Birth and Beauty
“Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. Thou
knowest how to wait.
Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.”
TAGORE: _Gitanjali_.
When all goes well and there is no accidental hastening of the birth
by shock or jar which dislodges the child too soon, the birthday finds
its place in the ordinary rhythm of the woman’s existence. We speak
generally of the “nine months” during which the child is borne by its
mother, but this nine months is a fictitious number depending on our
calendar months, and the developing child is actually ten lunar months
within its mother. Just as the average almost universal period of
the woman’s rhythm has twenty-eight days cycle, so on this number of
days does the circle of months leading to birth depend. Ten months of
twenty-eight days each is the full period of development, at the close
of which the child seeks its exit through birth. As a rule the day
of birth corresponds to some extent, if not quite accurately, to the
former rhythm of her menstrual waves.
An interesting paper containing various scientific data (not all of
which are universally accepted) is to be found in the _Anat Anzeiger_
of 1897 by Beard. What is actually the spring behind this rhythm is as
yet largely unknown, but recent work on the internal secretions from
the ovary such as was described by Starling in the _Croonian Lecture_,
1905 (who quotes Marshall and Jolly and other workers), appears to
indicate that this function like so many others in our system is due
to the activities of certain glands yielding internal secretions.
These, penetrating the whole system, have a controlling influence upon
activities remote from their source.
For the birth itself, the mother should be in experienced hands,
preferably those of a highly trained and certified midwife or maternity
nurse such as Queen Charlotte’s or the London Hospital supplies, one
who is experienced in all that has to be done in normal, healthy
circumstances, and who can detect at once any necessity for specialized
help. If the mother has lived rightly and wisely, dieted as I suggest
and is properly formed (as, of course, should be assured through
examination some time before the birth is expected), the birth should
be, however terrible an experience, yet one which is safely passed.
In the days which follow she will have much to endure, and instead of
the peace and quietness which she expected, she will find that she
has constant disturbances incidental to the nursing of one who is, in
essentials, a surgical case.
Possibly due to the inconveniences involved in staying in bed, there
is a tendency at present to encourage the mother to get up and at
least walk about the room and be up for an hour or two within ten days
or less of the date of the birth. Almost every one with whom I have
come in contact, advises this, and in a certain school, particularly
those who go in for what is called “Twilight Sleep,” there is not only
an effort to get the mother up early, but a pride on the part of the
mother and her advisers when she gets up perhaps within two or three
days of the birth.
Some women who have had a good many children boast of how they are up
and about in ten days. I glance critically at all who tell me that,
examining both their figures and their general appearance. _Only one
woman of all who have ever discussed this matter with me urged the
entirely old-fashioned month in bed following the birth. But_, and
this is _very_ important, _she was the only one who, having had many
children, at the same time had done most notable and arduous brain
work, and also retained her youthful figure and general appearance_.
This quite exceptional and old-fashioned advice is what I would hand on
to women to-day. The modern craze for getting up quickly is absolutely
wrong, and has a fundamentally deleterious effect on the general health
of our women. I should go so far as to say that not only should a woman
stay in bed the entire month, but that she should for two weeks longer
scarcely put her foot to the ground. She may lie out of doors or on
sofas, but, after a birth, _she should lie about for the whole of six
weeks_.
This may startle my readers. I, who look so keenly into the future, who
am so progressive, so modern and so desirous of the great and rapid
evolution of women, to return to the old custom of our grandmothers,
and demand, not only the month in bed, to ask even more, that there
should be six weeks spent practically lying about all the time! Is
this not an anachronism? No. It will be observed that throughout this
and my other books, my advice always has a biological basis, depending
on the actual structure or the history of our bodies, and there is
a very profound and physiological basis for the advice I now give.
It is this--that not only during the birth is the whole system of
the mother to some extent jarred and shaken; she suffers in all her
nerves the sudden relief from the strain upon her muscles and in the
whole readjustment of her system an extremely profound shock, and the
treatment for shock entails rest. More than that, the womb which lies
centrally and is so important an organ in her body, so enormously
enlarged during the last months through which the child inhabited
it, returns to its permanent size slowly; its strong, muscular walls
tensely contract, but this contraction which reduces its size very
much in the first day or two does not complete itself, does not bring
the tissues back to the size which they will afterwards permanently
maintain, _until six weeks have elapsed_. For the whole of six weeks,
therefore, the womb will be larger and heavier than normal and with a
tendency to get out of place, while all the muscles of the body wall
are weakened and out of condition by being so long stretched. A woman,
therefore, should not put any strain on her muscles like standing
or walking or taking any active exercise before the six weeks has
elapsed, though she should, lying both on her back and on her face,
do exercises calculated to restore the strength of these muscles and
fit them to take on their work directly she rises. One exercise,
particularly valuable and but little known, is to raise the diaphragm
without breathing. This can be done during the six weeks in bed, but
is particularly valuable on first rising and standing or walking.
This internal pull upwards of all the organs strengthens both the
internal and the outer body wall muscles. Such control deliberately
and frequently exerted throughout the day does more perhaps than any
one other thing to retain a slender well-formed trunk. It has also a
curiously bracing and exhilarating mental effect, and as the action can
be done at any time unobserved, its effect can be utilized at will.
