THE SUPREMACY OF MOTHERHOOD
“The dregs of the human species--the blind, the deaf mute, the
degenerate, the imbecile, the epileptic--are better protected than
pregnant women.”--Bouchacourt.
“I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of the society
of this present day are the carelessness with which it regards the
betrayal of women, and the brutality with which it suffers the
neglect of children.”--Ruskin.
A chapter must be included here concerning a question which can never
safely be ignored in any consideration of race-culture, but the
importance of which, as I think I see it, is recognised by no one
who has concerned himself at all with this subject, from Mr. Francis
Galton himself downwards. We must all be agreed, Mr. Galton declares,
as to the propriety of breeding, if it be possible, for health, energy
and ability, whatever else may be doubtful. To this I would add that,
whether we are agreed or not, we must breed for motherhood, and that,
even if we do not, we shall have to reckon with it. The general eugenic
position, I fancy, is that the requirements which we should make of
both sexes, the mothers of the future as well as the fathers, are
essentially identical: but it seems to me that we have not yet reckoned
with the vast importance of motherhood as a factor in the evolution
of all the higher species of animals, and its absolute supremacy,
inevitable and persistent whether recognised or ignored, in the case of
man. Any system of eugenics or race-culture, any system of government,
any proposal for social reform--as, for instance, the reduction of
infant mortality--which fails to reckon with motherhood or falls
short of adequately appraising it, is foredoomed to failure and will
continue to fail so long as the basal facts of human nature and the
development of the human individual retain even approximately their
present character. Whatever proposals for eugenics or race-culture be
made or carried out, the fact will remain that the race is made up of
mortal individuals; that every one of these begins its visible life as
a helpless baby, and that the system which does not permit the babies
to survive, _they_ will not permit to survive.
This is a general and universal proposition, admitting of no
exceptions, past, present or to come. It applies equally to conscious
systems of race-culture, to forms of marriage, to forms of government,
to any other social institution or practice or character that can be
named or conceived. Upon every one of these the babies pronounce a
judgment from which there is no appeal. The baby may be a potential
Newton, Shakespeare, Beethoven or Buddha, but it is at its birth the
most helpless thing alive, the potentialities of which avail it not one
whit. It is in more need of care, immediate and continuous, than a baby
microbe or a baby cat, whatever the unpublished glories of which its
brain contains the promise; and in the total absence of any apparatus,
mechanical, legal, or scientific, which can provide the mother's breast
and the mother's love, individual motherhood, in its exquisitely
complementary aspects, physical and psychical, will remain the dominant
factor of history so long as the final judgments upon every present and
the final determinations for every future lie in the hands of helpless
babyhood--which will be the case so long as man is mortal. When, if
ever, science, having previously conquered disease, identifies the
causes of natural death and removes them, then motherhood and babyhood
may be thrown upon the rubbish heap; but until that hour they are
enthroned by decree of Nature, and can be dethroned only at the cost of
Her certain and annihilative vengeance.
It is the master paradox that at his first appearance the lord of the
earth should be the most helpless of living things. Consider a new-born
baby. “Unable to stand, much less to wander in search of food; very
nearly deaf; all but blind; well-nigh indiscriminating as to the nature
of what is presented to its mouth; utterly unable to keep itself clean,
yet highly susceptible to the effects of dirt; able to indicate its
needs only by alternately turning its head, open-mouthed, from side to
side and then crying; possessed of an almost ludicrously hypersensitive
interior; unable to fast for more than two or three hours, yet having
the most precise and complicated dietetic requirements; needing the
most carefully maintained warmth; easily injured by draughts; the prey
of bacteria (which take up a permanent abode in its alimentary canal
by the eleventh day)--where is to be found a more complete picture of
helpless dependence?”[42] How comes it that this creature is to be
lord of the earth, and a member of the only species which succeeds in
continually multiplying itself?
=Motherhood and intelligence.=--We have maintained that the vital
character which is of supreme survival-value for man is his
intelligence, and this, as we know, is his unique possession. It is
very largely for intelligence, therefore, that race-culture or eugenics
proposes, if possible, to work. But if there be certain conditions
which must be complied with before intelligence can possibly be
evolved, eugenics will come to disaster should it ignore them. These
conditions do exist, and have hitherto been entirely ignored by all
students of this question. Let certain great facts be observed.
