obligations. What is wrong without a license or commission from human
government, is wrong with such a license. If an undesigned and
undesired maternity be a dark and damning sin against the child, the
mother, and humanity, against God, without the sanction of the Church,
the State, and public opinion, it is a sin of an equally dark and
damning character with such sanction. In every case where the act that
leads to maternity would be a sin, a foul and monstrous crime, and the
shame and infamy of one or both parents, without the sanction of human
laws, it would be the same with such sanction, and in a legalized
union. Those women, therefore, who for any cause, allow an undesired
maternity to be imposed on them by men holding the legal relation of
husbands, and permit themselves to be made the means of giving
existence to children whom they do not want, in legal marriage, ought
to be, and one day will be, regarded in the same light as those are
who become mothers outside of wedlock. If it be wrong for a woman to
become a mother, without the consent of Church and State and society,
it is wrong for her to become a mother with such consent. If right
with such consent, it is right without it. Whatever it is right to do
with a civil, ecclesiastical or social license, it is right to do
without it.
“If woman’s life be made a curse by the constant endurance of
suffering, consequent upon a too-frequent maternity, the religious
woman often endeavors to stifle the outcries and accusations of reason
and intuition by the absurd plea that she ‘must have all the children
whom it is God’s will to send.’ Occasionally, one is found weak
enough, and wickedly fond enough, to say, as Miss Bremer, with
contemptible silliness, makes one of her amiable characters in ‘The
Home’ say, ‘that though she had such a large and rapidly increasing
family, and her husband’s means of providing for it were somewhat
limited, yet he _never grumbled_, and was always ready to welcome each
new child as it came!’ Grumble, indeed! A husband ‘grumbling’ that his
wife has conceived! A father ‘grumbling’ at the birth of a child!
‘Always ready to welcome each new child as it came!’—and this said by
a wife of her husband, as the strongest testimony to his manliness and
justice as a husband and father, and as the highest reason why she
should love and honor him! What man so base, so ignoble, so fallen,
and so deserving a dungeon or the gallows, as he who imparts the germ
of a new life to his wife, to gratify his passion, and then ‘grumbles’
because a child is born, and thrusts it from him? Man can give no
greater proof of the utter degradation and ruin of his moral nature.
Yet not to grumble at a maternity of his own imposing, and not to
repel and cast off the babe for whose undesired existence he is
responsible, is Miss Bremer’s highest conception of manhood!
“But a false religious education is not the only reason why woman
weakly and unrighteously yields herself to the base and brutal passion
of her husband; for a passion, though all pure and ennobling when its
demands are just and naturally answered, becomes most base and
brutalizing to men and women, when indulged at the expense of the
child, and contrary to the wishes of the wife and mother. As society
is now constituted, she is his dependant. The laws make her
subservient to his will, while she continues a wife, and all-pervading
custom has, in great measure, deprived her of the dignity which an
independent ability to engage in business for herself, outside the
domestic circle, would confer.
“‘_Can do_ is easily carried about,’ is a pithy old Scottish proverb;
and this same ‘Can do’ is a good and sturdy staff of self-support,
when a woman finds that the man on whom she fondly leaned would become
to her, not a tower of strength and a refuge from the storm, but the
oppressor to crush both soul and body, and make of her very Womanhood
an unworthy thing. Let woman respect herself. She will gain nothing by
submitting to wrong and outrage. No wife ever gained or perpetuated
the love and respect of a husband, deserving the name, by yielding to
his passion, merely to please him.
“It is the popular, but foolish and unthinking belief, that children
owe great obligations to their parents for bringing them into life;
but is not the contrary the fact, that parents are under the strongest
possible obligations to their children to render that being good,
wise, and happy, which they themselves have forced upon their child?
Assuming this as self-evident, then is it clear that such existence
should not be the result of blind, unthinking passion, but of careful,
wise and loving design.
