"Their poor, old ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor,
old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls
made me weep. They are our conscripts. They are the venerable
ones whom we should reverence. All the mystery of womanhood
seems incarnated in their ugly being--the Mothers! the Mothers!
Ye are all one!"
--From the Letters of William James
Motherhood, which is not only the oldest but the most important
profession in the world, has received few of the benefits of
civilization. It is a curious fact that a civilization devoted to
mother-worship, that publicly professes a worship of mother and child,
should close its eyes to the appalling waste of human life and human
energy resulting from those dire consequences of leaving the whole
problem of child-bearing to chance and blind instinct. It would be
untrue to say that among the civilized nations of the world to-day, the
profession of motherhood remains in a barbarous state. The bitter truth
is that motherhood, among the larger part of our population, does not
rise to the level of the barbarous or the primitive. Conditions of life
among the primitive tribes were rude enough and severe enough to
prevent the unhealthy growth of sentimentality, and to discourage the
irresponsible production of defective children. Moreover, there is ample
evidence to indicate that even among the most primitive peoples
the function of maternity was recognized as of primary and central
importance to the community.
If we define civilization as increased and increasing responsibility
based on vision and foresight, it becomes painfully evident that the
profession of motherhood as practised to-day is in no sense civilized.
Educated people derive their ideas of maternity for the most part,
either from the experience of their own set, or from visits to
impressive hospitals where women of the upper classes receive the
advantages of modern science and modern nursing. From these charming
pictures they derive their complacent views of the beauty of motherhood
and their confidence for the future of the race. The other side of the
picture is revealed only to the trained investigator, to the patient and
impartial observer who visits not merely one or two "homes of the poor,"
but makes detailed studies of town after town, obtains the history of
each mother, and finally correlates and analyzes this evidence. Upon
such a basis are we able to draw conclusions concerning this strange
business of bringing children into the world.
Every year I receive thousands of letters from women in all parts of
America, desperate appeals to aid them to extricate themselves from the
trap of compulsory maternity. Lest I be accused of bias and exaggeration
in drawing my conclusions from these painful human documents, I prefer
to present a number of typical cases recorded in the reports of the
United States Government, and in the evidence of trained and impartial
investigators of social agencies more generally opposed to the doctrine
of Birth Control than biased in favor of it.
A perusal of the reports on infant mortality in widely varying
industrial centers of the United States, published during the past
decade by the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of
Labor, forces us to a realization of the immediate need of detailed
statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding.
Some such effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of
National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children's Bureau reports only
incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to coordinate
it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from
pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible
parenthood that is ignored by governmental and social agencies.
I have chosen a small number of typical cases from these reports. Though
drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the greatest crime
of modern civilization--that of permitting motherhood to be left to
blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant
and irresponsible classes of the community.
Here is a fairly typical case from Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A woman
of thirty-eight years had undergone thirteen pregnancies in seventeen
years. Of eleven live births and two premature stillbirths, only two
children were alive at the time of the government agent's visit. The
second to eighth, the eleventh and the thirteenth had died of bowel
trouble, at ages ranging from three weeks to four months. The only cause
of these deaths the mother could give was that "food did not agree with
them." She confessed quite frankly that she believed in feeding babies,
and gave them everything anybody told her to give them. She began to
give them at the age of one month, bread, potatoes, egg, crackers, etc.
For the last baby that died, this mother had bought a goat and gave its
milk to the baby; the goat got sick, but the mother continued to give
her baby its milk until the goat went dry. Moreover, she directed the
feeding of her daughter's baby until it died at the age of three months.
"On account of the many children she had had, the neighbors consider her
an authority on baby care."
Lest this case be considered too tragically ridiculous to be accepted
as typical, the reader may verify it with an almost interminable list of
similar cases.(1) Parental irresponsibility is significantly illustrated
in another case:
A mother who had four live births and two stillbirths in twelve years
lost all of her babies during their first year. She was so anxious that
at least one child should live that she consulted a physician concerning
the care of the last one. "Upon his advice," to quote the government
report, "she gave up her twenty boarders immediately after the child's
birth, and devoted all her time to it. Thinks she did not stop her hard
work soon enough; says she has always worked too hard, keeping boarders
in this country, and cutting wood and carrying it and water on her back
in the old country. Also says the carrying of water and cases of beer
in this country is a great strain on her." But the illuminating point in
this case is that the father was furious because all the babies died.
