FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DISASTROUS TO INFANT-LIFE AND HUMAN
FACULTY
"_A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to
make a home._"--Chinese Proverb.
I
The paths alike of progress and of happiness lie, obviously, in the ever
further dignifying and enhancement of the functions of home and of
wifehood, by way of every further interest and charm that higher, fairer
Womanhood confers.
The chief cause of latter-day conjugal unrest and disaffection is to be
found--not in the natural state of marriage, but in a decline of those
personal traits which make for happiness therein. Girls brought up as
now, without home-interests or training, but, on the contrary, with
mainly self-realising and self-absorbing aims and pursuits, are
deficient not only in domestic aptitudes but lamentably also in
emotional qualities. And the home-life without the emotions to give
values to it, is like a fine air played on the keyboard of a piano from
which have been removed the strings that transform the movements of the
fingers into melody.
So keenly self-centred the majority of women have become, so bent upon
their hobbies and careers, as to have lost nearly all of that
sympathetic adaptiveness natural to woman, which enables her to
forget--and to forget with pleasure--her own in the personality and
interests of others.
How eagerly latter-day girls seek refuge from their boredom in the
tennis-court, the Bridge-table, the dance, or in some other mode of
direct action which entails but little temperamental tax or output!
To such degree the sexes are now drilled to the same standards,
interests, and points-of-view, that neither brings to the other any new
thing, of freshness, of colour, or of inspiration. The interchange is
only too often a competitive struggle, indeed, as to which shall know
(or shall appear to know) more than the other knows (or appears to know)
of topics equally trite to both. There is little or nothing of the zest
and glamour of a delightful picnic of two; whereat each keeps producing
some new and unexpected thing to supplement the new and unexpected of
the other. Modern woman has no novelty in language even for her mate,
but deals him back his own slang--a vernacular which among women of the
working-classes not seldom takes the forms of blasphemy and obscenity,
wholly disqualifying for the rearing of children. As, indeed, do the
coarse and vulgar phrases in vogue now among the cultured of the sex. In
view of woman's native faculty of music and her subtle aptitude for
naming (as for nick-naming), one cannot doubt that she it was who
mothered Language. Yet now-a-days, adopting virile lingo, her "rotten,"
"stick-it," and the like are murdering the infant of her quondam genius.
And what genius it was, that gave birth to our surpassing mother-tongue!
In case of engagement between a young man and his bored one--whom, by
the way, although he may suspect that the relation is not all that it
might be, he never suspects of being bored--manlike, he trusts to
marriage "to put everything right." Yet although the newly-wedded more
and more relieve themselves of the strain of a honeymoon, with its
unmitigated (or inimitable) company of two, a month or six weeks of
wedlock find most young modern couples wofully at cross-purposes.
Possession has freed the man of the obligation to woo. And when the
wooing--which had engendered for the woman a flattering and intoxicating
sense of being a coveted prize--comes to a more or less abrupt ending,
she feels herself defrauded.
He too! Because while Courtship is man's affair, Marriage is woman's.
And where love is not, to recruit and quicken passion and to take the
place of novelty, the wane of honeymoons is sad indeed.
(There are faults and failings on the bridegroom's part, 'tis true. That
belongs to another story, however. Sufficient for these pages is the
unpleasing task of holding a mirror to the faults of a single sex.)
It should be remembered that men, for the most part, are not eager to
marry. Considering the nature of the bond, with its lifelong
obligations, responsibilities and sacrifices, this is little to be
wondered at. A week after marriage a wife may be crippled by an
accident, may become insane; or may otherwise be thrown, more or less a
burden, on her husband's hands. Or she may develop disagreeable and
wholly uncongenial traits. In spite of which, even though they wreck his
happiness, he will have bound himself to her--and will have bound
himself to maintain her--till death them parts.
He too, of course, may turn out wholly unsatisfactory. That belongs
likewise to the other story. But from the material standpoint, the onus
of support which falls on him, and which, in the case of an invalided or
of an obnoxious wife, may prove nothing but a carking care, makes the
liabilities unequal.
It is, doubtless, because of these his greater material obligations and
responsibilities, that passion has been planned to beset man more
urgently than woman. And had Church and State not taken advantage of his
inherent, chivalrous instinct, and so turned it to account, both for his
own moral uplifting and for the founding and maintenance of the family,
woman and society--and man, accordingly--would have remained at very low
grades of development.
II
Among other "wrongs" resented by women is that his obligation and his
economic means to support a wife have endowed the male, in the majority
of cases, with the lordly prerogative of selecting his mate. On her
side, while having much to gain materially by marriage, unless she is
unusually attractive she has but little range of choice.
And yet this masculine prerogative of selection has served as the
strongest incentive to the culture both of higher attribute and charm in
woman. Failing that economic struggle which has been man's spur to
development, this incentive has operated vastly to her benefit; inducing
her parents to educate and to enhance her gifts, and influencing her to
do the like for herself. A proportion of women have always been
self-supporting, of course. But their work has been mainly in fields of
unskilled labour, and has lacked, accordingly, the stimulus of
competition. The goal of marriage has not only supplied thus the element
of emulation, but it has turned Woman-culture in the direction of
developing personal traits and morale, rather than industrial or
professional specialisations. And this has been the right direction,
seeing that the role of the sex is one demanding personal qualities and
virtues rather than economic technicalities.
