Evolving Types of Women
Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of
freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.
Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various
colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the brim.
No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight
and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.
Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination or joy, and all
my desires ripen into fruits of love.
TAGORE: _Gitanjali_.
One of the great sources of disharmony in our social life is the extent
of the extraordinary ignorance about ourselves which still persists.
From this spring our conflicting opinions and diametrically opposed
views, and also the apparently self-contradictory evidence on almost
any point of fundamental importance which is brought before the public.
In no respect is there more conflict of opinion than concerning the age
at which a woman should marry and become a mother. On the one hand,
we have advocates of very early motherhood, and they point to the fact
that a girl of seventeen is often already a woman and strongly sexed;
they point to the hackneyed statement “that a girl matures sooner than
a boy”; they point to the fine and healthy babies which very young
mothers may bear and to the greater pliability and ease of birth,
and these facts and their arguments may appear conclusive. On the
other hand, the actual experience of many people conflicts with these
apparently justified conclusions.
All the highly evolved races tend to prolong childhood and youth. All
tend to replace early marriage by later marriage and parenthood to the
obvious advantage of the race.
Marriage and parenthood at fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, which once
were common in almost every country, are being replaced by later
marriage and parenthood. As Finot 1913 says:--
A mystic chain appears to attach the age for love to the
consideration enjoyed by women. In the Far East, woman is offered
very young to the passion of man, and disappears from existence at
the time her contemporaries are just beginning to live. Love, for
this very reason, has a purely sensual stamp, degrading to man and
to woman. The lengthening of the age of love elevates the dignity,
and at the same time increases the longevity, of woman. Beyond
the age of thirty or forty the woman, dead to love, was fit only
for religion or witchcraft. Her life was shattered. Prematurely
aged she went out of the living world. The prolonged summer of
Saint-Martin in women will doubtless have consequences which
we should be wrong to fear. There is a solidarity of ages. The
cares bestowed on the child benefit the old man. The enlargement
of the age of maturity allows the child longer to enjoy the
years of life that are intended to form bodies and souls.... The
sentimental life of the country has undergone similar results.
Balzac, in proclaiming the right to love on the part of the woman
of thirty, aroused in his contemporaries astonishment bordering on
indignation. In his day, was not a man of forty-four considered
an old man?[6] Let us not forget that forty or fifty years before
Balzac, a philosopher like Charles Fourier, despairing of the
sentimental fate of young girls who had not found a husband before
the age of ... eighteen years, claimed for them the right to throw
propriety to the winds. According to the author of the _Théorie des
Quatre-Mouvements_,[7] this was almost the critical age (_Problems
of the Sexes_, transl. Jean Finot 1913).
[6] Balzac: _Physiologie du Mariage_.
[7] Charles Fourier, Leipzig, 1808.
The relative ages of husband and wife also have their influence, but
should, to some extent, depend more on their _physiological_ age than
on their actual years. They should, however, not be widely different.
As Saleeby says:--
The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will
there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for
a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for
existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded,
tending to increase the man’s age at marriage, which, on the
whole, involves also increasing his seniority--contributes to the
amount of widowhood in a nation.
We, therefore, see that, as might have been expected, this question
of the age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from
the average point of view of the girl, has a far wider social
significance. First, for herself, the greater her husband’s
seniority, the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is
in any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of married
women. But further, the existence of widowhood is a fact of great
social importance because it so often means unaided motherhood, and
because, even when it does not, the abominable economic position of
women in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is not necessary
to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is
well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter
consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked (_Woman
and Womanhood_, 1912).
I have observed many girls, who were in every true sense of the word
girls (that is unconscious of personal sex feeling, still growing in
bodily stature and still developing in internal organization) until
they were nearly thirty years of age. In my opinion, the girl who
is thoroughly well-balanced, with an active brain, a well-developed
normally sexed body, natural artistic and social instincts is not
more than a child at seventeen, and to marry her at that age or
anything like it is to force her artificially, and to wither off her
potentialities.
The type of woman who really counts in our modern civilization is,
as a rule, not of age until she is nearly thirty. Not only does she
_not_ mature sooner than a boy; she matures actually later than a
large number of men. I have now accumulated a wide and varied amount
of evidence in favour of the view which I here propound, namely, that
there is a most highly evolved type of woman in our midst. This type,
which it will be agreed is the most valuable we possess, encompasses
women of a wide range of potentialities; they have beautiful entirely
feminine bodies, with all feminine and womanly instincts well
developed, with a normal, indeed a rather strong, sex instinct and
acute personal desires which tend to be concentrated on one man and one
man alone. I will provisionally call this the late maturing type, for
such a woman is generally incapable of real sex experience till she
is about twenty-seven or thirty. I think that she is in line with the
highest branch of our evolution, that she represents the present flower
of human development, and that through her and her children the human
race has the best hope of evolving on to still higher planes--but, and
this is very important, she is not fitted for marriage until she is at
least twenty-seven, probably later, her best child-bearing years may be
after she is thirty-five, and her most brilliant and gifted children
are likely to be born when she is about forty.