Why is the human baby the most helpless of all creatures? Since it is
to become the most capable, should it not, even in its infant state,
show signs of its coming superiority? What is the meaning of this
paradox?
The answer is that, so far as physical weapons of offence and defence
are concerned, these have disappeared because intelligence makes them
superfluous or even burdensome. But the peculiar helplessness of the
human infant depends not upon its nakedness in the physical sense but
upon its lack of very nearly all instinctive capacities. It is this
absence of effective instincts which distinguishes the baby from the
young of all other creatures. Why should its endowment in this respect
be so inferior?
It is because of the fact that, if instinct is to give rise to
intelligence, it must be plastic. A purely instinctive creature reacts
to certain sets of circumstances in certain effortless, perfect and
fixed ways. The reactions are the whole of its psychical life. They
need no education, being as perfectly performed on the first occasion
as on the last, and in many instances being performed only once in the
whole history of the creature in question. But, on the other hand, they
are almost incapable of education, and even in the cases where they
lack absolute perfection at first, they only require the merest modicum
of opportunity in order to acquire it. Perfect within their limits,
they are yet most definitely limited. They never achieve the new,
they are utterly at fault in novel circumstances, and they are wholly
incapable of creating circumstances.
A creature cannot be at once purely instinctive and intelligent. An
instinctive action is simply a compound reflex action, a highly adapted
automatism: now automatism and intelligence are necessarily inversely
proportional. It is possible for an intelligent creature to acquire
automatisms, which are popularly described as instinctive. They are
not instincts, however, but the acquired equivalents of instincts:
“secondary automatisms.” If they are used to replace intelligence, the
individual, in so far, sinks from the human to the sub-human level.
Their proper function is to leave the intelligence free for higher
purposes more worthy of it than, say, the act of dressing oneself.
In order that an intelligent creature should be evolved it was
necessary that instinct should become plastic. Intelligence could not
be superposed upon a complete and final instinctive equipment. You
cannot determine your own acts if they are already determined for
you by your nervous organisation. The incomparable superiority of
intelligence depends upon its limitless and creative character, in
virtue of which, as Disraeli puts it, “men are not the creatures of
circumstances: circumstances are the creatures of men.” But whilst
intelligence can learn everything, it has everything to learn, and the
most nearly intelligent creature whom the earth affords thus begins
his independent life almost wholly bereft of all the instruments
which have served the lower creatures so well, whilst, on the other
hand, he is provided with an utterly undeveloped, and indeed, at
that time non-existent, weapon which, even if it did exist, he could
not use. Hence the unique helplessness of the human baby: one of
the most wonderful and little appreciated facts in the whole of
nature--effectively hidden from the glass eyes of the kind of man who
calls a baby a “brat,” but, to eyes that can see, not only the master
paradox from the philosophical point of view but also a fact of the
utmost moment from the practical point of view.
=The evolution of motherhood.=--It directly follows that motherhood is
supremely important in the case of man. It is the historical fact that
its importance in the history of the animal world has been steadily
increasing throughout æonian time. The most successful and ancient
societies we know, those of the social insects, which antedate by
incalculable ages even the first vertebrates, could not survive for a
single generation without the motherhood or foster-motherhood to which
the worker females sacrifice their lives and their own chances of
physical maternity.
The development of maternal care may be steadily traced throughout the
vertebrate series--_pari passu_ with the evolution of sexual relations
towards the ideal of monogamy, which is ideal just because of its
incomparable services to motherhood. But whilst motherhood is of the
utmost service for lower creatures, tending always to lessen infant
mortality--if it may be so called--and to increase the proportion
of life to death and birth, it is of supreme service in the case of
man because of the absolute dependence upon it of intelligence, the
solitary but unexampled weapon with which he has won the earth. Hence
in breeding for intelligence we cannot afford to ignore that upon which
intelligence depends. Even if we could produce genius at will, we
should find our young geniuses just as dependent upon motherhood as the
common run of mankind. Newton himself was a seven months' baby, and the
potentialities of gravitation and the calculus and the laws of motion
in his brain could not save him: motherhood could and did.