As regards human values, it is a higher privilege to be a charming
personality than to be a successful stockbroker. So that in this, as in
other things, woman has been privileged by her disabilities.
III
An ever-increasing number of working-class girls, on leaving school,
enter a work-shop, a factory, or an office, and spend their time and
powers in minor mechanical tasks; gumming labels on jam-pots, making
match-boxes or tags for boot-laces, addressing envelopes, and other such
employments, deadening to female intelligence, impulse and temperament.
Their minds and natures become too warped and narrowed to adapt later,
with ease and interest, to the many and varied intelligent functions of
the home. They escape thence, accordingly, after a few months or years
of marriage (supposing them to have given up their industrial tasks for
a space even), and abandoning home and children, return to the old
narrow, mechanical routine, to which alone their poor stultified brains
have been shaped. In the education of girls, the Subconscious mimetic
element in their impressionable natures should be borne in mind. It may
be turned to excellent, as to disastrous account.
M. Vologotsky, head of the Omsk Government, has called attention to a
significant phenomenon of modern Russian life--namely, that the women
take no interest in their homes. This he attributes to their low states
of culture. Could they but be persuaded to become "house-proud"--with
all that this means and entails--he considers that the task of the
Regeneration of this vast unhappy, although singularly gifted, people
would be greatly furthered.
Constitutional deterioration, inherited or acquired, entailing defective
sex-development, causes many young working-women to be deficient in the
maternal instinct, whence spring fondness for and interest in children.
The same defective sex-development, disqualifying them for wifehood,
results in the vast majority of working-class wives lapsing, after a
few years of marriage with normal, virile young men, into haggard,
neurasthenic wrecks.
The whole of this vital and important department of the
woman-organisation is not only ignored in so far as scope for normal
development is concerned, but, despised as subserving inferior and
"merely physical" functions, every other capacity and aptitude is
fostered or forced at the expense of constitutional reserves and
resources which belong, by rights of Life and Love, to this. With the
result that the vast majority of modern women are physically unfitted
for, as an increasing number are temperamentally averse to the
sex-relation--_fons et origo_ of Life.
IV
To such degree the doctrine of Expedience and Self-for-Self-solely has
spread that there are women who seek now to escape wholly the natural
pangs of childbirth. Such persuade their doctors to induce labour a
month or more before term; in order that the smaller-sized infant may be
born with less discomfort to themselves. Others restrict their diet or
abstain from certain foods, in order that the babe, starved thus and
ill-nourished before birth, shall be soft and frail and easier of
delivery. Dread of pain at whatsoever cost to the future of a human
being--and that being their own child--actuates these unnatural and
pusillanimous practices.
It is becoming a vogue for expectant mothers of the wealthier classes to
enter Maternity-Homes, where, in luxurious surroundings, they are
enabled, under spinal anaesthesia (Twilight Sleep), to conclude their
mother-function without suffering or inconvenience; lying in a torpor of
crass insensibility while the greatest of Human Events is taking place
in them. Meantime, the sensitive infant-body is dosed with the powerful
drug circulating in the maternal blood.
But--whither is all this trending? Can we believe that true intelligence
and progress consist in grasping greedily all the pleasures and the
privileges to be had from life, and basely shirking all the hardships?
Can we believe that--suffering and effort being the laws alike of Life
and Progress, and the rungs whereby we have climbed the Evolutionary
ladder--we can continue to climb when, with short-sighted selfishness,
we shall have stripped the ladder of its rungs? The humane use of
chloroform duly assuages the worst pangs. While the fine courage,
fortitude and sweetness wherewith the soul of woman fares forth
naturally upon her Great Adventure, to meet this the Apotheosis of human
pain, prove and still further enhance her nobility. Even weak and flimsy
women rise to greatness at this crisis. Powers they had never glimmered
in themselves emerge and armour them, and--be it remembered--leave
eternal records upon mind and character; striking spiritual roots still
deeper into living function.
V
With characteristic Feminist materialism, Olive Schreiner lightly
dismisses Maternity as a merely "passive" form of labour.
Heaven save the mark! Is it passive so to equip a microscopic cell with
living human powers and aspirations that, within the space of months, it
makes that miraculous pilgrimage of the pre-natal evolutionary ascent
whereby it becomes Man? Passive--so to serve for living environment to
this developing organism as to supply it with the multiple, complex and
diverse elements, material and vital, biological and psychical, required
for the manifold needs and adjustments of its evolving life and
faculties?
During the ante-natal months of this miraculous Ascent, the embryo
"climbs its genealogical tree," as biologists style it. That is to say,
it passes, in turn, through all the countless evolutionary phases of all
the countless evolutionary ages whereof Humanity is the culminating
product. Fashioning out of formlessness, slowly it attains to form.
Shaping, shaping, ever marvellously shaping, it evolves, in succession,
through fish, amphibian and other rudimentary life-grades. Climbing,
climbing, ever marvellously climbing, day by day, to nobler heights, it
is transformed at last to human shape; lower human first, then higher
human, and finally to the highest human possible to its stock, its
parentage, and the resources, physical and psychical, available to it.
It is the most stupendous miracle in Nature; a miracle so sacred and so
tender that every man in passing an expectant mother should mentally bow
the knee. Individually, socially, morally--she may be a person of but
small significance. But because of the mystery of Life enshrined within
her, she is a living Testament of Evolution. The pregnant woman is,
moreover, pregnant with the destiny of Races.
