EUGENICS AND THE MODERN FEMINIST MOVEMENT
Eugenics is not essentially concerned with the right to vote nor
is Eugenics specially interested in such abstract questions as the
relative voting qualifications of the sexes. If these things really
weighed at all Eugenics would naturally favour fitness instead of sex
as the qualification for electoral enfranchisement. At present Eugenics
views the feminist movement from the point of view of political power
as a means to national efficiency. This standpoint is the more natural
because there is every reason to believe that while the objective
of the feminist is nominally Votes for Women it is actually an
assertion of woman's all-round equality with men. I believe it will
be a perilous enterprise, fraught with grave danger to the State if
women successfully organise as a sex-party, prepared to study every
question from the special interests or supposed interests of women.
However much this definite policy may be repudiated it is a genuine
danger, to which a prolonged suffrage agitation is bound, ostensibly
or unintentionally, to contribute. It is to the interest of all who do
not take a sex-party view of citizenship to abbreviate this struggle.
It seems illogical, unnatural and undesirable that there should be
a sex-basis of citizenship rights. All deprecation of anything even
remotely approaching a sex-war is an argument for the acknowledgment of
Women's claim to electoral equality with men. It is incredible that the
mere extension of the franchise can create a revolution; a revolution
is historically rather to be expected from refusing the suffrage to a
class containing intelligent, capable law-abiding adults.
Let us not deceive ourselves, however, as to the real meaning of
the claim for women's electoral emancipation. Whether that demand
is granted or not the moral and intellectual driving-force of the
agitation comes from a genuine reforming spirit, which will succeed
with or without the vote in elevating woman to a position more worthy
of civilisation than she has hitherto occupied. So much is certain to
those who recognise in Mrs. Chapman Catt, Dr. Anna Shaw and the English
Suffragettes the inspiration of Mary Woolstonecraft, the radical
pioneer who first said "Woman must be free." A conspiracy of men to
hinder women's emancipation might provoke a sex-war, the granting of
such freedom as women claim can only end in mutual honour. Women will
learn to realise and respect the differences between men and women when
those differences do not wear the unmistakable taint of inequalities.
The Eugenists' hope is for a peaceful solution, for the peace of the
home is the hope of the child. The child is apt to be forgotten when
men and women quarrel.
There are undoubtedly many property questions mixed up with the
electoral claim, and the former have a genuine Eugenic side to them.
It is not in the interests of the race that mothers should be in any
doubt as to their immunity from financial worry during child-birth
pains, or that they should have to consider any merely sordid question
in deciding whether or not a perfectly healthy mother should increase
the nation's stock of perfectly fit citizens. The position of a wealthy
man's wife in the present day is often an anomalous one. Where the
husband was rich at the time of his wedding, marriage-contracts usually
protect the wife's interests to some extent. In the much commoner
cases of gradually increasing wealth, of wealth coming unexpectedly
or as the result of years of protected operations, the wife depends
absolutely on her husband's good will. Often enough her exertions have
helped to find this fortune. Her influence on his life is frequently an
indispensable asset. Her care of the children she has borne give her a
sentimental claim which justice cannot ignore. It is intolerable that
husbands becoming rich men should be entitled to speculate and gamble
with the whole of what should be considered the joint capital of the
family, without obtaining the consent of the actual working partner.
He should be at liberty neither to "deal" unauthorisedly with what
might be considered the family's share of his fortune, nor to alienate
by testamentary legacy anything beyond a fair proportion away from
those who have the first claim upon his goods. In order to defraud his
creditors or for less criminal reasons a man has often used his wife
as a convenient banker. It will be easier to check this species of
cheating when the wife herself becomes a creditor.
In the poorest circles where man and woman are equally destitute
of worldly wealth this woman's property question is too inseparably
mixed with the whole economic problem to be stated solely in terms of
Eugenics. Eugenics does not profess to point out the lines on which the
problem of poverty is to be solved. Eugenics only says that certain
conditions (inconsistent with destitution) have to be observed if we
want the race to improve and to save the nation from absolute decay. It
is up to our politicians to find the means by which these conditions
can be observed. A nation converted to the gospel of Eugenics will not
boggle at providing the means for saving itself.
Middle-class women have a genuine grievance which is becoming
articulate. The women-workers claim equal wages for equal work, and
married women claim wages for the work they perform as housekeepers,
nurses or cooks, or all three. If there is anything at all in the idea
of attracting the best workers by high wages the women will win. It
will be a misfortune to Eugenics if for any monetary reason the best
women are attracted to commercial careers rather than to domestic
duties, but women-workers will succeed by combination while wives will
win only if legislation favours them. Legislation must and will be
forthcoming to prevent the comparative attractiveness of motherhood
from sinking still lower in the scale than at present.
The most important question which many suffragists are preparing to
face is to whom shall women look for their support. There is of course
for the daughters of the rich an inheritance which places them above
the vulgar struggle which ninety per cent. of our women have to face.
For this great majority the alternatives to State-maintenance are
generally speaking marriage or the labour-market. There is much to be
said for the State-provision of maintenance for motherhood, which is
elsewhere referred to. The principle is neither new nor revolutionary.