To show his disrespect for the wife who could only give birth to babies
that died, he wore a red necktie to the funeral of the last. Yet this
woman, the government agent reports, would follow and profit by any
instruction that might be given her.
It is true that the cases reported from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, do not
represent completely "Americanized" families. This lack does not prevent
them, however, by their unceasing fertility from producing the Americans
of to-morrow. Of the more immediate conditions surrounding child-birth,
we are presented with this evidence, given by one woman concerning the
birth of her last child:
On five o'clock on Wednesday evening she went to her sister's house to
return a washboard, after finishing a day's washing. The baby was born
while she was there. Her sister was too young to aid her in any way.
She was not accustomed to a midwife, she confessed. She cut the cord
herself, washed the new-born baby at her sister's house, walked home,
cooked supper for her boarders, and went to bed by eight o'clock. The
next day she got up and ironed. This tired her out, she said, so she
stayed in bed for two whole days. She milked cows the day after the
birth of the baby and sold the milk as well. Later in the week, when
she became tired, she hired someone to do that portion of her work. This
woman, we are further informed, kept cows, chickens, and lodgers, and
earned additional money by doing laundry and charwork. At times her
husband deserted her. His earnings amounted to $1.70 a day, while a
fifteen-year-old son earned $1.10 in a coal mine.
One searches in vain for some picture of sacred motherhood, as depicted
in popular plays and motion pictures, something more normal and
encouraging. Then one comes to the bitter realization that these, in
very truth, are the "normal" cases, not the exceptions. The exceptions
are apt to indicate, instead, the close relationship of this
irresponsible and chance parenthood to the great social problems of
feeble-mindedness, crime and syphilis.
Nor is this type of motherhood confined to newly arrived immigrant
mothers, as a government report from Akron, Ohio, sufficiently
indicates. In this city, the government agents discovered that more than
five hundred mothers were ignorant of the accepted principles of
infant feeding, or, if familiar with them, did not practise them. "This
ignorance or indifference was not confined to foreign-born mothers.... A
native mother reported that she gave her two-weeks-old baby ice cream,
and that before his sixth month, he was sitting at the table `eating
everything."' This was in a town in which there were comparatively few
cases of extreme poverty.
The degradation of motherhood, the damnation of the next generation
before it is born, is exposed in all its catastrophic misery, in the
reports of the National Consumers' League. In her report of living
conditions among night-working mothers in thirty-nine textile mills
in Rhode Island, based on exhaustive studies, Mrs. Florence Kelley
describes the "normal" life of these women:
"When the worker, cruelly tired from ten hours' work, comes home in the
early morning, she usually scrambles together breakfast for the family.
Eating little or nothing herself, and that hastily, she tumbles into
bed--not the immaculate bed in an airy bed-room with dark shades, but
one still warm from its night occupants, in a stuffy little bed-room,
darkened imperfectly if at all. After sleeping exhaustedly for an hour
perhaps she bestirs herself to get the children off to school, or care
for insistent little ones, too young to appreciate that mother is tired
out and must sleep. Perhaps later in the forenoon, she again drops into
a fitful sleep, or she may have to wait until after dinner. There is
the midday meal to get, and, if her husband cannot come home, his
dinner-pail to pack with a hot lunch to be sent or carried to him. If
he is not at home, the lunch is rather a makeshift. The midday meal is
scarcely over before supper must be thought of. This has to be eaten
hurriedly before the family are ready, for the mother must be in the
mill at work, by 6, 6:30 or 7 P.M.... Many women in their inadequate
English, summed up their daily routine by, 'Oh, me all time tired. TOO
MUCH WORK, TOO MUCH BABY, TOO LITTLE SLEEP!'"
"Only sixteen of the 166 married women were without children; thirty-two
had three or more; twenty had children one year old or under. There were
160 children under school-age, below six years, and 246 of school age."
"A woman in ordinary circumstances," adds this impartial investigator,
"with a husband and three children, if she does her own work, feels that
her hands are full. How these mill-workers, many of them frail-looking,
and many with confessedly poor health, can ever do two jobs is a
mystery, when they are seen in their homes dragging about, pale,
hollow-eyed and listless, often needlessly sharp and impatient with the
children. These children are not only not mothered, never cherished,
they are nagged and buffeted. The mothers are not superwomen, and like
all human beings, they have a certain amount of strength and when that
breaks, their nerves suffer."