During those ten lunar months there is enacted in the tender darkness of
the mother's womb the whole wonderful drama of the Human
transfiguration. With lightning swiftness, the evolving babe climbs in
the footsteps that its countless ancestors had trod, in forms
innumerable, along the route interminable of the Human Advent. In
flashes of progressive, infinitesimal transitions, through incalculable
phases and mutations, the single cell of double parentage unfolds the
marvel occulted in it. Until at last, the living product stands
triumphant on the topmost branch of its genealogical tree, a perfect
human babe awaiting birth; the last achievement of its Race, the latest
and most perfect bud of its hereditary stock.
In so far as all this occurs subconsciously within the mother, the
materialist may lightly dismiss the evolutionary marvel as a "passive"
form of labour. But although subconscious, these unceasing processes
demand inevitably such proportional vital potential and activities on
her part from whom the powers energising it are derived, as to be a
continued tax and strain upon her strength and health. There are women
who feel this strain but little. A rare few of these because they are so
richly endowed with maternal potence that the subconscious processes
have remained, as Nature doubtless intended, for the most part
subconscious and painless. Far more often, however, when Maternity
exacts but little from the mother, _it is because she is contributing
but little to the child_. I have observed that the finer a child in
physique and in brain, the greater the stress and disability the mother
had suffered prior to its birth.
VI
Indifferent, notwithstanding, to all the vital activities and psychical
evolutions taking place within the mysterious laboratory of the mother's
body; reckless of the circumstance that any interference with, or
hampering of the least of these must inevitably jar, and warp, the
delicate complexes of infantine development, we scruple not to strain
and burden, to harass and deplete, the prospective mother even further
by strenuous breadwinning. Her whole physiology and psychology are
profoundly altered by her momentous condition; by the new adjustments to
the needs of the developing babe, of the maternal circulation and
digestion, assimilation and elimination, mentality and intricate nervous
constitution and processes. Fatigue, noise, turmoil, effort, shock--any
one or all of these which are inseparable from industrial
employment--cannot but injuriously re-act upon the delicate evolutions
mysteriously occurring in her.
The infant brain is complete at birth. From its lowest to its highest
departments, all the marvel of exquisitely-delicate construction and
association of its complex cells is achieved pre-natally. And according
or not as her vital powers have been rich and otherwise unexpended, and
according or not as the embryological processes of development have
occurred in quietude and freedom from strain upon the mother's part,
will be the quality for life, in vigour and in sanity, of her child's
intelligence and character.
VII
In view of those lower biological grades through which the embryo passes
before arriving at the human stage, it is inevitable that maternal
over-fatigue, shock or undue effort may arrest its physical development
temporarily upon any of these lower levels. And such arrest must
inevitably entail some warp or bias of a lower animal phase; which may
so impress itself permanently on embryonic development as to detract
more or less gravely from the final transition.
It is, doubtless, for this reason that many modern humans show in their
configuration, degrees of reversion to ape, sheep, fish and other lower
species.
Shock or nervous perturbation in the expectant mother may occasion, in
the babe, appalling monstrosity, or such minor defects as cleft-palate,
hare-lip, and other deformities. Showing the vital and--inevitably--the
psychological effects on offspring, for good or for evil, of maternal
conditions and impressions.
The Germans record that of infants born during the war, a number are
gravely degenerate of type, an infant-degeneracy attributed by some to
the creed of Hate obsessing German mothers. The same phenomenon is seen
however in the offspring of mothers exhausted by religious preachings
and marchings, in furtherance of their creed of Christian Love.
For Biology recognises no Theology except its own--that of Evolution.
At a representative meeting of London doctors, it was stated recently
that the number of imbecile infants now coming into existence with us is
no less than appalling.
A medical wiseacre has adventured the amazing dictum that _Every infant
is born healthy_! He might, with equal truth, have said that every
infant is born wealthy, or is born a Chinaman. Some infants are born
alive, a great number are born dead. And between those born alive and
healthy and the still-born, lie all the infinite gradations of
constitutional condition between life and health, between disease and
death.
One child inherits from its parents a tuberculous tendency; another a
neurotic, another a strain of alcoholism or other taint. One is born
blind or a hopeless idiot; another with hare-lip or clubbed-foot;
another with congenital heart-disease. One babe is born with a beautiful
head; all its brain-faculties nobly developed and splendidly balanced.
Another is born headless, or with a skull which, from crown to brows, is
a rapid descent--showing lack of all the brain-powers involved in higher
mentality; is born, in short, of criminal inherency.
The degrees in which individuals strive against inherited tendencies
differ greatly, as do the life-conditions wherein their will and moral
power are tested--to make or to break them. Man is not, of course, _the
creature_ merely of his heredity or of his environment. But he whose
mother has equipped him with physical defects instead of with qualities,
even though he fight against his disabilities, is obviously handicapped
for the life-struggle. A great musician may charm fine music from a
poor fiddle, but in no degree so fine as he will bring out of a more
perfect instrument.
VIII
A phenomenon which has baffled vital statisticians is a curious relation
between the Birth-rate and Infant-Mortality. A high birth-rate is found
to be associated with a high rate of infant-mortality; while with a
lower birth-rate, the death-rate among infants and children decreases.