“The act in which the child originates is performed, often, solely for
the momentary gratification of one or both parents. No thought for the
welfare, the physical, mental and spiritual organization and
tendencies of the child that may ensue, is entertained. No careful and
anxious forethought for the character and destiny of the child is
exercised, but the gratification of mere animal passion is the sole
object sought. The child comes into being undesigned by the father and
undesired by the mother,—the offspring of reckless, selfish, sensual
lust, and not of tender, self-forgetting, noble love. How grievous the
wrong done by the father to the mother, and by the mother to herself,
and by both to the child who is thus thrust into the world by
violence! What hope can exist for such a child? The felon’s doom was
written on his soul before he was born. His parents consigned him to
the dungeon or the gallows ere he drew the breath of life.
“The woman who, in youth, is flattered and caressed for the charms of
her person, the sweetness of her temper, and the goodness of her
heart, when married to a man who thus regards her as but the
instrument of his pleasure, soon loses the charms for which she was
caressed, and, while the husband is in his prime, she enters upon a
premature old age; her physical strength exhausted by the almost
constant suffering and agony attendant upon giving existence to those
poor, unwelcome ones,—her beauty faded, her temper soured, her whole
soul embittered by a consciousness of her hard lot, and her mental
nature stunted in its growth,—for what leisure has she to attend to
the wants of her own spirit, while her energies are taxed to the
utmost with the care of her living children, who are solely dependent
on her, and she preparing to add another to the number? How can she
fill the treasure-house of her own soul with ‘things new and old,’
under all these adverse circumstances, and while the present physical
wants of her little ones are constantly clamoring, ‘Give! give!’ Does
not reason, does not justice, demand for woman that she have full
opportunity for the development of her own Womanhood, soul, body, and
spirit? Has not she, as an individual child of God and member of the
human family, a _right_ to this? Does not the well-being of such
children as she may righteously bring into existence loudly call for a
full and _practical_ recognition, on the part of every husband and
every man, of her right to decide for herself when, how often, and
under what circumstances, she shall assume the office of Maternity, or
be subjected to the relation that may issue in maternity? Does not the
happiness, the best interest of the husband, require it? Does not
Humanity itself demand it?
“And how must that woman, in whose soul the theory of passive
obedience has not wholly eradicated nature, regard the husband who
causes her thus to curse ‘the day wherein she was born’ a woman? In
her inmost soul, she must look upon him as the half-enlightened slave
looks upon his master, and bitterly reproach him for victimizing her
to his own base passion, and for his own short-lived gratification,
irrespective of the woful consequences to her whom he has sworn to
cherish, honor and protect. And justly does she thus regard him. No
wife can love and honor such a husband. He is to her what the
executioner is to the victim, or the slaveholder to his crushed and
outraged slaves. She cannot but loathe him.
“Can love do any injury to its object? Must not the wife become
alienated from the husband, who, instead of cherishing her health and
beauty, and seeking her happiness, subjects her to the loss of all
these, and instead of honoring, basely enslaves her to his own
infamous passion?—who, instead of protecting from evil, exposes her to
sickness, sorrow and death, not in accordance with her own free will,
her own glad choice, in pursuit of an object worthy and great enough
to inspire hope, courage and strength to meet the coming suffering,
and the attainment of which shall amply compensate, and cause her ‘to
remember no more the anguish, for joy’ that a new life is given unto
her, but simply and solely that his own mean, selfish, animal nature
may find present satisfaction? Deserves such a man the blessings of a
home of love and harmony, the devotion of wife and little ones? Alas!
no; he has planted only curses, and ‘whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap.’
“Must not such a wife, too, regard the creative function in both
herself and husband with loathing and abhorrence? And did not the
power of refusing this unwelcome maternity reside within herself, who
could blame her for reproaching even the great Creator for so endowing
her with a capacity for unremunerative suffering? And what must be the
atmosphere of that house (I will not dignify it by the sacred name of
_home_), where the wife and mother regards her own nature as
degraded,—her husband the tyrant who degrades, and her children the
fruits of this degradation? Is that house a fit nursery for the germs
of a noble Humanity? Do not plants there take root which cumber the
earth, and, in their turn, fill it anew with those briers and thorns
of human kind, which render its habitations places of cursing and
bitterness?
