THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(2) THE MOTHER
“In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man;
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth;
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her.”
JOHN MASEFIELD.
The neglected motherhood of England cried out for attention, and it is
getting attention with a vengeance. A veritable Babel is being raised on
the subject of mothers. Progressive women are all for more recognition
and support of motherhood, but the difference between the reactionaries
and them is that they hold the first thing necessary, to give intelligent
support and recognition, is the liberation of the mother from all the
antiquated rubbish of coverture law and from some of the worst results
of economic servitude. Else indeed may women find that they have only
exchanged King Log for King Stork. While King Log is reigning, little is
done for the mothers directly by the State. Women, when they marry, are
merged into their husbands, who hold them as property, and have towards
them certain legal responsibilities, of a nature somewhat analogous to
those they have towards other living and sentient pieces of property, The
State has always dimly known that in the quality of its citizens lay its
true and lasting wealth; but penal laws, which used actually to mutilate
men and women, and which still tend to reduce their vitality and to drive
them to imbecility and madness, are plain witnesses of how imperfectly
this truth has been grasped. Improvements in these respects are, however,
on the way. This is said to be the age of the child, and through the
child it is becoming also the age of the mother.
In England, at the present day, a working man has almost absolute power
over his wife. That he uses this power in the main as humanely as he
does, is a proof of how much better men are than the laws which they
make or tolerate, and of how much real affection there is between men
and women. The fact remains that, especially among working people, where
the woman can have no money of her own unless she is in a position to
earn it, the husband has the most awful powers of inflicting torture and
wretchedness upon his whole family, and that it is distinctly safer for a
working woman not to be married to the man she lives with. That working
women so greatly prefer being married, again shows how strong in them is
idealism and the love of social order. What may an Englishman do with his
wife? His physical force is supported by law as regards his “marital
rights.” He can insist on his wife’s faithfulness to him, while using
complete licence himself. He is supposed to maintain her in accordance
with his station in life, but if he fails, it is very difficult for her
to find redress. She can pledge his credit if he has any, but it may
be refused, and she can then only get maintenance from him by leaving
him and taking the children with her and throwing herself on the rates.
The Parish will then take action, not for the sake of the woman or her
children, but to save the rates! That is to say, she must become a pauper
before she can get what he is supposed by law to give her. Even when the
law has given her a maintenance order, the recovery of the money is made
vastly difficult and precarious, and if the husband absconds, it is no
one’s business to find him, unless, again, the woman becomes a pauper.
What would men say of a law which only allowed them to recover their
debts on the same terms?
The husband can prevent his wife from earning, and he can claim any money
she saves out of the housekeeping. He can bring up the children as he
pleases, and control them even after his death, by will. He can leave
the whole of his property as he pleases, even if it has been accumulated
by the joint-work of his wife and himself, and if by doing so he leaves
her and her children destitute. If he is wilfully idle and refuses to
maintain her, she can “have the law of him,” and send him to prison:
much good that does her! The latitude allowed by the law in the matter of
personal chastisement of the wife has been a byword ever since _Truth_
published its weekly list. I have read this list on and off for over
twenty years and I see no change. One week is very like another. Flogging
a wife till she is covered with bruises, driving her out of the house on
a winter’s night in her nightgown, kicking her when she is with child,
and other assaults too abominable to mention have been held insufficient
to entitle the wife to a separation. I repeat, it is _safer_ for the
woman to need no separation because she has never tied the knot.
By far the greater number of men do not by any means do what the law
allows them, but are kind, toiling and fond husbands and fathers. But
even when the father is the best of fellows, it happens in millions of
cases that he is not able, under modern conditions, to make adequate
provision for his family, and no working men can make adequate provision
for the widows and young children they may leave. The State began to
make serious provision when it introduced free elementary education. The
next step was free meals for the needy, and this was rapidly followed by
free medical inspection and treatment of children in schools. All these
developments are undoubtedly socialistic, and involve the principle
of giving, not according to deserts, but according to needs. And the
interesting situation arises that—although we go on saying that the man
supports his family, and must, therefore, have a much larger wage than
the woman—when the State pays for education, food, doctoring, nursing,
it does so from the rates, which are paid by women as well as by men.
No rate-collector troubles whether his rate is levied on a woman or a
man; nor does he inquire whether the woman is supporting a family or no.
Our experience of socialistic legislation so far goes to show that male
politicians are disposed to say to women, “What’s yours is mine; what’s
mine’s my own.” The Insurance Act is perhaps the most flagrant example
of this, for by its provisions the State’s weekly twopence goes to nine
million men and three million women; it is paid for out of the pockets
of the taxpayers, and so is the whole of the cost of administering the
Act. Practically all women feel the weight of taxation, yet here the men
profit three times as much as the women, and by an extraordinary irony,
the women who are selected to be left out of sickness benefit are the
very women who are doing the admittedly womanly work of making a home,
and nearly all women are left out of unemployment benefit.
It is easy to see how these anomalies arise. It is not by any means
easy to provide a remedy for them. One scheme, propounded by Mr. H.
G. Wells, and with a few ardent supporters, is the State endowment of
motherhood. If this were adopted, the individual man would be relieved
of the necessity of providing for his child, and the individual woman
would be relieved of her economic dependence on her husband. There
has been markedly little support for this proposal as yet among women
in England, although Ellen Key in Sweden is a warm advocate, seeing
in it the opportunity of women to do their life-work well. So far as
the scheme applies to women who have lost their husbands, there is a
considerable measure of approval; it has sometimes been described as
“boarding out children with their mothers,” and is, to a very limited
and inadequate extent, actually practised by some Poor Law authorities.