Long and careful observation has left me in no doubt as to the cause of
this phenomenon. Which is, that under strain of disease, of industrial
exhaustion or strenuous activities of any sort, but particularly as
result of _the constitutional drain entailed by pregnancy_, mothers may
so draw upon the vital powers of their children in order to recruit
their own, as to occasion fatal illness in their families.
The evil is so great in its effects, not only upon the health and
constitution of the rising generation, but, as well, upon the physical
and mental development thereof, that such maternal depletion is, I am
assured, a cause of widespread disease among children; of infantile
paralysis, degeneracy and mortality. It is reason enough, in all
conscience, to call for the legalised prohibition of all mothers with
young families from engaging in professional or industrial employment.
Because although such depletion of her children's health is graver in
degree during a mother's pregnancy, at all times over-worked, sickly, or
strenuous women recruit their powers from the constitutional resources
of others. Only, indeed, by such depletion of their neighbours can many
of our present-day neurotic, overactive women (some of them with
ill-nourished bodies and feeble assimilation, but with, nevertheless,
indefatigable energies) contrive to keep going.
Strong-willed, self-centred women, keen in pursuit of business,
athletics or pleasure, will, by sapping the nervous forces of these,
keep all the members of their households--husband, children,
servants--more or less de-vitalised, neurasthenic and characterless; one
or more actually invalided, perhaps.
If nervous energy is, indeed, a complex form of electrical energy, this
nervous interchange is intelligible; obeying the law that bodies
under-charged with electricity charge themselves from bodies more highly
charged, until equilibrium is established.
Who among doctors does not know the wan and listless, semi-paralytic
babes that working-mothers--and most particularly _pregnant_
working-mothers--bring to the consulting-room? The hapless victims lie
limply, or sit hunched upon the woman's lap, nerveless, wasted,
apathetic; faces white and hopeless, abdomen lax and tumid; the blenched
limbs soft as butter, weak and dangling. They are suffering, perhaps,
from some specific ailment, bronchitis, paralysis, gastric or intestinal
troubles; perhaps only from mysterious wasting and inanition. Not seldom
there is an elder child too, white and weak and fretful, and the subject
of "infantilism"; growth stunted, development arrested. Such children,
in their mental hebetude and physical degeneracy, suggest a degree of
cretinism. And in the suggestion, a possible cause appears for the
cretinous offspring of the hard-living, over-worked mothers of Swiss
cantons.
IX
Drummond says of Motherhood:
"_Even on its physical side ... this was the most stupendous task
Evolution ever undertook._"
While on the physical side, we see that Nature has made infancy and
childhood increasingly helpless as species advances in evolutionary
values, in order to call forth increasingly intelligent, and sympathetic
response and resource in the mother. Feminism in _un_making the mother,
is undoing the labours of countless ages of evolutionary advance. The
intensifying mentality of woman, destined for the more subtly
intelligent and sympathetic nurture of the Race's increasingly valuable
and complex offspring, is being diverted, more and more, by Feminist
counsel and practice from human and vital into merely economic channels.
Life is so constituted that its most cruel disabilities and evils are
borne inevitably by the children in the van of the Great March. These
hapless ones it is--soft buds pushing from the Human Tree--that bear the
brunt of the evolutionary impulse.
In the main, the very finest children of The Poor succumb. Because the
higher the organism, the more complex and delicately-fitted to its vital
needs its life-conditions require to be. Briars flourish where
rose-trees die. Degenerate children struggle through where better types
go under. We are not ready, it is true, for exotic humans. But we need
urgently, indeed, all the healthy, intelligent, well-balanced stock we
can produce.
A certain uniformity of type is secured by the expedients of Natural
Selection; by that continual correction of premature evolutionary
unfoldment which results from the checks and prunings of developmental
exigencies--in the necessary acclimatisation and adaptation of the young
and tender organism to environment. And Nature herself provides all the
checks and prunings required, in her tests of teething, of measles, and
the other diseases and trials of infancy and childhood.
The respiration-curves and the brain pulse-waves of young infants show
serious disturbance as result of sudden loud noises. The consequent
nervous jar perturbs both breathing and circulation.
The whole organisation of an infant is so delicate and is so subtly
balanced as to require the gentlest possible treatment. One sees on the
faces of infants and young children a chronic look of painful
expectancy. Their brows are knitted as though to brace their
hyper-sensitive systems for the next distressing shock. Women accustomed
to hard, laborious work (or sports) lose power to adjust their movements
to these delicate needs. And when, unkind and impatient, they fly at the
unfortunates and shake or beat or scold them violently, they have no
suspicion that for hours afterwards, perhaps for days, the children's
nervous systems may be so shattered and disorganised, digestion and
assimilative powers so impaired, as to interfere gravely with growth and
development. Degrees of "shock," akin to shell-shock, result from such
maternal violence and chronic terrorism; occasioning feeble-mindedness,
morbid timidity, mental hebetude and, moreover, subconscious
impressions, which, later in life, may emerge as obsessions, or as other
forms of insanity. Fear is the most shattering and paralysing of the
emotions. Yet not only brought up by hand, the majority of our little
ones are brought up by _violent_ hand.
All day long and during every moment of it, a thousand delicate
processes of growth and unfoldment and of intricate adjustments are
going on mysteriously within the shaping brain and body of a child.