Personal evidence, and also facts in the interesting letters sent
me by my readers have brought to my knowledge the existence of
an important proportion of women who are absolutely unconscious
of personal localized sex feeling until they are nearly or over
thirty--one woman was nearly fifty before she felt and knew the real
meaning of sex union though many years married.
From outward observation of the general physique of such of these women
as I have seen face to face, I may say that, as a rule, they retain
their youth long; they retain also a buoyancy and vitality which, if
they are properly treated, and have the good fortune to be married at
the right time to the right man, may remain with them almost throughout
their lives. Such women not only prolong their girlhood, they defer
their age. Such women have, of course, throughout the centuries
appeared from time to time, and I fancy have generally in the past,
and still often in the present, suffered acutely through marrying too
young. When they marry too young they tend, by the forcing of their
feelings, by the deadening through habit of their potentialities, by
the trampling on the unfolded possibilities within them, to be turned
artificially into a “cold type of woman.”
Women now older tell me of the fact that for the first years of
their married life they could give no response, but when they were
respectively twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one or more, they began first
to feel they were truly women. Young husbands have written to me of
their distress that their wives (aged about twenty to twenty-three),
delightful girls in every respect, seemed utterly incapable of
any response in the marital orgasm. Sometimes this depends on her
conformation, but such an incapacity I often attribute to the girl’s
marriage being premature. When she is twenty-seven or twenty-eight
perhaps her internal development will be complete, and she will then
be ripe for the full enjoyment of marriage: but if instead of a
considerate husband she marries one who merely uses her, she stands
little chance ever of knowing the proper relation of wifehood and
motherhood.
These facts which I could vary with details from individual
experiences, in my opinion, indicate a profound truth in the
development of the human race. It is this: not only do the higher races
of human beings have a prolonged childhood and youth, but the most
highly evolved, mentally, physically and racially, of our girls have
not finished their potential growth into maturity until they are in the
neighbourhood of thirty years of age.
Does this then mean that all marriage should be deferred till so late?
By no means, nor is the above conclusion any reflection on the type of
girl who ripens much more quickly. I fully recognize that from the
point of view of their sex potentialities some girls are complete women
at seventeen or eighteen, and that they may then be very strongly sexed
indeed. Such women should marry young.
The marked differentiation of type of these very notably different
women can be traced through many other aspects of their lives. I
consider, for instance, the type of whom I spoke in Chapter XII (who
has a natural desire for union, representing the highest and most
complex human union, the union of three) belongs very frequently to the
late maturing and the most highly evolved form of femininity.
It should be recognized that there are among us not only different
races, but that in the same stock, sometimes in the same family of
apparently no specially mixed ancestry, we may find one or more members
of the late maturing, others of the early maturing type. Sometimes of
two sisters, the elder may perhaps be still in mind a girl while her
younger sister is a woman, as can be observed by any one with a large
circle of acquaintances. It would be well, I think, if humanity, whose
proper study is mankind, were at least to know themselves sufficiently
well to realize the existence of such different types, and their
possible potential value as well as their differing needs. The energy
at present wasted in the acrid statement of conflicting views would
be so much better spent on the careful recording and recognizing of
varying types.
The advice to marry young, which is in every respect socially wise and
physiologically correct for some, should not be hurled indiscriminately
at all women, because for the late maturing such advice is socially
disadvantageous and physiologically wrong.
I am now ready to consider the question of the proper age for
motherhood about which an immense variety of opinion is expressed. The
general tendency has been, even in the last few years, to raise the
age at which a girl may marry, and to raise the age which the medical
profession advises as the earliest suitable for motherhood. But still
one often hears of elders, whom one would in other respects like to
follow, advising the early bearing of children.
Now I should like every potential parent to consider what type of child
they want. Do they want to secure healthy, jolly little animals with no
more brains than are sufficient to see them creditably through life? If
so, let them have their children very early. Such healthy sound people
with no special gifts are valuable, and there is much work in the world
for them to do. On the other hand, do they want to take the risk for
their child of a possibly less robust body, but with the possibility,
indeed, in healthy families, almost the certainty, of an immensely
greater brain power, and a more strongly developed temperament? Then
let them have their children late. And if a man desires to have a child
who may become one of the _master_ minds whose discoveries, whose
artistic creations, whose ruling power stamps itself upon the memory
of our race, whose name is handed down the ages, then let the father
who desires such a child mate himself with the long-young late-maturing
type of woman I have just described, and let her bear that child some
time between the age of thirty-five and forty-five.