Even our least biological reformers must admit that purely physical
motherhood, up to the point of birth, can scarcely be omitted in any
schemes for social reform or race-culture. Some of them will even
admit that purely physical motherhood, so far as the mother's breasts
are concerned, cannot wisely be dispensed with. The psychical aspects
of motherhood, however, many of these writers--I do not call them
thinkers--ignore. In relation to infant mortality--which is the most
obvious symptom of causes productive of vast and widespread physical
deterioration amongst the survivors, and which must be abolished
before any really effective race-culture is possible--it is worth
noting that motherhood cannot safely be superseded. I do not believe
in the _crèche_ or the municipal milk depôt except as stop-gaps, or
as object-lessons for those who imagine that the slaughtered babies
are not slaughtered but die of inherent defect, and that therefore
infant mortality is a beneficent process. In working for the reduction
of this evil we must work through and by motherhood. In some future
age, boasting the elements of sanity, our girls will be instructed in
these matters. At present the most important profession in the world is
almost entirely carried on by unskilled labour, and until this state
of things is put an end to, it is almost idle to talk of race-culture
at all. But under our present system of education, false and rotten as
it is in principles and details alike, it is necessary for us to send
visitors to the homes of the classes which, in effect, supply almost
the whole of the future population of the country, and to establish
schools for mothers on every hand.
=Psychical motherhood.=--I confess myself opposed to the principle
of bribing a woman to become a mother, whether overtly or covertly,
whether in the guise of State-aid or in the form of eugenic premiums
for maternity. It may sound very well to offer a bonus for the
production of babies by mothers whom the State or any eugenic power
considers fit and worthy. But though the bonus may help motherhood
in its physical aspects, the importance of which no one questions,
I do not see what service it renders to motherhood in its psychical
aspects--which are at least equally important. What is the outlook for
the baby when the bonus is spent? In fact, with all deference to Mr.
Galton, and with such deference as may be due to the literary triflers
who have discussed this matter, I am inclined to think that a cardinal
requisite for a mother is love of children. Ignorant this may be, and
indeed at first always is, but if it is there it can be instructed. The
woman who does not think the possession of a baby a sufficient prize is
no fit object, I should say, for any other kind of bribe or lure. The
woman who “would rather have a spare bedroom than a baby” is the woman
whom I do not want to have a baby. Thus I look with suspicion on any
proposals which assume that the psychical elements of motherhood are of
little moment in eugenics. I see no sign or prospect that they can be
dispensed with, and I think eugenics is going to work on wrong lines if
it proposes to ignore them. Even if you turn out Nature with a fork she
will yet return--_tamen usque recurret_.
In this question we should be able to derive great assistance from
biography. Real guidance, I believe, is obtained from this source, but
only a pitiable fraction of that which should be obtained. Scientific
biography is yet to seek, and it is the ironical fact that when Herbert
Spencer, in his _Autobiography_, devoted a large amount of space to
the discussion of _both_ his parents and their relatives, the literary
critics were bored to death. Nevertheless, we cannot know too much
about the ancestry, on both sides, and the early environment, of great
men. At present it is always tacitly assumed that a great man is the
son of his father alone. The biographer would probably admit, if
pressed, that doubtless some woman or other was involved in the matter,
and that her name was so and so--if any one thinks it worth mentioning.
On the score of heredity alone, however, we derive, men and women
alike, with absolute equality from both parents; and we cannot know too
much about the mothers of men of genius. Such knowledge would often
avail us materially in cases where the paternal ancestry offers little
explanation of the child's destiny.
We do owe, however, to great men themselves many warm and unqualified
tributes to their mothers, not on the score of heredity, but on the
score of the psychical aspects of motherhood. This, indeed, is one of
the great lessons of biography which some eugenists have forgotten.
It is all very well to breed for intelligence, but intelligence needs
nurture and guidance, and that need is the more urgent, the more
powerful and original the intelligence in question. The physical
functions of motherhood from the moment of birth onwards can be
effected, no doubt, though at very great cost, by means of incubators
and milk laboratories, and so forth. But there is no counterfeiting
or replacing the psychical component of complete maternity, and a
generation of the highest intelligence borne by unmaternal women would
probably succeed only in writing the blackest and maddest page in
history.