“Alas for the poor child of such a parentage! Receiving his very being
by a base act of the father, nourished until birth underneath the
heart of the mother, whose whole nature protests against its
existence, feeding upon her bitterness, hatred, and sense of
humiliation, the gall and wormwood of her soul infused into its young
being, coming at last into the world destitute of the inheritance of
love,—the inheritance justly his own,—where shall be the resting-place
of that child’s soul? Around what can it lovingly cling? Even its own
mother regards it as an unwelcome intruder; in whose loving bosom
shall it be tenderly nurtured?
“Perhaps the mother who bore him used her best endeavor to cut short
his earthly existence ere he saw the light; and, failing in this, when
ushered into the world, grudges him the care and sustenance necessary
to sustain that existence. Or if, as is more frequently the fact, with
the actual presence of the helpless innocent in her bosom, somewhat of
the mother’s heart awakens into life, it is not that rich, overflowing
life of love which pours the wealth and fulness of her own being into
his. She cares for him as the animal cares for its young in its utter
helplessness; and then the weary woman, with many other children about
her, and preparing for a new maternity, thrusts him from her as soon
as possible, and the little yearling must ‘tak the stirk’s sta’ (the
stall of the yearling calf). What can the poor, unwelcome child
become? How small are his chances for a virtuous life! If he thinks
God has so created him, well may he plead with poor Burns—
‘Thou knowest thou hast formed me
With passions wild and strong.’
‘Can a bitter fountain send forth sweet water?’ ‘Where shall I get
them?’ was the reply of a criminal to Jonathan Edwards, who told him
he must have better thoughts.
“Alas for poor Humanity! ‘Let there be light,’ that man may know that
the relation that leads to maternity can only be ennobled when its
object is the creation of a new and glorious life; that his passional
nature can only derive dignity and beauty from the control of love and
reason; that otherwise, it is of the earth, earthy, and debases him
below the level of the brute. ‘Let there be light,’ that woman, in
whose soul resides the power, may say to this overwhelming flood of
evil, ‘Here shall thy proud waves be stayed!’ The errors of a false
religious education, bad laws, and bad customs, have, hitherto, formed
some extenuation for this weak subserviency; but this ignorance has
been tolerated full long, and now the great cry of God and Humanity
goes forth calling for repentance,—that ‘a new heavens and a new earth
may be created, wherein shall dwell righteousness.’”
Man has a heart, and that heart can be reached by the loving and earnest
appeal of a true woman. Words, such as those contained in the above
extract, will never be uttered in vain. They are the true oracles of
Nature’s God, as revealed in the soul of the wife and the mother. Let
the father hearken to the mother as she pleads, in behalf of her
children, that they may not be cursed with an unwelcome existence. Let
the husband listen to the prayer of his wife, that she may be spared a
maternity whose responsibilities she is not prepared joyfully to assume.
Humanity utters her indignant protest against man, when, to gratify his
sensual passion, he perpetrates the greatest possible outrage against
woman, as a wife and mother, and as a woman, by subjecting her to the
necessity of cursing her child with an abhorred existence, or of killing
it before it is born. Protestations of love and devotion must ever seem
insulting and disgusting to a true woman, from a man who would thus
recklessly inflict upon herself and her child this foul wrong. In vain
does such a man prate of his regard for the purity and honor of woman,
of his reverence for marriage and parentage, and of his desire for the
elevation of our common humanity; his life, in the sacred privacy of
home, is an insult to his wife, an outrage upon the mother of his
children, an act of living injustice and cruelty to his offspring, and a
crime of deepest infamy against all that is true, pure and noble in
human nature.
Man will not always be thus heedless of the health and happiness of his
wife; he will not always be thus unjust and inhuman to his innocent and
unconscious children, by making them objects of dread, of loathing and
cursing, to the very heart under whose pulsations they receive their
ante-natal development. He will subject his manhood to the health and
happiness of his wife and children; and in doing so, will receive the
richest reward earth can bestow,—the perfect trust of a devoted wife,
and the loving respect of a healthy, happy and joyous offspring.
H. C. W.
LETTER VII.
THE DREAD ALTERNATIVE—ANTE-NATAL MURDER, OR AN UNWELCOME CHILD.