Subconsciously, these are a continued tax and strain; making him
hyper-sensitive, irritable, cross, perhaps, for causes that appear
inadequate. A child is like a convalescent, in that he uses up rapidly
for growth and development all the nutritive material and vital energy
at his disposal. This is true of healthy, well-nurtured children. What
then of these child-martyrs of The Poor, who in addition to the strain
of growth, are ill-fed, poisoned by unsuitable foods; are sickly,
rickety, bronchitic, dyspeptic, syphilitic, phthisical? Nevertheless,
all the maternal care these miserables receive are such rough dregs of
kindness and of patience as may be left over from the toil of their
working-mothers' hard, exhausting days.
It is no less than monstrous that our laws allow the nation's babes and
children--to whom are due all the best resources of maternal care and
tenderness and duly-trained maternal powers--to be thus martyred. As
substitute for the home and for their mothers--which are every child's
birthright--more and more, infants and young children are consigned now
to Creches; chill institutions of alien atmosphere, alien surroundings,
alien nurses, where, unmothered, they are ciphers among other unmothered
alien ciphers. Yet babies and young children are so pathetically
constituted that they prefer blows from their mothers to caresses from
strangers.
X
The life-story written in the faces of the great majority of our
Twentieth-Century babes and children is a terrible one, in its
revelation of tortured helplessness, hopeless resignation, unnatural
fortitude, blank despair. See them sunk, limp and dejected, in their
prams or go-carts, eyes staring forward on the dreary waste their lives
are; limbs dangling, like those of toys with broken springs.
In cities, mothers, ignorant of the shock and injury which noise and
turmoil inflict upon these sensitive brains and nerves, wheel them amid
jostling crowds--in order that they themselves may enjoy the excitements
of the shops. At the low level of their prams, they breathe air vitiated
by the passers-by; are in the exhausting whirl and press of swirling
nerve-currents. In their poor ill-made carriages, they are jerked
abruptly, now up, now down, at every kerb; with no more care or
tenderness than though they were baskets of clothes. They sit patient,
leaden, apathetic; cruelly strapped for hours together in one position;
neither pulse of health nor spirit in them.
In cold weather, their heads but thinly thatched with hair are bare. So
too their limbs; though warmth is life to young, developing creatures.
In hot weather, the sun beats mercilessly down upon their hatlessness,
their exquisitely-sensitive brains but slightly shielded by their thin
un-ossified skulls. Degrees of sunstroke, with lifelong injury to health
and faculty, occur. They knit their pale brows in fruitless attempt to
defend their weak eyes from the glare. Many keep their lids close shut,
to protect both eyes and brain from the nerve-shattering solar rays,
which are far too powerful to be allowed to fall, untempered, upon an
infant's highly-sensitive body. With closed eyes, the poor things miss
all the joys of their ride; the colour and movement about them, and the
spurs to intelligence these should supply. Their unobservant mothers and
nurses suppose them to be sleeping!
Children old enough to walk are walked to stages--sometimes to extremes
of exhaustion. You may see them dragging heavily along, with wan,
exhausted faces; peevish and cross, and scolded and shaken and slapped
for being peevish and cross. Exhaustion from such over-fatigue will keep
a child below par for days; checking its growth and development--to say
nothing of its happiness. Children derive but little benefit from their
holiday changes to sea or country, because of the exertions forced upon
them, or the too strenuous play to which they are exhorted.
Children who go bare-headed suffer, in large number, from eye-strain,
with resulting permanent frown. As too, from ear-ache and from
ear-diseases; from headache and toothache. In as many as 75 per cent. of
school-children, vision is defective.
The obsessing aim of many mothers is to "harden" their children. Yet no
more than a clay model in the shaping may be hardened and set, should
the process be applied to children in the shaping.
Healthy children are inevitably _delicate_ children, because of that
highly-sensitive re-activity to surroundings which not only
characterises but _conduces_ to the developmental state. (Such delicacy
must not be confused with _sickliness_.) The finer the organisation the
longer it takes (within normal limits) to come to full growth. Our
greatest men and women were delicate in youth. Hardy children are always
of inferior type--for the most part, plain and shrewd and unimaginative,
insensitive, unlovable. They have matured (have adapted to environment,
that is) precociously. Evolution of higher faculty has been prematurely
arrested in them.
Modern children are described as "super-children," for their abnormal
sharpness and worldly perspicacity. They are merely precocious, which is
to say, they have missed their childhood. And too early development
entails inevitably early decline. Not only America, but England now has
produced a grey-haired boy of ten!
No less amazing than it is lamentable is the light neglect by the
majority of cultured mothers, of their grave maternal obligations. From
earliest infancy, they hand over their children, body and soul, to the
ignorance, the carelessness, the cruelty (not seldom to the viciousness
even), of stranger-women of the uncultured classes; women of whose
character and disposition they know nothing, and who are only too often
unfitted by nature, by upbringing, and by habit for this most delicate,
difficult and important of all human tasks.
It is by no means uncommon to find prostitutes, grown too old for a
trade that has vitiated every cell and secretion of their bodies (to say
nothing of mental vitiation), officiating in the capacity of nursemaid
to children of culture.
