
government. The best mothers are not those who are so enslaved by their
primitive instincts that they will bear children no matter how hard the
conditions are, but precisely those who place a very high price on their
services, and are quite prepared to become old maids if the price is
refused, and even to feel relieved at their escape. Our democratic and
matrimonial institutions may have their merits: at all events they are
mostly reforms of something worse; but they put a premium on want of
self-respect in certain very important matters; and the consequence is
that we are very badly governed and are, on the whole, an ugly, mean,
ill-bred race.