DEAR FRIEND:
The following experience of a woman, given in her own words, will make
its appeal to all that is pure, manly and noble in manhood. It is the
cry of anguish from woman’s riven heart to man, to save her from the
agony and blighting curse of a maternity whose sufferings she is not
prepared joyfully to meet, and from which her entire nature shrinks with
dread and loathing; to save her from the revolting alternative of
killing her child before it is born, or of giving life to one whose very
existence is loathed by her. Several times, the crime of an undesired
maternity had been perpetrated upon her by her husband, and each time
the child had been killed by herself or by a doctor, before its birth.
She was asked how she felt under these outrages, and what was the result
on her physical, social and spiritual nature. The following is her
answer:
“How did I feel? I felt that I was committing a damning sin. My soul
shrank from the deed with intense horror and loathing. The
remonstrances of a guilty conscience I could not silence. I had
submitted to the relation in which maternity originates, thinking it
my duty, as a wife, to do so whenever my husband demanded. I told him
that my very soul shrank from maternity; that I was not yet prepared
for its responsibilities and agonies, and begged of him not to impose
that burden upon me till I could joyfully welcome it, which I felt
that I should, in due time. But he heeded not my prayer. He insisted
on the relation. Conception and maternity ensued.
“My soul died within me. An ever present loathing of the new life that
was being developed within mine was in my heart. My own soul, and the
God whose voice was heard within, repudiated its existence. I could
not help the feeling. The spirit of murder, towards the unconscious
child in embryo, was ever present to me; yet my soul shrank with
horror from the deed. Shall I kill my child before its birth, or give
existence to one whose birthright inheritance is _a mother’s curse_?
was the question I found myself debating continually;—for my curse was
on its very life.
“I consulted a woman, a friend in whom I trusted. I found that she had
perpetrated that outrage on herself and on others. She told me it was
not murder to kill a child any time before its birth. Of this she
labored to convince me, and railed in the aid of her ‘family
physician,’ to give force to her arguments. He argued that it was
right and just for wives thus to protect themselves against the
results of their husband’s sensualism,—told me that God and human laws
would approve of killing children before they were born, rather than
curse them with an undesired existence. My only trouble was, with
God’s view of the case. I could not get rid of the feeling that it was
an outrage on my body and soul, and on my unconscious babe. He argued
that my child, at five months (which was the time), had no life, and
where there was no life, no life could be taken. Though I determined
to do the deed, or get the ‘family physician’ to do it, my womanly
instincts, my reason, my conscience, my self-respect, my entire
nature, revolted against my decision. My Womanhood rose up in
withering condemnation. And, after the deed was done, I felt that I
could never respect myself again; that I could never again appear in
society; that if I did, all that was pure and true in manhood and
womanhood would shrink from me as a polluted, disgusting object.
“I tried to cast the blame on my husband, who had imposed the
necessity upon me. I tried to feel that the outrage and the guilt were
all his own; that, had he heeded my prayer, and dealt justly by me, I
should never have been driven to the dread alternative of ante-natal
murder, or of giving birth to a child I did not want. But I saw and
felt, that however great the wrong he had done to me, the fact still
remained,—my nature was outraged, if not by my consent, yet by my
sufferance. I knew I could have saved myself from maternity, had I
been resolute to do so; and that, having submitted to the relation in
which it originated, I had no right to add to the outrage by killing
my child. I felt myself to be a crushed, prostituted, abandoned woman.
Can any apology be offered for a woman who commits the crime of
ante-natal murder, after she has voluntarily yielded to the relation
that leads to maternity?
“Maternity, with its prospective agonies and its abhorred
responsibilities (for I did not yet call for a child), was again
thrust upon me in a few months; but I shrunk from destroying my child
again. I gave birth to two living children. Then my soul rebelled
against having more; but my husband was deaf to my prayers and my
tears, though he himself was opposed to my having any more children,
and insisted it was my fault if I did, though he persisted in his
right to his sensual indulgence. How could I avoid having more
children, when he was continually demanding of me the relation which
naturally leads to offspring? ‘Kill them,’ was his reply, ‘before they
are born, or do something to prevent conception!’