Every child is a new creation, with a highly specialised organisation of
mind and of body. For the nurture and best development of these, are
required high degrees of intelligence, of understanding and of sympathy
in treatment. To realise its idiosyncrasies, constitutional and
temperamental, and to adapt to these in its rearing and surroundings,
with respect to diet, exercise, play, sleep, moral supervision and
discipline, demand intuitive perceptiveness, intelligent discrimination,
and practical resource such as no other department of life demands--or
is worth.
Notwithstanding all this, mothers who can afford to shelve their duty
upon paid substitutes abandon the most complex and sensitive, the most
beautiful and valuable, and moreover, the most helpless thing in
Nature--the mind of a child--to be shaped and coloured, during all the
most impressionable years of its development, by persons with neither
aptitude nor faculty for this supremely complex and difficult function.
In place of so adapting its environment to the child-organism as to
enable it, fenced within the tender mother-fold, to enjoy to the full
and to develop to the full the lovely, inspiring beliefs and illusions
of natural childhood, latter-day mothers now cruelly rob their little
ones of this fructifying phase, by prematurely forcing worldly knowledge
and distrusts upon them, in precocious adjustment to mature view-points
and conditions from which they should be carefully secluded.
In that mysterious Mind-department, the Subconsciousness, with its
highly sensitised brain-tablets, every smallest happening of a
lifetime--scenes, experiences, mental impressions--are photographed, to
be stored for ever after as ineffaceable records. And though, perhaps,
wholly forgotten, these subconscious records nevertheless colour and
influence for ever after every thought and impulse and action.
Sometimes they flash up as memories. They can be recalled under
hypnotism.
The young mind is like an unfurnished house. The rooms are empty. There
are no pictures on the walls. But its unblotted, exquisitely-sensitised
spaces are ceaselessly filming indelible records of everything seen and
felt and apprehended. One impression may correct, or may distort,
others. Or that right point-of-view which is judgment may focus all
impressions in the true perspective which reveals their true values and
proportions. But until such judgment has been formed by mental
development, it is vitally important that all the impressions absorbed
by young minds, whether of their life-conditions and associates, of
books or of plays, shall be fair and simple and wholesome.
Thus, the foundations of mind and of character are laid in clean,
intelligising and uplifting influences.
XI
While we deplore, as appalling, that during the first fifteen months of
War, 109,725 of our fighting men were killed or died, the returns of the
Registrar-General show that during the twelve months of the peace
preceding War, _there died 140,957 of the nation's children_, at less
than five years old; 95,608 of these at less than a year old.
Consider it! War, with its destructive engines of bomb and shell, more
or less swiftly and painlessly kills just over a hundred thousand men,
in the course of fifteen months. Peace, with its destructive
transgressions against Nature, kills in less time a far greater number
of defenceless babes and children, by slow and more or less torturing
forms of disease. Babies, even when unhealthy, come into existence
endowed with a certain Life-potential. And they struggle hard and
painfully to live. It is amazing to see the odds against which the poor
things battle; and battle successfully. It is only the fearfulness of
the odds to which most of them are subjected that succeeds in killing
them.
Pain and suffering are spurs to adult development. In children they are
as needlessly cruel as they are permanently injurious. Far from fitting,
they _unfit_ them for life.
The ratio of mortality is no guide, of course, to the immeasurable
injuries wrought to mind and body by these same fearful odds upon the
children who survive; and who survive, maimed, diseased, degenerate, to
live out lives of disability, of joylessness and ineffectiveness.
It will be said--and said truly--that much of this high infant-mortality
results, not from maternal omissions, but from paternal commissions.
Well, that alas! is another of the terrible wrongs against children
which lie at the door of the sex. Were there not women whose lives are
passed in engendering and transmitting the direst of all the diseases
human evil has bred, the hapless imbecile and paralytic, the blind, the
deaf, the ulcerous, the slowly-wasting, tortured little ones who fill
our asylums and hospitals would not be.
At every turn the truth is more and more impressed, that the fate of
Humanity rests, in some or other form, with its women. Woman is
Redeemer; or she is Destroyer. Because, while man's province is the
material, with its roots in temporal things, woman's province is the
vital, with its roots and stem and blossom in functioning Life.
The burning wrongs of women? Alas! what are they beside the burning
wrongs of helpless babes and children?
* * * * *
XII
An anomaly of Feminism is the admission, on the one hand, that
Motherhood was woman's most valuable function, and her greatest claim
on the community in days of barbarism, and the denial, on the other,
that it is her most important function in civilisation.
The illogic of the position is patent.
That the production of savages should be primitive woman's chiefest
claim to honour; while the production of highly-evolved and complex
human beings should be civilised woman's least.
The potence and the values of fine motherhood are proven by the fact
that every great, or good, or clever man or woman has been the child of
a great, or good, or clever mother. Not of one who has made her mark in
the world of affairs. Such, for the most part, have not reproduced at
all. And when they have been mothers their children have been notably of
inferior calibre.
On the other hand, bad men and bad women have in nearly every instance
been sons or daughters of bad women.
Examples innumerable might be cited to show that both genius and moral
greatness are variations (mutations) of the human species which have
their origin in mother-genius and greatness.
Great scientists, it has been noted, have been sons of women
characterised by intense love of Truth. The love of Truth in the
mother--for Truth's sake--became in the executive, concrete mentality of
the son an intuitive apprehension of the truths of Science, and an eager
and indomitable aspiration to render these in terms of intellection.