A small beginning, too, has been made in the maternity benefit, and now
that it has been made payable to the mother, it may be considered a true
experiment in the direction of endowment.
In the abstract there is a great deal to be said for the notion that,
since children are not properly held to be the property of their
parents, and since the welfare of the children is the highest interest
and the gravest concern of the State, it is the State as a whole that
should shoulder the responsibility of the children, and they should
not be at the mercy of the vicissitudes of one single life. The women
should have the responsibility of bearing and rearing the children,
and the men should have the responsibility of providing maintenance
for the children and their guardians; but the men should pool their
responsibilities, and, out of taxation levied upon all men, the children
and child-bearing women should be supported. In this way it is claimed
that the personal relations of men and women would be relieved of the
economic incubus: the husband would be the woman’s mate, but would
cease to be necessarily her employer. If she chose to keep his house,
that would be a piece of voluntary service, to be paid for by him like
other voluntary service; for cooking and cleaning and blacking grates
is not a part of motherhood. Under such a system, each sex would really
make the contribution characteristic of that sex, and the question of a
“family wage” would be solved. A man would be able equitably to claim
a higher wage than a woman for the same work, on the ground that, as a
man, he was taxed as women were not, for his share of supporting the
human family, and the widows and spinsters would cease to be burdened out
of their smaller wages with rates and taxes to pay for the unfulfilled
duties of men. The proposal has, in fact, so many theoretical advantages
that it is curious so few women can be found to look at it favourably.
The reactionary would naturally not do so, because all changes are
abhorrent to her. The progressive women are, some of them, oppressed by
the dreary details in which Mr. Wells has revelled, and by the awful
prospects of standardisation and inspection, and red tape. Utopias are
always so appalling to all but their creators, and when I read Mr. Wells’
enthusiastic description of how his endowed mothers will live, my soul is
filled with “an unutterable sense of lamentation and mourning and woe.”
Is this, I ask myself, an instinct which it would be folly to suppress?
Or is it merely that the idea is too new for me, progressive though I
like to think myself? I don’t know.
I cannot agree that there would be anything derogatory to womanhood in
the maintenance by men of women whose motherhood prevented them from
maintaining themselves. The actuarial standard, of which we heard so much
during the debates on the Insurance Bill, is totally inapplicable to
mothers. They have a claim on the State and should be proud to make it.
Too often, the poor woman trembles to confess that she is with child, and
is tempted or even compelled to destroy it unborn. This is an abomination
and a most grievous injury to both women and men. But the supporters of
the scheme have not yet given a consistent reply to those who ask what is
to be done for the mother when the children are grown up. Is she to be
pensioned? It is not enough to say that she can return to wage-earning,
for this is generally not true. By marriage she is often compelled to
leave the place of her employment, and every year taken from wage-earning
makes it more difficult to return to it.
This is a much greater practical difficulty than the fear of
over-population which some people raise. People are always in a panic
about the birth-rate; it is always too high for some and too low for
others. They suggest that if the endowment of motherhood were instituted,
and a man altogether relieved of the individual duty of maintaining
his offspring, there would be no limit to that offspring. It is quite
possible that a free womanhood would in itself provide the natural and
right limit. Those who talk as if women would deliberately have as many
children as possible, so as to go on earning motherhood grants, overlook
the fact that at present the women who have the largest families are
those who are the least able to support them, and suffer most from
having too many. It is a well-established fact that increased comfort
and refinement decrease fertility, at the same time that they decrease
infant mortality. Furthermore, it might be hoped that the endowment of
motherhood might make it possible for many men who now remain single and
are a great danger to the community, to marry.
It is not my task, and it would be an impossible one, to say whether
the women of the future will develop the family along individualist or
socialist lines. That they will not be content with things as they are
is one certainty. Another is that they ought to be made free to reform
conditions in full consultation and agreement with men. Lady Aberconway
has suggested that men should be obliged by law to give their wives a
fixed proportion of their incomes, and there appear to be in England more
followers of this idea than of the endowment of motherhood. It should
certainly be possible for a wife to sue for maintenance, without being
compelled to go on the rates, but the fixed payment of wives has very
many and very great practical difficulties, and it would not help the
millions of cases where the man’s total earnings are inadequate. Many
men, even now, give not a proportion, but practically the whole of their
wages to the wife to administer. A fixed proportion of one wage may be
enough, and the same proportion of another too little, and a small family
may easily be brought up on what would be penury for a large one.
What is urgently needed is, that the problem should be dealt with by
men and women not in the spirit of bargaining, or endeavouring each to
best the other, but with a single endeavour to do right by one another
and by the child. Nature has so arranged matters that the women cannot
evade a considerable portion of the burden of parentage. Men can,
and not infrequently do, evade the whole of the burden of parentage.
Together all good men and women should so contrive their body politic
that every child shall have the care and nurture it requires. Hitherto
man’s outlook as regards marriage has been personal rather than racial.
When the inequality of the marriage law with regard to infidelity is
objected to, he has, for ages past, explained that he has made infidelity
a more serious fault in a woman than in a man, because the result of it
in a woman might be that her husband would have to support another man’s
child. This is so, of course, but it is generally a far less serious
injury to the race than the results of a man’s infidelity are. It seems
to be a law of nature that some of the present must always be sacrificed
for the future. The woman may have to sacrifice liberty, genius, life
itself. Neither can the man with impunity evade his sacrifice. And he may
not regard it as a gift or a favour to the woman, for which she must, in
return, be subservient. It is his toll to the future, the future of his
world as well as hers.