We are presented with a vivid picture of one of these slave-mothers: a
woman of thirty-eight who looks at least fifty with her worn, furrowed
face. Asked why she had been working at night for the past two years,
she pointed to a six-months old baby she was carrying, to the five
small children swarming about her, and answered laconically, "Too much
children!" She volunteered the information that there had been two more
who had died. When asked why they had died, the poor mother shrugged her
shoulders listlessly, and replied, "Don't know." In addition to bearing
and rearing these children, her work would sap the vitality of any
ordinary person. "She got home soon after four in the morning, cooked
breakfast for the family and ate hastily herself. At 4.30 she was in
bed, staying there until eight. But part of that time was disturbed for
the children were noisy and the apartment was a tiny, dingy place in
a basement. At eight she started the three oldest boys to school, and
cleaned up the debris of breakfast and of supper the night before. At
twelve she carried a hot lunch to her husband and had dinner ready for
the three school children. In the afternoon, there were again dishes
and cooking, and caring for three babies aged five, three years, and
six months. At five, supper was ready for the family. The mother ate by
herself and was off to work at 5:45."
Another of the night-working mothers was a frail looking Frenchwoman of
twenty-seven years, with a husband and five children ranging from eight
years to fourteen months. Three other children had died. When visited,
she was doing a huge washing. She was forced into night work to meet the
expenses of the family. She estimated that she succeeded in getting
five hours' sleep during the day. "I take my baby to bed with me, but he
cries, and my little four-year-old boy cries, too, and comes in to make
me get up, so you can't call that a very good sleep."
The problem among unmarried women or those without family is not the
same, this investigator points out. "They sleep longer by day than they
normally would by night." We are also informed that pregnant women work
at night in the mills, sometimes up to the very hour of delivery. "It's
queer," exclaimed a woman supervisor of one of the Rhode Island mills,
"but some women, both on the day and the night shift, will stick to
their work right up to the last minute, and will use every means to
deceive you about their condition. I go around and talk to them, but
make little impression. We have had several narrow escapes.... A Polish
mother with five children had worked in a mill by day or by night, ever
since her marriage, stopping only to have her babies. One little girl
had died several years ago, and the youngest child, says Mrs. Kelley,
did not look promising. It had none of the charm of babyhood; its
body and clothing were filthy; and its lower lip and chin covered with
repulsive black sores."
It should be remembered that the Consumers' League, which publishes
these reports on women in industry, is not advocating Birth Control
education, but is aiming "to awaken responsibility for conditions under
which goods are produced, and through investigation, education and
legislation, to mobilize public opinion in behalf of enlightened
standards for workers and honest products for all." Nevertheless, in
Miss Agnes de Lima's report of conditions in Passaic, New Jersey, we
find the same tale of penalized, prostrate motherhood, bearing the
crushing burden of economic injustice and cruelty; the same blind but
overpowering instincts of love and hunger driving young women into the
factories to work, night in and night out, to support their procession
of uncared for and undernourished babies. It is the married women with
young children who work on the inferno-like shifts. They are driven to
it by the low wages of their husbands. They choose night work in order
to be with their children in the daytime. They are afraid of the neglect
and ill-treatment the children might receive at the hands of paid
caretakers. Thus they condemn themselves to eighteen or twenty hours of
daily toil. Surely no mother with three, four, five or six children can
secure much rest by day.
"Take almost any house"--we read in the report of conditions in New
Jersey--"knock at almost any door and you will find a weary, tousled
woman, half-dressed, doing her housework, or trying to snatch an hour or
two of sleep after her long night of work in the mill. ... The facts
are there for any one to see; the hopeless and exhausted woman, her
cluttered three or four rooms, the swarm of sickly and neglected
children."
These women claimed that night work was unavoidable, as their husbands
received so little pay. This in spite of all our vaunted "high wages."
Only three women were found who went into the drudgery of night work
without being obliged to do so. Two had no children, and their husbands'
earnings were sufficient for their needs. One of these was saving for
a trip to Europe, and chose the night shift because she found it less
strenuous than the day. Only four of the hundred women reported upon
were unmarried, and ninety-two of the married women had children. Of the
four childless married women, one had lost two children, and another
was recovering from a recent miscarriage. There were five widows. The
average number of children was three in a family. Thirty-nine of the
mothers had four or more. Three of them had six children, and six of
them had seven children apiece. These women ranged between the ages of
twenty-five and forty, and more than half the children were less than
seven years of age. Most of them had babies of one, two and three years
of age.