How often one hears some version of the phrase: “Yes, it is so sad,
poor, dear Lord So-and-So, a charming man, but no brains at all; his
younger brother such a brilliant man; but that is always the way, the
eldest sons in the aristocracy do seem to get the gift of property
balanced by the lack of brains.” Now I enquire, and I should like my
readers to enquire, into the secret of this phenomenon, which is by
no means universal, but is sufficiently common to be endorsed. In my
opinion, the interpretation of this fact is that the earlier children
were born when the mother was still too young to endow them with
brains, particularly if the mother was one of the gifted and cultivated
women of the late-maturing type.
This also leads me to consider another generality which is frequently
used as an argument by those who oppose conscious and deliberate
parenthood. Some people say that by the direct control of the size
of the family to a small limited number which the parents definitely
desire, we would be eliminating genius from our midst, and their
argument runs: Look at Nelson, he was a fifth son; look at Sir Walter
Scott, he was a third son; and so on. This to the uncritical seems
conclusive, and many people of great capacity, ideals and heart, who
otherwise would be wholly on my side in my claim that every child born
shall be deliberately desired, and that all other conceptions shall
be consciously prevented, are swayed by this argument and say: “Yes,
your position would be obviously the right one for the race if it were
not that later children are so often the better.” I turn, therefore,
to a consideration of the life histories of these men’s mothers. Why
was Nelson the genius of his family? Because his mother was too young
to bear geniuses at the time she was bearing her elder children. But
this is not yet a sufficiently accurate consideration of the subject;
I want to know also of which type the mother was, for, in my opinion,
the right age for the parenthood of a woman depends also on the type
to which she belongs, whether the early maturing or the late maturing.
If she knows herself to be the latter, after it is patent, as it must
become patent to every one once the idea is placed before them, that
such women are in our midst, then that woman and her husband should
usually defer parenthood until she has reached at least thirty years of
age. If this were done, then not the fourth, fifth or seventh but the
first child would stand a very great chance of being a world leader,
a powerful mind, perhaps even a genius. First children have been
geniuses (Sir Isaac Newton was an only child); all depends on the age,
the conscious desire, the general type and the surrounding conditions
during prenatal state of her infant, of the mother who bears him and
the father from whom he also inherits potentialities.
A few investigations bearing on the effect of the parent’s age have
been published by the Eugenics Society and some individuals, but none
of these appear to me to be of any value, for none take into account
the necessary data concerning the type of the mother which I here point
out, and in all the calculations crude errors occur.
The best woman, with comparatively few exceptions, is already and will
still more in the future be the woman who, out of a long, healthy and
vitally active life, is called upon to spend but a comparatively small
proportion of her years in an _exclusive_ subservience to motherhood.
A woman should have eighty to ninety active years of life; if she bears
three or perhaps four children, she will, even if she gives up all her
normal activities during the later months of pregnancy and the earlier
of nursing, still have cut out of her life but a very small proportion
of its total. She should, indeed, after she once is a mother, always
devote a proportion of her energies to the necessary supervision of
her children’s growth and education, but with the increasing number of
schools and specialists, nurses, teachers and instructors of all sorts,
the individual mother has much less of the purely physical labour of
her children than formerly. That this is not only so, but is _approved_
by the State can be seen at once by imagining a working class mother
insisting on keeping her child at home all day under her personal
supervision--the School Inspector would step in and take the child from
her for a certain number of hours every day. But this book is primarily
for middle and upper class women, and for them motherhood increasingly
should mean a _widening_ of their interests and occupations.
The counter-idea still expressed, even by leading doctors and others,
is that the whole capability of the individual mother should be devoted
solely to contributing to her children. This is exemplified in the
recent statement of Blair Bell: “A normal woman, therefore, would not
exploit her capabilities for individual gain, but for the benefit of
her descendants.” This view is a false one and is based on a narrow
vision.
This pictures an endless chain of fruitless lives all looking ever
to some supreme future consummation which never materializes. By
means of this perpetual sinking of woman’s personality in a mistaken
interpretation of her duty to the race, every generation is sacrificed
in turn. The result has not been productive of good, happiness or
beauty for the majority. No; the individual woman, normal or better
than the average, _should_ use her intellect for her individual
gain in creative work; not only because of its value to the age and
community in which she lives, but also for the inheritance she may
thus give her children and so that when her children are grown up they
may find in their mother not only the kind attendant of their youth,
but their equal in achievement. With a woman of capacities perhaps
still exceptional, but by no means so rare as some men writers would
like to pretend, the pursuit of her work or profession and honourable
achievement in it is not at all incompatible with but is highly
beneficial to her motherhood. As Charlotte Gilman says:--
No, the maternal sacrifice theory will not bear examination. As a
sex specialized to reproduction, giving up all personal activity,
all honest independence, all useful and progressive economic
service for her glorious consecration to the uses of maternity,
the human female has little to show in the way of results which
can justify her position. Neither by the enormous percentage of
children lost by death nor the low average health of those who
survive, neither physical nor mental progress, give any proof to
race advantage from the maternal sacrifice.--_Women and Economics._