It is, of course, easy to write of these evils, the difficult thing is
to find a remedy. Many attempts are being made; much discussion is
taking place about the future position of women in industry; training is
being given to adolescent girls; even schools for wives have been
formed. The newly established Ministry of Health has wide schemes for
maternity and child welfare. Never was so much expended to right things
that are wrong. Yet, I cannot think the remedies offered are likely to
be satisfactory.
Let me here pause for a moment to compare my view of the true remedy for
the present unsatisfactoriness of women's lives, and the consequent
wastage of baby lives, with those remedies now so commonly put forward
by the reformers. I assert that women are trying in vain to transfer
their affection from babies to machines, and to take care of their
babies, if they have them, in the few hours left over after days
seriously devoted to business. I will test the results in a way fairer
to my opponents than to myself, comparing the effects of their method
at its best with my system in circumstances little favorable to human
life.
Bradford is a wealthy town: spending some £40,000 annually on the care
of infants in a total population of 300,000. Its institutions and
arrangements for this purpose are famous; its infant department, its
graded municipal milk, its free-feeding for expectant mothers--all are
as nearly perfect as is possible; and the men who have developed and
direct its municipal system of protection for infants are well known for
their ability and enthusiasm. The birth-rate is as low as Malthusians
could desire. But all its care is but an attempt to lessen evils brought
about by a wrong system; for the mothers of Bradford are not in their
homes, but in woolen factories.
County Roscommon is a poor district in Ireland, with a primitive and
superstitious population of agriculturists; the birth-rate is very high,
and there is practically no public provision for the safeguarding of
infant life. But its backward ignorant mothers tend and feed their
babies after the manner of the earliest ages.
_The infant death-rate is 135 in Bradford, and 35 in Roscommon._
You will see what I wish to make plain. Those whom I criticize are
dealing with symptoms instead of working to remove the real cause of the
disease. They work hard and achieve little. Of course their efforts are
praiseworthy, and, under present conditions, frightfully necessary. But
they are just about as lastingly useful as trying to mend a badly broken
china cup at home with cheap cement. You know what happens: as soon as
you succeed in getting two pieces to stick together another piece
tumbles away, and, at last, if by excessive patience the work gets done
and the cup is mended, the first shock of hot water makes all the pieces
again fall apart. It is a solution that gives great opportunity of
employment, one indeed that goes on forever; perhaps that is why it
fascinates the child-like minds of the feminists. I want something very
different.
I want a tradition of life to hand on to our daughters and to their
daughters. We need a strongly deepened sense of womanly responsibility,
wide-spread and universally accepted; an up-to-date sense, if you like
that term. I have no fears of change. I would re-fix our moral standards
more fearlessly than many who think me old-fashioned. But what I want
to insist upon is this: _The standard of conduct must be fixed for
women._ Our children want something settled, not everything left
uncertain. Our morals (I do not mean our sexual morals only, but our
whole ethical and social conduct) has become like a skein of wool that
has been unraveled by a puppy. We want a firm broad way in which it is
good and possible for all of us to walk without hurting one another, not
the horrid scramble that to-day we accept as life.
The modern conception of personal rights is essentially individualistic,
and has arisen only under industrial values of life; the result of its
further application as a social criterion for women, must logically be
exactly what it has been in the experience of the past century: a bitter
and brutal struggle for self-aggrandizement, with the failures
remorselessly crushed underfoot, and the very idea of a fixed common
responsibility and common good for all forgotten or denied. My plea for
women is, therefore, based not upon the notion of equal rights, but
rather upon that of equal duties. Moral equality means equality in the
will to serve--not self, but all. And the practical correlative of this
conception must be a social organization which secures equalities of
opportunity for service to women and men. The only rights I desire to
claim for my sex are those necessary to the discharge of its own duties;
the fulfillment of the instinctive maternal craving; the realization of
the deepest impulses of a woman's nature.
The pitiless war of every individual against his, or her, fellow waged
with gold or with steel, can never make life other than mean and empty.
Women and men must learn again to regard themselves as part of a
mightier whole, one of the human race, and, as we feel in moments of
deeper insight, of the universe, which is a unity in spite of all the
discords it contains.
It follows from this, that I am not greatly concerned with what any
individual woman, or group of women, can do, or cannot do, should be
encouraged to do, or be restrained from doing, in competition with men
and with each other, but rather what is most right and worth while for
all women, _as women_, to do. _I do not want freedom for each woman to
do what she wants._
You see, in my view of life, such freedom can lead only to a more
degraded slavery. And because I am certain about this, I do not desire
success for women in the blind struggle based on the doctrine (so
fundamentally untrue in my opinion) of personal rights. A doctrine which
results inevitably in separations, in hatreds, in disorders and
struggling one with another. Unity of ideals and of conduct becomes
impossible. The general life is driven about in this way or the other,
directed by this purpose or by that, but always by individualistic
principles, and not to serve the good of all, but by each person for his
own, or her own, ends. How can order come out of such a way of life? Do
you think you are going to improve things in the old selfish ways. I
tell you the result can be nothing but a further failure of vision. The
mountain heights become obscured by the mists going up from the damp
valleys, and the soul loses its way.