=The eugenic demand for love.=--Mr. Galton desires that we breed for
physique, ability, and energy. But we also need more love, and we must
breed for that. Nothing is easier or more inevitable once we make
human parenthood conscious and deliberate. When children are born only
to those who love children, and who will tend to transmit their high
measure of that parental instinct from which all love is derived, we
shall bring to earth a heaven compared with which the theologian's is
but a fool's paradise.
The first requisite, then, for the mothers of the future, the elements
of physical health being assumed, is that they should be motherly. They
may or may not, in addition, be worthy of such exquisite titles as
“the female Shakespeare of America,” but they must have motherliness
to begin with. For this indispensable thing there is no substitute. It
must certainly be granted, and the fact should not be ignored, that the
hidden spring of motherliness in a girl may be revealed only by actual
maternity, and the frivolous damsel who used to think babies “silly
squalling things” may be mightily transformed when the silly squalling
thing is her own--and the Fifth Symphony sound and fury signifying
nothing compared with its slightest whimper. I will grant even that the
maternal instinct is so deeply rooted and universal that its absence
must be regarded as either a rare abnormality or else as the product of
the grossest mal-education in the wide sense. But the reader will not
blame me for insisting at such length upon what, as he would think, no
one could deny, when he discovers that these salient truths are denied,
and that in what should be the sacred name of eugenics, they are openly
flouted and defied.
Before we go on to consider these perversions of a great idea, it may
briefly be observed that, though fatherhood is historically a mushroom
growth compared with motherhood, and though its importance is vastly
less, yet as a complementary principle, aiding and abetting motherhood,
and making for its most perfect expression, fatherhood played a great
part in animal evolution, in the right line of progress, ages before
man appeared upon the earth at all, and that its work is not yet done.
To this subject we must return. Meanwhile it is well to note the
dangers with which eugenics is at present threatened in the form of
certain proposals which, if for a time they became popular--and they
have elements making for popularity--would inevitably throw the gravest
discredit upon the whole subject.
=Eugenics and the family.=--Certain remarkable tendencies invoking
the name of eugenics are now to be observed in Germany. These have
considerable funds, much enthusiasm, journalistic support, and even a
large measure of assistance in academic circles. In pursuance of the
idea of eugenics there is a movement the nature of which is indicated
by the following quotation from a private letter:--
“I wonder if your attention was drawn to the German projects of the
reform of the Family. They all aim at improving the German race and
rendering decisive its superiority over all others. The means seem
to be too revolutionary. The more modern wish the establishment of
the matriarchal family (_ein nach Mutterrecht_), the more logical
require universal polygamy and polyandry, an individualisation of
Society. Others hope to increase the production of German geniuses
by the ‘hellenic friendship.’[!] The three movements are strongly
organised, command large pecuniary means, a phalanx of original and
prolific writers, and enthusiastic devotion to their cause. More
even than the support of Courts and aristocracy is, in my eyes, that
of the Universities. It is there that the destinies of Germany have
always been shaped, and if they are determined to reform the Family
in that way, it will be done.... The Herren Professoren are terribly
in earnest, yet they say things which even to the least prejudiced
minds appear ridiculous and even vulgar. Still, their projects have
some relation to Eugenics, and to Sociology in general.”
This sufficiently indicates the dangers run by the eugenic principle
at the hands of those who see in it an instrument of protest and
rebellion against established things. We dare not repudiate the sacred
principles of protest and rebellion, which have been the conditions of
all progress, but believing in motherhood as we must, believing it to
be authorised by nature herself and not by any human conventions, we
must deplore any tendencies such as the two last cited. For us in this
country, however, a more immediate interest attaches to the views of a
much admired and discussed writer who claims to be a social philosopher
of the first order, and whose claims must now be examined.
The opinions of Mr. Bernard Shaw on the question of eugenics may be
quoted from his contribution to the subject published in _Sociological
Papers_ 1904, pp. 74, 75, in discussion of Mr. Galton's great paper.
Mr. Shaw begins by saying: “I agree with the paper and go so far as
to say that there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the
fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation from
the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations.” And further:--
“I am afraid we must make up our minds either to face a considerable
shock to vulgar opinion in this matter or to let eugenics alone....