Most States make some provision of the kind, and this State-provision
is often excellent in efficiency but frequently quite demoralising in
the restrictions with which it is hedged. Obviously with no Eugenic
inspiration State-helps of the kind can never be anything but a
stop-gap which self-respecting women will not seek voluntarily and
which will always be given grudgingly. Its conditions will no longer
degrade but will tend towards race improvement by encouraging the fit
and warning the weak and diseased. For this double purpose the State
will employ ladies to visit poor mothers so as to make sure that at
least no mother shall want for food, shelter and the best medical
attention, while she is assisting in what will be universally regarded
as the highest and best interests of the nation. If State-subventions
of this kind are beset with restrictions, what are we to say to
"charitable" enterprises. Some few are ideal institutions, the vast
majority are only justifying their existence by doing badly what
would be otherwise left undone. Some exist merely because medical
students must have some experience of maternity cases, sometimes the
accommodation for mothers is so scanty compared with the number of
students that many score of students attend a single mother, whose
experience in such a case is not an enviable one.
Neither charity nor the present limited State-aid touch the larger
question. It would almost seem as if the State and the charities had a
grudge against motherhood. It is as if some monstrous misunderstanding
of Malthusianism had led these authorities to believe that the
interests of the race demanded the accentuation of the primal course.
"In sorrow," indeed, do the poor "bring forth children." There is a
prejudice too against the noblest emotions of motherhood. Cases are
common where the relieving authorities, public or voluntary, faced
with the absolute inability of a parent to contribute towards a child's
keep, undertake the child's care under conditions which exclude
the parents' continued interest in the child's welfare. A mother
unexpectedly widowed is "relieved" of her four young children who are
sent sometimes to different orphanages, often at a distance from the
mother who loves them and who would be their very best guardian. She
has to find work amongst strangers to support herself, while losing
money every "visiting day" if she can anyway get to see her children,
whose aggregate keep costs actually more than would comfortably
maintain them and their mother under ideal conditions. It is this
almost fiendish masculine administration of the maternal functions of
the public authorities which women most vehemently protest against.
There seems no remedy for it except a recognition that a man cannot be
a mother, not even a step-mother.
Apart from the maternal side of woman's life there is her individual
life to consider, and while this is of enormous importance to herself
its chief interest to Eugenists (as such) is that only out of healthy
and happy conditions of womanhood can a noble motherhood be expected to
grow. Slave-mothers are apt to breed slave-children, and still worse
for the race slave-women are disinclined to become mothers. It is of
course unfair to see no distinction between slavery which professes
no fine sentiment towards its chattel objects, and the refined system
which places woman on a pedestal and worships her but denies her the
elementary rights of citizenship. The Eugenist ideal of marriage is the
union of equality, two citizens joining together in love and wisdom
and with such sanction of the State and the Church as may be, with
resultant harmony of life and its fruit in an increase of the truest
wealth any State can possess, namely well-conceived, well-formed, and
well-matured men and women.
In the Eugenist State there will be a determined enmity to the
increased generations of the criminal, the weak-minded and the
diseased. But if reform is forced on women by men, instead of being
the spontaneous decision of a genuine democracy, the grossest tyranny
will be perpetuated (however wise its object, humane its methods and
Eugenic its result). A benevolent despotism might be endured in its
disposition of the issues of war, the production of wealth, or the
distribution of honours, nothing but the sovereign will of the people
can be tolerated in the Eugenic field, and here if nowhere else woman
being essentially concerned must have an equal voice with man. Where
women cannot be convinced that Eugenic reform is in the interests of
the race we must trust to personal persuasion, individual example and
such public opinion as we are capable of influencing. The powers of
the State must not be invoked in the face of popular protest, it will
be to the interests of Eugenists that such protest shall be able to
express itself in the ballot-box instead of by surreptitious evasion or
mob-law.
The double standard in morals must go. Whatever our standard may be
it must be colour-blind as regards sex. The modern feminist movement
is in harmony with Eugenic science, in insisting on this point being
made clear. For ages past masculine hypocrisy has been able to exact
from the opposite sex a crushing worship of Mrs. Grundy, by the simple
expedient of ruling men out of the conventions they dictated to women.
The time has come for a candid reconsideration of moral problems on
the basis of sex-equality. It may be that some fine sentiments will
vanish, perhaps women will descend from the dizzy height where they are
supposed to dwell. Truth at least will gain, pretence will give place
to reality and we shall be capable of postulating a new and better
morality based on the essential facts of life. To the consideration
of the best possible life for men and women must be added the Eugenic
claims of the race. We live and die but the race continues, heirs of
our perfection, inheritors of our defects. We pass, but we must think
of those to whom this heritage passes. The strong woman mated to the
strong man is proud of a posterity which will do them honour. The
woman-movement aims at removing the obstacles to this endeavour. The
tragedy of the woman's life is when either her own or her husband's
unfitness to bear anything but a tainted stock is disregarded by law,
custom and the brutality of lustful bestiality. She who might be, as
she desires to be, the guardian of the nation's truest interests, is
overpowered and compelled to be the medium of national pollution. This
knowledge strengthens the women's agitation; the determination to end
such a shameful degradation makes the women's movement irresistible.