At the risk of repetition, we quote one of the typical cases reported
by Miss De Lima with features practically identical with the individual
cases reported from Rhode Island. It is of a mother who comes home from
work at 5:30 every morning, falls on the bed from exhaustion, arises
again at eight or nine o'clock to see that the older children are sent
off to school. A son of five, like the rest of the children, is on a
diet of coffee,--milk costs too much. After the children have left for
school, the overworked mother again tries to sleep, though the small son
bothers her a great deal. Besides, she must clean the house, wash, iron,
mend, sew and prepare the midday meal. She tries to snatch a little
sleep in the afternoon, but explains: "When you got big family, all time
work. Night-time in mill drag so long, so long; day-time in home go so
quick." By five, this mother must get the family's supper ready, and
dress for the night's work, which begins at seven. The investigator
further reports: "The next day was a holiday, and for a diversion, Mrs.
N. thought she would go up to the cemetery: `I got some children up
there,' she explained, `and same time I get some air. No, I don't go
nowheres, just to the mill and then home."'
Here again, as in all reports on women in industry, we find the
prevalence of pregnant women working on night-shifts, often to the very
day of their delivery. "Oh, yes, plenty women, big bellies, work in the
night time," one of the toiling mothers volunteered. "Shame they go, but
what can do?" The abuse was general. Many mothers confessed that owing
to poverty they themselves worked up to the last week or even day before
the birth of their children. Births were even reported in one of
the mills during the night shift. A foreman told of permitting a
night-working woman to leave at 6.30 one morning, and of the birth of
her baby at 7.30. Several women told of leaving the day-shift because of
pregnancy and of securing places on the night-shift where their condition
was less conspicuous, and the bosses more tolerant. One mother defended
her right to stay at work, says the report, claiming that as long as she
could do her work, it was nobody's business. In a doorway sat a sickly
and bloodless woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Her first baby
had died of general debility. She had worked at night in the mill until
the very day of its birth. This time the boss had told her she could
stay if she wished, but reminded her of what had happened last time. So
she had stopped work, as the baby was expected any day.
Again and again we read the same story, which varied only in detail: the
mother in the three black rooms; the sagging porch overflowing with pale
and sickly children; the over-worked mother of seven, still nursing
her youngest, who is two or three months old. Worn and haggard, with a
skeleton-like child pulling at her breast, the women tries to make the
investigator understand. The grandmother helps to interpret. "She never
sleeps," explains the old woman, "how can she with so many children?"
She works up to the last moment before her baby comes, and returns to
work as soon as they are four weeks old.
Another apartment in the same house; another of those night-working
mothers, who had just stopped because she is pregnant. The boss had
kindly given her permission to stay on, but she found the reaching on
the heavy spinning machines too hard. Three children, ranging in age
from five to twelve years, are all sickly and forlorn and must be cared
for. There is a tubercular husband, who is unable to work steadily, and
is able to bring in only $12 a week. Two of the babies had died, one
because the mother had returned to work too soon after its birth and had
lost her milk. She had fed him tea and bread, "so he died."
The most heartrending feature of it all--in these homes of the mothers
who work at night--is the expression in the faces of the children;
children of chance, dressed in rags, undernourished, underclothed, all
predisposed to the ravages of chronic and epidemic disease.
The reports on infant mortality published under the direction of the
Children's Bureau substantiate for the United States of America the
findings of the Galton Laboratory for Great Britain, showing that an
abnormally high rate of fertility is usually associated with poverty,
filth, disease, feeblemindedness and a high infant mortality rate. It
is a commonplace truism that a high birth-rate is accompanied by a high
infant-mortality rate. No longer is it necessary to dissociate cause and
effect, to try to determine whether the high birth rate is the cause of
the high infant mortality rate. It is sufficient to know that they are
organically correlated along with other anti-social factors detrimental
to individual, national and racial welfare. The figures presented by
Hibbs (2) likewise reveal a much higher infant mortality rate for the
later born children of large families.
The statistics which show that the greatest number of children are born
to parents whose earnings are the lowest,(3) that the direst poverty is
associated with uncontrolled fecundity emphasize the character of the
parenthood we are depending upon to create the race of the future.
A distinguished American opponent of Birth Control some years ago spoke
of the "racial" value of this high infant mortality rate among the
"unfit." He forgot, however, that the survival-rate of the children
born of these overworked and fatigued mothers may nevertheless be large
enough, aided and abetted by philanthropies and charities, to form the
greater part of the population of to-morrow. As Dr. Karl Pearson has
stated: "Degenerate stocks under present social conditions are not
short-lived; they live to have more than the normal size of family."