* * * * *
Shall woman leave to man no field at all of natural supremacy? Shall she
not be content with her beautiful part as generatrix of Faculty, but
must seek to be exponent too?
That all women do not marry--cannot marry, indeed, because of their
preponderance in number over the other sex--is no reason for dissembling
the truth that in wifehood and motherhood lie woman's most vital and
valuable roles.
Nor is it warrant for training the whole sex as though none were
destined to fulfil this, their natural and noblest--if not always, their
happiest vocation.
XIII
Feminism repudiates, from time to time, the charge against it of
belittling Motherhood. Yet how can it profess to credit the maternal
function with due values or significance when it denies the obligations
and responsibilities thereof, asks no economic concessions for it? And
when, in place of demanding privileges indispensable to its exercise and
complete fulfilment, it makes no distinction, in respect of work and the
worker, between childless and unmarried women and mothers and expectant
mothers? And this despite the fact that, for a period of eighteen months
at very least, the mother's best vital resources belong by rights,
biological and moral, to each babe she produces--nine for the pre-natal
building of its body and brain, and nine for lactation.
Her moral obligation to nurse, and the criminality of her omission when
able to do so, have been emphasised as follows by Sir J.
Crichton-Browne:
"Dr. Robertson, Medical Officer of Health for Birmingham has shown
that while the infant-mortality of breast-fed infants is 7.8 _per
1000 births_, that of infants receiving no breast-milk is 232 _per_
1000. And Sir Arthur Newsholme, Medical Adviser to the Local
Government Board, has shown that the probability of death from
epidemic diarrhoea is 54 _times greater among infants fed on cow's
milk_ than among those fed on breast-milk, and 150 _times greater_
amongst infants fed on condensed milk.
"But it is not merely in a high infant death-rate that the evil
effects of the want of breast-milk stand confessed. Where it does
not kill it often maims, and is responsible for malnutrition,
rickets, tuberculosis, and a multiplicity of ailments. Every doctor
is familiar with the alabaster babies, flabby, limp, languid, and
painfully pallid, who have never tasted their natural nutriment."
Dr. Truby King records the interesting fact that the finest calf-skin,
known as Paris Calf, is obtained from calves reared by their mothers, in
order to provide the finest veal for Paris. So supple and smooth-haired
and superior is the skin of these mother-suckled creatures that dealers
are able to distinguish it at once from the skin of calves that have
been artificially fed.
About this, Mr. Horace G. Regnart kindly supplies me with the following
significant data:
"If we feed a calf, 'on the bucket,' the calf's coat loses its shine and
becomes dull. We say it is 'dead.' A couple of days is sufficient to
deaden the coat. And it takes three weeks or a month 'on a cow' to get
the gloss back. _A quart of milk direct from the cow is as good as a
gallon of milk out of a bucket._
"We do not attempt to feed our female calves so well as we feed the
bulls. It is too costly. Our heifers are put on 'the bucket' when three
days old. I buy a cow to rear my bull-calves on. I once reared a bull on
'the bucket' satisfactorily. But I gave him twelve gallons of new milk
every day after he was five months old, and kept it up till he was
fourteen months. _One cow that gives three gallons does a calf just as
well as twelve gallons_ via _the bucket, and is much cheaper._ Some
crack bulls have three and four five-gallon cows at once, and go to
Shows with all their nurses in attendance.
"Once I reared a bull as we rear the heifers. But he was a failure. His
daughters are only half the size they ought to be."
(An example of direct developmental inheritance--in terms of
deterioration--from father to daughter.)
XIV
Comparing a calf with a human baby, it becomes self-evident that the
diet suited for the large, crude creature which trots about on four legs
shortly after birth must be wholly unsuited to the delicate digestion
and the subtle psychological needs of the small and complex,
highly-organised human infant, which remains so long a helpless infant.
The all-important _proteid_ of every order of creature differs from that
of every other. Before any form of alien _proteid_ can be built into the
body of a living organism, the digestion and assimilation of this
creature must first have laboriously disintegrated and reconstructed it
to the form of its own individual _proteid_.
The Irish tradition that persons not nursed during infancy by their
mothers are beings without souls has much to justify it. Even the
ill-nourished, sickly babes of working-mothers have an essentially
_human_ look in eyes and features, possess far more of nervous power,
and are of appreciably higher and more intelligent psychology than are
the bottle-fed infants of the cultured.
The bottle-fed start handicapped for life, both in constitution and
mentality. It is safe to say that all great men and women have been
suckled by their mothers or have come of stock thus humanly nurtured.
That they were thus humanly nurtured during their momentous first nine
months of life, is the reason, doubtless, why so many of our greatest
men have sprung from humble origin.
The incapacity of a mother to nourish the babe she has borne should be
known for a mark of degeneracy--sign, too, that she was unfitted to
have borne a child, because deficient in the vital reserve requisite to
carry her maternal function to its normal biological and psychological
conclusion. Just as a statesman or a general would be held unfitted for
_his_ function, if he should lack the physical and mental enterprise to
complete his national undertakings.
That for the nine months preceding its birth the infant obtains its
nourishment directly from its mother's blood, and for nine months after
birth it obtains this, normally, from her milk--_her_ digestive
processes having so assimilated the originally brute and vegetable
proteids of her food that these are now _human_ proteids, and are ready,
therefore, to be built into the infant's body with the least possible
tax upon its own assimilative powers--proves a number of important
facts.