The ancient Greeks laid great stress on the value of control of the
diaphragm.
It may be argued that during the time the child was within it the womb
was very much larger than it is after birth, and nevertheless then
active walking exercise was recommended. Yes: but during that time the
womb was supported by the increased tension on the front muscles of the
body wall against which it pressed and was thus assisted in maintaining
its position; but after birth, while it is so very much smaller than
quite recently it has been, and, at the same time, while still much
larger than normal, and more than the weakened internal muscles are
prepared to support, it is no longer held firm by the tense body
wall, for the body wall is now limp, crumpled and almost incapable of
supporting any strain. If, therefore, the woman stands too soon, the
inner organs which are again beginning to find their natural place--the
long digestive tract and other organs--tend to flop downwards, to
bulge out the still loose and strained abdominal muscles, and press the
still too heavy womb out of its normal position, the position to which
it must return, and must permanently take up if the woman is to have
her general health maintained throughout the rest of her life. Hence,
before she sets foot to the ground she must lie the nature-decreed six
weeks, and meanwhile _exercise_ the abdominal muscles so as to prepare
them to act properly.
When I see and hear of women either forced or lured or eagerly getting
out of bed in ten days or a week after child birth, I wonder what will
happen to all those women ten or fifteen years hence. They will be
fortunate if they do not have what is now so increasingly prevalent,
namely some form of displacement of the womb with all its attendant
miseries of handicapped motherhood and wifehood. I maintain that it is
nothing short of cruelty and criminality to allow the modern woman to
get up quickly in the way she does. It may possibly be claimed by some
of the foolish and hardy pioneers of getting up rapidly, that when she
is a middle-aged or elderly woman she will not be suffering from the
slow relaxations and displacements which result from putting pressure
too soon on abdominal muscles unprepared to bear the strain. This
will not make things safe for the average woman however. It is not
realized how appalling is the prevalence of womb displacements among
the lower working-class women, those who are forced by circumstances to
get up in a week or ten days and go back to work. I think the modern
increase in displacements in middle and upper class women is partly to
be traced to the tendency to get up too soon, and also to the impatient
practitioner’s use of instruments to hasten a birth which would come
naturally in good time. When once the perineal and inner supporting
muscles have been torn, they are too often mended superficially, but
inner tears are left which make the perineum an insufficient support
for the womb, of which the result is its slow and gradual dropping
out of place, which some years afterwards may acutely handicap the
unfortunate woman.
In the name of all the fond and happy mothers that I hope the future
may contain, I would urge every one who possibly can to _insist_ on
having six weeks of “lying in.” This is not only in the interests of
general health but of beauty. Too long have we become tolerant of the
hideous formation of the body which is common in older women. We have
domesticated some animals[8] solely for our own purposes, and they are
hideous indeed. Why should we women permit a comparable standard for
ourselves? Why not insist on at least as much care as is devoted to the
race-horse? Why not take a period of rest after the great effort of
maternity proportionately as long as a she-wolf or tigress takes in her
cave, fed by her mate while she lies about and plays with her cubs?[9]
The standard of beauty of the racing mare, of the wild tigress or
she-wolf is slender and not markedly different from that of its virgin
state. Such a standard, and not that of the over-taxed, man-used,
domesticated animals should be that on which we women should insist.
[8] The sow normally breeding once a year, artificially forced to breed
two or three times a year. Its appearance is proverbial.
[9] This has been reported to me by travellers and others, but I cannot
get an authoritative scientific record for the fact.
In this connection should be mentioned one other way in which the
following of Nature and obedience to her law works for good. In the
next chapter I mention the baby’s right to be fed by nature’s food, and
while the infant is nursing from its mother it stimulates contractions
in the womb which very much assist in bringing it to its right size and
position, and so the act of nursing benefits not only the infant but
its mother.
A number of researches by various experts have been made, which proves
that the womb reacts to the stimulus of suckling by the child. Pfister
(_Beit. z. Geb. u. Gyn._, 1901, vol. v, p. 421), for instance, found
that very definite contractions took place during the baby’s suckling,
particularly for the first eight days after its birth; also Temesváry
(_Journ. Obstet. and Gyn. Brit. Emp._, 1903, vol. iii, p. 511) found
that the natural involution of the womb after birth was distinctly more
rapid in those who nursed their babies than in those who did not.
Prolonging the nursing period does undoubtedly not tend to increase
the beauty of the woman’s bosom but to deteriorate it, but, for at any
rate the first few months, it is _very_ advantageous both to the mother
and to the child that she should feed it naturally. If throughout the
nursing period she slings her breast properly from above, and if when
the nursing period ceases she massages and treats the breast properly,
it should not lose its beauty in the way which is alas, to-day, too
general.
Mothers, in the self-sacrifice involved in their motherhood, too
often forget their duty to remain beautiful. All youth is revolted by
ugliness, consciously or unconsciously. A girl should not be indirectly
taught to dread motherhood herself by seeing the wreckage her own
mother has allowed it to make of her. A high demand for beauty of form
by mothers is not selfishness but a racial duty.