Reports of charitable organizations; the famous "one hundred neediest
cases" presented every year by the New York Times to arouse the
sentimental generosity of its readers; statistics of public and private
hospitals, charities and corrections; analyses of pauperism in town
and country--all tell the same tale of uncontrolled and irresponsible
fecundity. The facts, the figures, the appalling truth are there for all
to read. It is only in the remedy proposed, the effective solution, that
investigators and students of the problem disagree.
Confronted with the "startling and disgraceful" conditions of affairs
indicated by the fact that a quarter of a million babies die every year
in the United States before they are one year old, and that no less
than 23,000 women die in childbirth, a large number of experts and
enthusiasts have placed their hopes in maternity-benefit measures.
Such measures sharply illustrate the superficial and fragmentary manner
in which the whole problem of motherhood is studied to-day. It seeks a
LAISSER FAIRE policy of parenthood or marriage, with an indiscriminating
paternalism concerning maternity. It is as though the Government were
to say: "Increase and multiply; we shall assume the responsibility of
keeping your babies alive." Even granting that the administration of
these measures might be made effective and effectual, which is more
than doubtful, we see that they are based upon a complete ignorance
or disregard of the most important fact in the situation--that of
indiscriminate and irresponsible fecundity. They tacitly assume that
all parenthood is desirable, that all children should be born, and
that infant mortality can be controlled by external aid. In the great
world-problem of creating the men and women of to-morrow, it is not
merely a question of sustaining the lives of all children, irrespective
of their hereditary and physical qualities, to the point where they,
in turn, may reproduce their kind. Advocates of Birth Control offer and
accept no such superficial solution. This philosophy is based upon
a clearer vision and a more profound comprehension of human life. Of
immediate relief for the crushed and enslaved motherhood of the world
through State aid, no better criticism has been made than that of
Havelock Ellis:
"To the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on paper,
nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils of child-rearing
by setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers of
everything connected with the men of the future beyond the pleasure--if
such it happens to be--of conceiving them, and the trouble of bearing
them, and at the same time to rear them up independently of the home, in
a wholesome, economical and scientific manner. Nothing seems simpler,
but from the fundamental psychological point of view nothing is
falser.... A State which admits that the individuals composing it are
incompetent to perform their most sacred and intimate functions, and
takes it upon itself to perform them itself instead, attempts a task
that would be undesirable, even if it were possible of achievement.(4)"
It may be replied that maternity benefit measures aim merely to aid
mothers more adequately to fulfil their biological and social functions.
But from the point of view of Birth Control, that will never be possible
until the crushing exigencies of overcrowding are removed--overcrowding
of pregnancies as well as of homes. As long as the mother remains the
passive victim of blind instinct, instead of the conscious, responsible
instrument of the life-force, controlling and directing its expression,
there can be no solution to the intricate and complex problems that
confront the whole world to-day. This is, of course, impossible as long
as women are driven into the factories, on night as well as day shifts,
as long as children and girls and young women are driven into industries
to labor that is physically deteriorating as a preparation for the
supreme function of maternity.
The philosophy of Birth Control insists that motherhood, no less
than any other human function, must undergo scientific study, must be
voluntarily directed and controlled with intelligence and foresight. As
long as we countenance what H. G. Wells has well termed "the monstrous
absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing
and rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they `earn
their living' by contributing some half-mechanical element to some
trivial industrial product" any attempt to furnish "maternal education"
is bound to fall on stony ground. Children brought into the world as the
chance consequences of the blind play of uncontrolled instinct, become
likewise the helpless victims of their environment. It is because
children are cheaply conceived that the infant mortality rate is high.
But the greatest evil, perhaps the greatest crime, of our so-called
civilization of to-day, is not to be gauged by the infant-mortality
rate. In truth, unfortunate babies who depart during their first twelve
months are more fortunate in many respects than those who survive to
undergo punishment for their parents' cruel ignorance and complacent
fecundity. If motherhood is wasted under the present regime of "glorious
fertility," childhood is not merely wasted, but actually destroyed.
Let us look at this matter from the point of view of the children who
survive.
(1) U.S. Department of Labor: Children's Bureau. Infant
Mortality Series,
No. 3, pp. 81, 82, 83, 84.
(2) Henry H. Hibbs, Jr. Infant Mortality: Its Relation to
Social and
Industrial Conditions, p. 39. Russell Sage Foundation, New
York, 1916.
(3) Cf. U. S. Department of Labor. Children's Bureau:
Infant Mortality
Series, No. 11. p. 36.
(4) Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society, p. 31.