First: that an infant's digestive powers remain, normally, for nine
months after birth, in a more or less embryonic state; slowly and
gradually developing capacity to convert the products of the brute and
vegetable kingdoms into forms suitable for building into its human
organisation. (Just as we see the digestive organs of the child
progressively developing power to assimilate an adult dietary.)
Secondly: that the infant's digestion remains thus undeveloped obviously
in order that as little as possible of its vital power may be expended
in the complex processes of assimilation, all available vital-power
being urgently required for its exhaustingly rapid brain- and
body-building.
Thirdly: that where an artificial diet forces precocious development
upon the infant-digestion--since all precocity is degeneracy, all the
organs concerned in digestion will be, necessarily, more or less
structurally defective and functionally inefficient; as a consequence of
not having been permitted time and rest to develop slowly and stably
over the normal allotted period. (Proof is supplied by the premature
development of teeth, which occurs in artificially-fed babies some
months before dentition is normally due. And these teeth and those that
succeed them are of such perishable structure that present-day children
need perpetual dental repairs.)
Fourthly: that such misapplication of vital resources for the premature
development and abnormal functions of precocious digestive organs
entails inevitably corresponding loss of vital power for general
development.
Fifthly--and by no means lastly, but perhaps most important of all: that
since the infant-digestion is quite incapable of properly converting
brute and vegetable-proteids into human proteid, infants artificially
fed must necessarily _build into their brains and bodies lower-grade
proteids_--and proteids so imperfectly assimilated as to be something
less than human, and, accordingly, more or less brute or vegetable still
in their inherences. And since all living cells and tissues reproduce
upon the plan of the parent-cells and tissues they were derived from, it
is clear that the abnormal cells and tissues constructed of these
half-brute, or half-vegetable proteids must be abnormal; unstable and
degenerate, and prone to lapse readily to still further degrees of
deterioration and disease.
Hence a source of our neurotic, neurasthenic, adenoid-afflicted,
mentally-defective and otherwise diseased children. Hence too the
increasing criminality--which is _animality_, of course--that
characterises a considerable proportion of the rising generation.
Each further generation artificially fed in infancy can but deviate
still further from the Human Normal, becoming ever less human; brain and
body-cells reproducing themselves, throughout life, on the plan of their
infant-construction of half-brute or half-vegetable proteids. One sees
the ox in the dull, soulless eyes, in the bovine flesh, the stolid
faces, and in the crude animal natures of many modern little ones, to
whom calf-diet was fed before they had developed the digestive power of
transforming this into substance highly vitalised enough for human brain
and body-building. And the less their systems have rebelled against and
have rejected, but, on the contrary, have conformed to and have thriven
upon such brute-diet, the cruder are their organisations. Of this order
are the insensate child-monsters who win prizes at Baby-shows.
To one who realises that, of all the powers of Woman, the ability to
nurse her babe is second in importance only to her first and vital
function of producing it, the cry and clamour and impassioned fallacy
that have swirled around the trivial detail of her Suffrage-disabilities
show grotesque beside the human tragedy of her increasing biological
disability and her increasing psychical aversion to fulfil this
indispensable and sacred mother-office. To despise which, as being a
function woman possesses in common with the humbler creatures, is as
narrow-sighted as it would be to scorn the genius of Shakespeare because
both dog and pig, poor things! possess brains. Moreover, in forfeiting
this maternal faculty, woman reverts to the mode of those crude
rudimentary species _below_ the Mammalia.
"... _Each mother's breast_
_Feeds a flower of blue, beyond all blessing blest._"
Notwithstanding all this, Feminism, in its grim materialism, blind to
the mystical beauty of Life and the sacredness of Individuality, regards
women mainly as parts of an economic machinery. And to serve as such, it
standardises all in body, mind and aptitude, to economic ends; the young
and tender girls whose shaping frames are shaping to become the mystical
looms of evolving Humanity; the young wives in whom love and marriage
have set mysterious processes in motion; the young pregnant mothers in
whom the shuttle of Life is already marvellously flying, interweaving
the luminous threads of a soul with a body of flesh.
Nature made women ministrants of Love and Life, for the creation of an
ever more healthful and efficient, a nobler and more joyous Humanity.
Feminism degrades them to the status of industrial mechanisms, whereof
the commercial products are the chiefest values, and children no more
than bye-products.
* * * * *
And what bye-products they are! God help them!--Who alone can help
them--this pathetic rubble of pallid, sickly, suffering, and dejected
infant- and child-Life; the violet-hued babies, with their dull eyes
glazed by misery, their leaden, half-paralysed limbs; the blind and
crippled, halt and deaf, the imbecile and feeble-minded children,
apathetic, neurasthenic, joyless; as too, on the other hand, the
low-browed, sturdy and soulless, or the debased and evil--All the
generation of degeneracy which our deteriorate and enfeebled looms of
womanhood are grinding out to-day.
Though shut from sight and thought, in the prisons, hospitals and other
institutions of our modern civilisations is an ever-swelling,
ever-rising, further-menacing tide of diseased, defective, insane and
criminal mankind, product of ours and of those others' violations of
Natural Law; clogging the River of Life, choking the Springs of
Evolution, damming the current of Progress.