What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being
hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the
institution of marriage. If our morality is attacked, we can carry
the war into the enemy's country by reminding the public that the
real objection to breeding by marriage is that marriage places no
restraint on debauchery, so long as it is monogamic.... What we need
is freedom for people who have never seen each other before and never
intend to see one another again, to produce children under certain
definite public conditions, without loss of honour.”
The conception of individual fatherhood here stated involves a
deliberate reversion to the order of the beast: it excludes individual
fatherhood from any function in aiding motherhood or in serving the
future. It involves, of course, the total abolition of the family. It
denies and flouts the very best elements in human nature. It assumes
that the best women will find motherhood worth while without the
interest and sympathy and help and protection of the father. It does
not, however, condemn or exclude the psychical functions of motherhood,
since so far as this quotation goes it might be assumed that the mother
would be permitted to live with her own child. On this point, however,
Mr. Shaw offered us further guidance in his controversy with myself in
the _Pall Mall Gazette_, in December, 1907. One or two of his _dicta_
must here be quoted--they followed upon my remark, “Anything less like
a mother than the State I find it hard to imagine”:--
“When the State left the children to the mothers, they got no
schooling; they were sent out to work under inhuman conditions,
under-ground and over-ground for atrociously long hours, as soon as
they were able to walk; they died of typhus fever in heaps; they grew
up to be as wicked to their own children as their parents had been to
them. State socialism rescued them from the worst of that, and means
to rescue them from all of it. I now publicly challenge Dr. Saleeby
to propose, if he dares, to withdraw the hand of the State and
abandon the children to their mothers as they fall.... All I need say
is that before Dr. Saleeby can persuade me to sacrifice the future
of human society to his maternalism, he will have to tackle me with
harder weapons than the indignant enthusiasm of a young man's mother
worship.”
Mr. Shaw's teaching constitutes a brutal and deliberate libel upon the
highest aspects of womanhood. For his own purposes he attributes to the
mothers all the abominations which, as every one knows, have lain and
in some measure still lie, at the door of the State. The man who has
this opinion of motherhood is complacently ignorant of the elements of
the subject. His charge is denied by every one who has worked as doctor
or nurse or visitor or missionary amongst the poorer classes, and knows
that the mothers there met are of the very salt of the earth.
It is well to state plainly here that these utterly irresponsible
_dicta_ have absolutely no relation or resemblance whatever to the
opinions or proposals of Mr. Francis Galton himself, who desires to
effect race-culture through marriage, and whose whole propaganda is
based upon this assumption. This we shall afterwards see. Meanwhile
we may note Mr. Galton's own words: “The aim of eugenics is to bring
as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful
classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to
the next generation.” Mr. Galton would be the first to assert that
influences designed to supersede motherhood and to abolish everything
but the physical aspect of fatherhood, would not be reasonable, but
insane in the highest degree.
The ideal of race-culture without fatherhood or motherhood, except in
the mere physiological sense, constitutes a denial of the greatest
facts in evolution, as we have seen. It ignores everything that is
known and daily witnessed regarding the development of the individual,
and the formation of character, without which intelligence is a curse.
There is not the slightest fear that any such reversion to the order
of the beast is possible, absolutely forbidden as it is by the laws of
human nature. There is, however, reasonable ground for apprehension,
especially when the recent developments in Germany are remembered,
that the public may obtain its notions of eugenics in a highly-garbled
form.[43]
It must be asserted as fervently and plainly as possible that, if the
idea of race-culture is even in the smallest degree to be realised,
it must work through motherhood and fatherhood not less in their
psychical than in their physical aspects. It is time to have done with
the gross delusions of Nietzsche regarding the nature and course of
organic evolution. Morality is not an invention of man but man the
child of morality, and it is not by the abolition of motherhood, in
which morality originated, nor of fatherhood, its first ally, that
the super-man is to be evolved: but by the attainment of those lofty
conceptions of the function, the responsibility and the privilege of
parenthood which it is the first business of eugenics to inculcate.
As for marriage, invaluable though at its best it be for the completion
and ennoblement of the individual life, its great function for society
and for the race is in relation to childhood. Thus considered, the
dictum of Professor Westermarck may be understood, that children are
not the result of marriage but marriage the result of children.
This, in other words, is to say that marriage has become evolved
and established as a social institution because of its services to
race-culture. It is, in short, the supreme eugenic institution. This
great subject must next occupy our attention.