“His injustice and heartless selfishness cut me to the quick,—stung my
very soul. ‘This is the man,’ I said to myself, ‘who has promised to
love, cherish, and _protect_ me; who expects me to love him tenderly
and evermore; whom I have promised to love till death separates us;
and yet, this is the man who, without regard to my wishes and
conditions, insists on his right to gratify his passion, though at the
expense of my body and soul!’ My soul rose in rebellion against him.
It became evident to me, that the gratification of his passion was his
only object in seeking me as a wife; that this was the only claim he
had upon me, or wished to have, and that he had no higher idea of
marriage than as a means of licensed, reputable indulgence.
“I became desperate. I could not leave my children. I knew if I left
him, I could give no reason for the step, except my aversion to having
maternity thrust upon me in defiance of the demands of my own nature,
and I knew that all would condemn me, if I left him to escape from
such an outrage, as this was not considered a wrong to me, but his
right. Every feeling of my soul revolted against his taking possession
of my person, without my consent, to blight and curse my body and soul
to gratify his animal nature.
“I came to the conclusion to stand by my own rights, and defend my
person against his sensualism. I told him, candidly, how I felt, and
that I must protect myself, in this respect, for he would not. I told
him I was living daily in deadly fear of his passion, and of
maternity; that the relation in which it resulted had become repulsive
to me, and that he had brought me to view myself as a loathed, abject
and prostituted woman. His wrath was roused; and finally, from fear of
breaking up my family and having my helpless living children taken
from me, I submitted to a hell which had no mitigation, until
separation gave it to me.
“In my intercourse with men, I have found few who did not view
marriage and a wife as my husband did, as a mere means of sensual
gratification. Companionship, intellectual, social, and spiritual
growth, and elevation, they think little of, in connection with a
wife. They see no soul, no God, in the wife; only the mere animal, to
administer to the brute in them.”
In the presence of a just and pure God, and before the laws of Nature
that are designed to govern all conjugal relations, does marriage give
to the husband any right over the person of the wife, or to the wife any
rights over the person of the husband, which neither had before? Has a
husband any more right to _demand_ of his wife the surrender of her
person to his passion, than he has to demand that surrender of any other
woman? True marriage creates necessities in each, and gives vitality and
intensity to wants in each, which the presence, the love and
companionship of the other can supply; but a pure conjugal love creates
no rights, and never thinks or talks of rights over the property, the
body, or the soul of the loved one. Indeed, a true man, whose soul is
filled with a holy conjugal love for a woman, would scorn and loathe any
personal caresses or surrender from her, when he knew she gave them
merely from a sense of duty, and only because she believed he had a
right to them. A man must be shorn of all true manliness, and become
utterly debased and prostituted, before he can, in or out of legal
marriage, accept the personal surrender of a woman to his passion, when
he knows the surrender is made solely to please him, or from some false
idea of duty. However tenderly, truly and devotedly a man may love a
woman, she is not, therefore, under obligations to receive any
expressions from him, except such as her own necessities demand.
Whatever manifestations of yourself you would make to your wife, before
offering them, create in her the necessity of demanding and of receiving
them. If your nature prompts you to reveal yourself to her in the
relation that leads to maternity control yourself, and be sternly true
to yourself, to your wife, and your child that may ensue, until, by all
other loving and endearing manifestations, you have created in her
nature an earnest call for maternity. Then would she joyfully accept of
you the germ of a new life, and, for the sake of her husband and her
child, consecrate all the energies of her soul to its true development.
Read the following. The extract is from a letter written by one who has
proudly and nobly filled the stations of a wife and a mother, and whose
children and grandchildren surround her and crown her life with
tenderest love and respect. She has seen many of the companions of her
girlhood victimized, and literally offered up on the altar of
sensualism, in legal marriage. Their husbands demanded passional
gratification as their _right_, irrespective of consequences to wife or
children, and they submitted as a _duty_. Their career was short, in
many cases, and in others, they live but wrecks of their former selves.
A relation that should have ennobled and saved them, has crushed them to
death: