HECUBA
_Feminist Mothers_
So far I have refrained from any detailed discussion of modern women
and maternity because it is still necessary to make it clear that a
full life of activity for women is perfectly possible and permissible
without it. I am quite aware that certain religious people assert
as a moral principle that the purpose of sex-love is not mutual
enjoyment but the perpetuation of the race. I am also aware that
militarists enjoin on women the necessity of marriage and large
families as a patriotic duty. Further, certain doctors have gone
out of their way to try to prove that the use of contraceptives is
contrary to health and nature. These same people, we may note, have
no aversion from the wearing by women of internal remedial rubber
supports for months on end nor to patching up with silver, papier
mâché, and other foreign materials, the insides and outsides of human
beings mutilated in the natural and healthy pursuit called war. I
am not concerned with the morals of convention or superstition, but
with the morals of experience. It is the experience of modern women
that sex is an instinctive need to them as it is to men, and further
that the prevention of conception brings to them no loss of poise,
health, or happiness. On the contrary, when once they embark on the
task of maternity, contraception is a blessed safeguard to health and
recovery in the periods of rest between pregnancies. I am not going
to deny that the most perfect delight known to human beings is the
completely reckless, mutually adoring union of two people of vitality
and intelligence who hope to create another human being as a constant
reminder of the beauty of that moment. But many considerations, which
we shall discuss, forbid a yearly child. I read recently in an article
by G. K. Chesterton, that sex without gestation and parturition is
like blowing the trumpets and waving the flags without doing any of
the fighting. From a woman such words, though displaying inexperience,
might come with dignity; from a man they are an unforgivable,
intolerable insult. What is man’s part in sex but a perpetual waving
of flags and blowing of trumpets and avoidance of the fighting? The
vast majority of men are not even tender or kindly to their pregnant or
nursing wives, nor will they give help or consideration to the care of
their young children.
A revolt against motherhood under present conditions is not surprising,
nor is it entirely regrettable. There are quite a number of women
whose minds and bodies are not fitted or have not been fitted by their
upbringing and education to produce and care for children. This is
a source of distress to many people, who, as was suggested earlier,
did not think of it at the right moment, when the education of women
in public and private schools was being developed. Even now these
same people stand in the way of the surest remedy: which is to teach
science, physiology, and the beauty of sex and maternity to boys and
girls at an early age. The London County Council, many of whom are
certainly distressed beyond measure at the falling birth-rate and the
discontent and irresponsibility of modern young people, have just, in
consultation with suitably selected moral headmasters and mistresses,
turned down the suggestion of sex-teaching in elementary and secondary
schools. We are always told that boys and girls of all classes nowadays
acquire this knowledge easily for themselves, but the mere knowledge
is not the only thing to the adolescent mind. Things not spoken of by
parents or teachers, things dealt with in hushed voices by moral and
spiritual leaders, surrounded by cant and humbug and false sentiment,
are bound to be thought nasty by mild young people and to provide
ribald laughter for the obstreperous.
This is not to say that sex-information should be given in a spirit of
evangelical solemnity and exhortation, nor even of soft sentimentality.
All that is needed is lessons in physiology, taught as a matter
of course, as botany or nature-study are often taught; and then
explanations to boys of the working of their bodies, how to keep them
in health, how not to dissipate and destroy their energies too soon.
Further, they should be told that woman is neither a chattel nor a
servant, nor even an inferior, but a partner in joy as in the business
of life; that there is no question or difficulty, public or private,
which cannot be brought to her for discussion and judgment; and that
she has a right to share in all decisions affecting a joint life,
children, money, and the conduct of affairs of State. To girls in the
same way could be explained the physical changes of puberty, marriage,
and maternity, how the child grows, what food and care the mother, and
afterwards the baby, will need. There is nothing in this too difficult
or shocking to young or adolescent minds. So many of us can remember
the secret conclaves with our friends when we puzzled out and pieced
together what scraps of information we could glean, awakening instinct
darkly supplementing this knowledge. Some of us can remember, perhaps,
having noticed obscene writing on school-walls, instantly reported by
shocked prefects, instantly effaced by school-mistresses with an awful
and portentous gravity which made us feel we had stumbled on the brink
of a secret of incredible wickedness and horror. One straightforward
lecture of concise information could have dispelled the lurking
mystery once and for all and imparted a sense of magic and wonder and
ambition. Some of the more fortunate of us, through study in libraries
and dreaming over poems, created for ourselves a finer attitude. With
no teaching other than that we might find someone who would marry us
some day, and that marriage was an excellent destiny even for educated
women, and with no belief in any of the moral taboos current around
us, some of us can none the less remember the pride of caring for the
body, safeguarding health and looks, avoiding excess, severe strain,
and overwork, because we cherished our dreams of the children that our
bodies were to make――not ordinary children, of course not: Promethean
creatures, endowed with every gift that mortal man could steal from
the jealous gods, strong, beautiful, intelligent and bold――kings and
conquerors, not of their fellow-creatures but of nature and the mystery
of the world. There is not a woman, unless completely warped by early
training, in whom such dreams and visions will not stir if we try to
wake them. If not, then let her pass: we do not need her to perpetuate
the race. And do not trick her into motherhood by false sentiment and
information, or by withholding from her the means to protect herself if
she is not fully resolved upon bearing a child.
We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to
prevent them. Nor should we represent motherhood as something so common
and easy that everyone can go through it without harm or suffering
and rear her children competently and well. Without arousing dread
or horror, we should tell young women frankly the pain and agony of
childbirth, and the anxiety and griefs which are the fate of every
woman who is a mother by choice and therefore loves her children.
Nothing whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by
lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and responsibility
which they will evade. Everything is to be gained by training a woman
in knowledge, courage, and physical strength, and leaving it then to
her own instinct and her mind to tell her that to create new human
beings is worth the discomfort and the suffering which she must
necessarily undergo. Those in whom the courage to create survives
when choice is free and all the facts are known are those best fitted
to bring children into the world, and breed in them eagerness and
intrepidity. The others will only pass on fear and distaste for life
from which individuals and the community suffer far too much already.[7]
[7] The anti-feminists who see in emancipated women nothing but
persecuting spinsters should take comfort from the fact that
voluntary motherhood will ultimately destroy feminism, if
they are right. The children of women passionately desirous
of maternity will inherit strong parental and survival
instincts, the occasional feminist “sport” not reproducing
herself!
I do not mean by this that we should, scorning the aid of science,
return to natural childbirth, and let its pangs scare off the weaklings
and the cowards. In this matter the charges of our critics are
conflicting. They condemn us for having sought the aid of science to
mitigate our suffering, and in the same breath tell us that a return
to natural child-bed will bring back a primitive exhilaration and
freedom from pain lost for thousands of years. I do not believe that
for any comparatively civilized race, any race really worthy the name
of man, childbirth has ever been painless. The upright position, held
by eighteenth-century divines to be a source of pride in man, was the
first injustice to women. Nor do I believe that the sufferings of
modern women are any worse or their confinements any more difficult
than those of women in the past. They are more closely observed and the
difficulties known, and, where skill is available, the dangerous ones
are less likely to be fatal. In the past the fragile woman died, or
continued ailing, unobserved by a doctor and afraid to complain. People
who live and breed in a state of nature are by no means so healthy and
vigorous as our modern Rousseaus would have us believe: more children
die than survive, and those who are left have physical defects and
deformities which could have been remedied by knowledge and care. These
and the ravages of smallpox and other diseases, and the deformities
due to the natural accidents of life unmitigated by medical care,
produce far more ugliness than the mark of an obstetric instrument on
temple or forehead. Then, again, youth passes more quickly. The men
and women we see in modern life, still reasonably young and fresh with
rounded faces and teeth stopped or supplemented by art, would in a more
primitive community be dead, or else crouching useless and despised,
toothless and with sunken cheeks by the fireside of their sons and
daughters.
Decay and pain belong to nature. To arrest the one and mitigate the
other has been the task which the sciences that deal in physiology
have set themselves. Remedial at first, they pass on to the stage
of prevention. Already the principle of intelligent medicine is to
strengthen what is weak in the body by nourishment and exercise rather
than provide artificial substitutes. Paralysed limbs return to life;
women retain their teeth white and strong through several pregnancies.
This is not done by a return to nature, but by an increase in
civilization and knowledge. In that way our very landscapes have been
formed. We prune, we nourish the soil, we cross-breed our plants. The
vegetables upon which the enthusiast for nature urges us to live are
the product of science and artifice: thousands of years of cultivation,
nitrates from Chile, skill of the experimenter, skill of the gardener’s
hand. The same is true of the animals we breed for meat, eggs, or
milk supply. Agriculture and stock-breeding seem natural to us――they
were not natural in the distant past. As regards the human body, to
me at least it seems that we are now beginning to approach the right
attitude. There was more dosing and doctoring of petty ailments among
intelligent people in the last century. To-day we try to learn how best
to live in order that such ailments may not occur, and substitute a
well-balanced diet for aids to digestion and the normal functioning of
our bodies. We do the same in rearing our children. And this attitude
would become more general if those who rule us, Press, Church, rich men
and politicians, would consider it really important that every man,
woman, and child in the State should have health and happiness, and
therefore supply broadcast the necessary rules of life and sufficient
of healthy and staple foods for all, in place of advertisement of
quack remedies and patent substitutes prepared by profiteers.
To return to the application of science and nature to maternity. A
special sentimentality and superstition inherited from the completely
savage periods of history cling about this, as about sex. The avoidance
of suffering in childbirth is taboo in the Japanese moral code, as
it was until recently in Christian morals. Religion has persisted
in regarding the female body as unclean when engaged in its most
important functions, and purifying it afterwards by special prayers
to the Deity.[8] We find this savagery current in Judaism[9] as in
Christianity, together with an exhortation to be fruitful and multiply,
and therefore to pass through shame and uncleanness as often as we can.
It was thought a horror and an outrage when chloroform was used to
help us. It is a still greater horror when means are discovered of not
having children at all. To this day most doctors and dentists refuse
to give an anæsthetic and draw a rotten tooth which is wearing down a
pregnant mother’s strength by sleepless nights and days of agony. Yet
this can be done with reasonable care and skill. Behind all this there
is the mystic belief that somehow or other nature does the work best
unaided and unhindered; and this mysticism is rooted in a savage taboo.
Life is, indeed, so pertinacious that somehow some of us will survive
whatever we do, but this does not seem to me an adequate attitude for
the rational mother.
[8] See the service for the _Churching of Women_ in the Prayer
Book.
[9] _Leviticus_, xii, 1–8.
The truth is that it is not desired or expected that mothers should
be rational. Maternal instinct is so wonderful, maternal devotion so
sublime, cry our sentimental brutes. Whatever we may have known of life
and the outside world, it is still expected in modern times that, once
married, we shall descend into a morass of instinct and ignorance from
which we shall never, if the male and the vindictively-minded spinster
can prevent it, emerge again. We are privileged, so we are told, in
that we may bear each year a child for the State, rock the cradle,
wash, mend, and make, pass on the lore of housekeeping and infant-care
to our daughters just as we received it from our mothers. It is such
a beautiful picture: a pity it is entirely false. The old-fashioned
mother had no lore, and her instinct was inadequate. She succeeded by
luck rather than by knowledge. She adored, or disciplined; she killed
by kindness or by severity and neglect. She would coddle when she
should have hardened, harden when she should have coddled; she would
over-feed and under-feed, or give the wrong kind of food. Since it has
been the fashion for women to have minds, the books for mothers have
become more scientific and our intelligent inquiries have been met by
research and more adequate replies. Every mother with any intelligence
who has reared one or more children through the first year of life and
up to five years of age would admit nowadays that scientific knowledge
was of more service to her than all the instinct and adoration at her
command. Indeed, I believe the so-called maternal instinct in handling
and understanding babies consists of habit almost imperceptibly learnt
in tending the first, blossoming into a smooth instinctive unity with
the coming of the second. The fashionable mother, said to be devoid of
maternal instinct because she neglects her child, has simply not learnt
it, because necessity does not compel her to practical duties. This is
even true, though less so, of well-to-do mothers who feed their babies
at the breast.
People will persist in imagining that uncivilized women were always
able to feed their children in natural fashion. Very often they were
obliged to seek the help of another mother, and, when that was not
forthcoming, the baby died. It is quite true that our adaptation to
modern conditions of life, nerve-stress, combined with overwork for
women in towns and industrial districts, has caused breast-feeding to
be less common than it was in the past. But here again the way of life
is not back to nature, which is impossible because we cannot at a blow
destroy industrialism and the towns――but onwards, to greater knowledge.
Instead of bullying the mothers and telling them it is wicked not to
feed their babies at the breast, let them know how, by pre-natal care
of health and strength, by diet, by deliberate nerve-control, they can
feed their babies with comfort and delight and without detriment to
their health and the work which they must necessarily do――or even to
their beauty. Here again, if choice is free and the child therefore
ardently desired, there is more chance of success with breast-feeding.
And knowledge of the chemical constituents of cow’s milk and patent
foods as compared with human milk is more likely to induce the modern
mother to suckle her child than volumes of abuse or sentimental twaddle.
Then as to the hygiene of pregnancy. Could our mothers have taught us
about the different food-values, about protein, nitrogenous foods,
calcium from the green foods for teeth and bones, avoidance of too
many albuminous foods? Knowledge of what diet can do to help us in
pregnancy and our children in early youth is in its infancy, but it
is there, none the less. Shall we fling it aside and return to pure
instinct? What massage and remedial exercises have taught can be
applied to our bodies during pregnancy and after childbirth. It is
probable that closer study of the functions of the muscles of the back
and the abdomen would enable us to teach women to exercise and control
them in a way that would make childbirth almost painless, and the
recovery of poise and activity afterwards more rapid and more thorough.
Under present conditions, muscles that are often too rigid or too
feeble expand and never recover their tone; others――the back muscles,
it may be――go out of use temporarily and similarly do not recover.
In the middle-class woman laziness is often the cause of difficult
confinements and poor recovery of the figure; in the working mother a
too speedy return to work which is too hard and does not exercise the
body harmoniously; in both the ignorance which leads to wrong kinds
of nourishment during pregnancy, and fear of doing harm to the child
which leads to rigid and over-careful movement, are responsible for a
good many troubles. Psychological effects may be serious. Most women
develop during pregnancy sensitiveness and a timidity protective to the
child. From this the very fertile mother has no opportunity to recover.
Hence many of the silly old ladies who cannot cross roads unaided by a
policeman. With birth-control, in two years a determined mother can
completely restore her nerve, her joy in life, and her full muscular
powers.
The author of _Lysistrata_ suggests that by diet we may produce thin
babies and therefore have easier confinements. This may be true, but
it is a curious fact that the experience of some mothers and doctors
goes to show that much protein (which Mr. Ludovici suggests we should
avoid) produces a thin baby and a corpulent mother; that, on the other
hand, light and nitrogenous foods, while keeping the mother slim
and supple, yield a plump 8 to 9 lbs. baby. I think the size of our
babies is perhaps not so much under our control as many might wish to
suggest. Heredity enters in. Children sometimes have large fathers. The
sheep-breeder knows that he dare not mate certain larger types of rams
with small-made ewes.
In all these problems, however, it is the frankness and intelligence
which feminism has made possible for women which will bring solution
and progress, rather than a return to the unguided instincts of
our forefathers. The lore of motherhood is a science which is now
beginning, but it is not following the lines which convention and
the moralists expect. It defies sentiment, ridicules unnecessary and
unintelligent sacrifice, is not content to suffer, but makes demands.
It begins with birth control, which to many seems the negation of
motherhood, but which to the creative mother is the key-stone of her
work.
Suppose we have educated our young women sanely about physical matters,
as suggested earlier in this chapter. As they reach the age of maturity
and activity, what will they find? If they are middle- or upper-class,
an existence that is not too intolerable. Feminism has won for them
the right of entry to most professions and, provided they are fairly
able, they can get work. None the less, it must be admitted that the
years since the War have borne hardly upon wage-earning women of all
classes. The lack of sexual freedom is a terrible burden, but the
remedy ultimately lies in their own hands. Life in marriage still
offers reasonable comfort and good food for man and wife and two or
three children. But late marriages, from the lack of opportunity for
men and the expense of living, cause girls’ young bodies to be worn
with longing unless they are bold enough to follow our modern Aspasias.
This waiting to marry is a real danger to young women’s health which
conventional, unimaginative people refuse to face. It produces nervous
disorders bordering at times on insanity.
As regards the care of her body in pregnancy and childbirth, and the
feeding of her children, the middle-class mother is in a position to
carry out what modern science has to teach. She cannot have a large
family, it is true, and the cry goes up on all sides that it is very
hard for the middle-classes to pay for the proper education of their
children.[10] The best stocks are being penalized and extinguished,
so we are told. This is part of a much bigger problem, and a problem
that involves the class-war. All ambitious mothers, from miners’ wives
to the aristocracy, would like to breed the fine types who receive a
thorough education and then enter one of the intellectual professions.
Obviously this cannot be. And, given equal ability in two children
of different classes of life, there is no just reason for driving
the worker’s child, who has less good food and conditions and is
therefore less fitted to stand the strain, through the worry of the
scholarship system, whilst the other child’s path is made smooth to a
ruling position. Man for man, woman for woman, the workers would be
the equals of the middle-class in strength and ability, given the same
nourishment, comfort and training. In actual fact, the middle-class is
perpetually being replenished in one generation, or two at most, from
below. Middle-class fathers and mothers have no right to claim the
privilege of a large family unless their children, if they are strong
but not clever, are prepared to work the railways or dig coal in the
mines. Professional people, scientists, artists, research workers, pure
mathematicians, as well as skilled engineers, are, indeed, the salt of
the earth, and the community that fails to produce them and give them
scope is doomed in this modern world. But they are supported by manual
labor, and it cannot be denied that their number cannot be indefinitely
extended except by an increase of productivity and wealth. A more equal
system of society will diminish drudgery and make it possible for all
to have a fine development of intelligence and understanding, whatever
the work on which they are employed.
[10] An instance of the incredible snobbery surrounding this
question is given by the decision of the conference of
Headmasters of Secondary Schools, January, 1925, against
free secondary education. While the middle-class parent
groans against the cost of his children’s education, he also
refuses to take the obvious remedy of making education free,
for fear the working class should get some of it. Class
difficulties would not exist if health and education were
adequately dealt with.
Feminism in the mother has led us far from maternity. That is what
it is bound to do. The working mother to-day looks straight from her
kitchen, if she is lucky enough to have one, on to one of the most
complex situations in history. And the intelligent ones are not blind
to the situation. That is why I suggested that, though middle-class
feminism has conquered the professions, the feminism of working mothers
might bring a new and powerful contribution to our work.
The life of the working woman who intends maternity is becoming
well-nigh impossible, and she knows it. When she has found a husband
the community denies them a decent house. Possibly they find one room
or two at an exorbitant rent, with no water and a grate unsuited for
cooking. There are no restaurants at which the pair can afford to feed.
Therefore they exist on partially or casually-cooked food, innutritious
bread, and food from tins. Things may not be so bad if the wife can go
on with work at a mill and get food that is fairly good at the canteen,
her wages helping the meals taken at home.
The coming of a baby too often means a search for another lodging. The
Bishops and the Generals like babies, but landladies don’t. Another
room is found, perhaps. The mother works till the last moment, has a
difficult confinement and inadequate attention, and gets up too soon.
It is not easier for her than for a delicately-nurtured woman, and it
is not less painful. Probably it is worse, because the working mother
has from birth been underfed and has weaknesses and deformities――a
contracted pelvis, perhaps――that a woman well-fed and cared for
escapes. Then it goes on, baby after baby up to ten and eleven,[11]
always in one room and no more money coming in. The mother works
whenever she can to help keep the family. Frequently she is cursed or
beaten by her husband for her fertility. Should the husband die, she
must work continually and harder or send her children to the workhouse.
In the opinion of the Bishops, she deserves the “stigma of the Poor
Law,” and, in the opinion of all right-thinking people, anything done
for her by individuals or the State is in the nature of a charity.
[11] A woman of 45 years of age gave birth recently at Queen
Charlotte’s Hospital, Paddington, to her 23rd child. Ten
children is not uncommon.
If I but had the eloquence of Hecuba mourning her slaughtered sons!
The crime of war is bad enough: this butchery of hope and promise and
human lives is one so black that the heart and mind of every woman
who has borne a child should revolt against it until it is tolerated
no more. It is easy to escape into an aristocratic theory of society.
It has been done before, and ends in the guillotine. These working
mothers are the people who must be lied to and terrified by bogies
for fear that they use their votes to help themselves. And it is they
who, when they sit in conference, demand of the State the right to stem
the tide of children, to endow mothers, to pension widows, to teach
and tend maternity and ensure rest for pregnant and nursing women; to
see that houses and schools are built, and to control and purify the
food-supply. Here is the most serious problem for the mothers, and
one which the middle-class politician does not touch, because for the
middle-class pure and fresh food is almost always obtainable. It is
for the working mother to tackle those tins. She cannot now destroy
industrialism, which dragged her work and her after it to the mill;
but she can claim her right to control it in the name of life and
the destiny of her children. Control of the population is essential
to solving the food-problem and improving national health. Women in
small houses know it. They know, moreover, that contraceptives are
better than infanticide and war. The survival of the fittest is a
false doctrine in child-bearing as in fighting. Every child which
starts with a reasonably good constitution can, by the right care up
to one year and food up to five, grow up to be strong and well. And,
if the weak and unhealthy are discouraged from breeding and healthy
mothers given proper care, great improvements are possible. Poor food
and over-crowding are the ladder down which we go to mental deficiency
and ultimate complete feebleness of mind.[12] If we cared for life,
the best food would by law go to the pregnant and nursing mothers
instead of, as at present, to clubs for fat old gentlemen and the
frequenters of palatial hotels. It is probable that at present we do
not produce enough milk, or produce and import enough butter and eggs
to distribute adequately to all.[13] But, by stabilizing or decreasing
our population, and by co-operation, intensive culture and control of
marketing abroad and of marketing and purity at home, we could see to
it that everybody had enough and that what they had was really good.
[12] Professor MacBride, dealing recently with the “Inheritance
of Defect” (_Daily Telegraph_, January 8, 1925) said: “The
question of questions was whether the failure of the lowest
strata of society was due to their surroundings or to their
inborn characters. Such questions must be ultimately decided
by experiment; and proper experimental work could only be
done with animals; we were not entitled to make _corpora
vilia_ of our fellow human beings. For this reason he
would direct attention to the common goldfish, whose weird
monstrosities were all originally due to the starvation
of the eggs with respect to light and air in the earliest
stages of development. The result of this starvation
was to weaken the developmental power and to produce a
disharmonious arrest of growth of various organs. Similar
arrests of growth occurred in human beings, and were the
causes of mental and bodily defects. Their original cause,
however, must be sought in the starvation and poisoning
of the blood of the mother, but, once started, they were
hereditary.”
[13] Working people live on tinned milk, margarine, and
substitute eggs――all deficient in necessary vitamins.
To feed an industrial population in a small island is a peculiar and
special problem and one demanding expert care and advice. Food must
come long distances and must “keep.” Hence the preservatives and tins
and the need to be watchful beyond measure against poisoning and the
loss of what is vital to our well-being. With research, the problem
would be easy; but we must make it clear that it is important. Science
would easily enable us to produce more from the soil, and, as regards
the food of mothers, since the assimilation of extra minerals, salts,
etc., in their natural state is not always satisfactory or easy during
pregnancy, we might find ways of growing food, through treatment of the
soil, to provide for the special needs of their condition.
What then must feminist mothers demand? The right first of all to the
recognition of their work――the most dangerous of all trades and the
most neglected and despised. They should ask for endowment from the
community. This is opposed by many on the ground that fathers delight
to support their children, and it is they who should claim from the
community an adequate family-wage. But, after all, it is the mother
who bears and tends the child, and, although many women receive the
whole of their husbands’ wages, others must fight a humiliating battle
against drink and tobacco for the wherewithal to build their children’s
bodies. This struggle is exemplified on a large scale in the spending
of State revenue, most of which goes on armaments and the forces of
destruction, and an infinitesimal portion to aid and support life. If
Jason cannot give up his murderous playthings, let him have neither
sons to destroy nor daughters to drag through misery. His children
shall never be conceived. I have indicated that this is happening
already, not as a deliberate revolt, but as a counsel of despair in a
world which offers no hope, no joy, and no opportunity to the young.
The mother has a right to demand two years’ rest between pregnancies;
and the right to decide the number of her children. For some the call
of motherhood is insistent and its charm grows with experience; they
would be good mothers and might well have large families. They could
help others by superintending nursery-schools in which children from
one to five years might have their important meal of the day. But it is
imperative that the woman who has children should not be shut out from
public life. The ideal would be for a woman to continue her education
at least till eighteen, have the first child at twenty-four, then
perhaps three others at two-year intervals. This assumes that large
numbers of women do not choose to breed. At thirty-five every mother
of four children would, in a community of good schools, convenient
houses, and well-run restaurants, be free again to take part in public
life. It does not follow that she would be separated from her children;
they would go to day-schools. But the mother would do the work for
which she was best fitted in school,[14] kitchen, hospital, shop,
mill, or Parliament. In this way her opinion would count, and her
attitude to life help to permeate the community, which is otherwise
left to be guided by the outlook of the single woman and the male.
Problems of unemployment and competition due to married women’s work
are really questions of population pressure, muddled thinking, and bad
organization. To discuss all this in close detail is hardly within the
scope of this book.
[14] I am strongly of opinion that experience of maternity, even
more than of marriage alone, would help the teacher. Some
women, even teachers, are bored by children until they have
one of their own, whereupon all children of all ages become
interesting.
In conclusion, it may be said that the community should never, except
on the strongest grounds, deny parenthood to man or woman. Therefore
marriages which after two years did not result in a child should be
dissoluble at the wish of either party to the contract. This, apart
from all other reasons for which the cancelling of marriage should
be allowed. Partnership in marriage should in effect be regarded as
a partnership for parenthood, and as such should not be entered upon
lightly.
V
JASON AND ADMETUS
_Men_
Before we pass on to an attempt at a summary and conclusion of the
argument, it may be as well to re-state briefly what is the matter
with men. Certainly they are not such fierce tyrants as when first
we fought them; certainly they have some grounds to complain of the
feminine arrogance which, not content with proving equality, wants to
go on and prove women the superior sex. We might, on grounds of science
perhaps, advance this claim, urging that, since a female being needs
one more chromosome for its creation than a male, it must, therefore,
be of higher importance. Should we do so, and seek to live alone on
the planet, producing our children by parthenogenesis, our pride would
be doomed to a fall. Such children, there is reason to believe, would
all be males. At least, that is what happens when the experiment is
tried by sea-urchins. Men, on the other hand, like to pretend that our
assumption of intelligence and independence is but a momentary spurt
in a race which must end in masculine victory and feminine submission.
They admit that the great development of our freedom in body and mind
has given us a serious advantage, and the more discerning among them
urge their fellows to press on and catch us up. Others trundle the
golden apples beseechingly, but still Atalanta runs.
I believe it to be true that the education and outlook of men is more
old-fashioned than that of women reared in the freedom of feminist
traditions. Men have not yet realized how women’s outlook is changing,
nor attempted very seriously to adapt themselves to the change. They
will do so, of a certainty; for, true as it may be that above all
desires in woman is that to be pleasing to men, it is still truer that
the desire of desires in man is to be pleasing to women. I believe that
Puritanism or asceticism, of which they accuse us, is very strong in
them. One of the compliments or insults that has been hurled during the
sex-war is that the feminine mind is pervaded by the physical harmony
of the feminine body. One may perhaps retort that the dualism of mind
and matter is a very masculine philosophy; and one which, moreover, men
have translated into their everyday lives by the sharp division they
like to make between fighters and thinkers, games-playing idiots and
thin intellectuals. Too often a woman of vitality and intelligence must
choose between a soldier-gentleman and Chaucer’s clerk.[15] Should she
choose the former, she takes a plunge into the past. This man exults in
murder, whether of animals or of his fellow-creatures; deep down within
him he is still convinced that women are divided into good and bad――and
both require the handling of a master. His wife must beware how she
responds to his advances; she may be thought forward or impure. Decency
must above all things be preserved. Though games and the classics may
have taught the English gentleman the beauty of paganism and the joy
of the naked body where man is concerned, he is still stuffy in his
approach to sex. He rarely brings the freshness of the morning and the
joy of the open skies to the love of mistress or of wife. Plush, gilt
and silk stockings express the one; pipe, the armchair at the fireside,
dinner, and a coldly furnished bedroom, the other. Conversation is
a masculine monologue, punctuated by assent. He will be good to his
children, provided they are not odd, and will protect his wife. He will
never lift her to rapture. She fears, and will probably deceive him.
[15] A clerk ther was of Oxenford also
That unto logyk hadde longe y-go.
As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,
* * * * *
And him was lever have at his beddes heed
Twenty bokes clad in black or reed.
The intellectual――perhaps by reason of the monastic tradition of
learning, perhaps because he finds Jason so revolting――does all
that he can to forget the needs of the body. Woman counts as one of
them. She is a burden, a responsibility, a distraction, an incursion
of the material into a world of contemplation. As for children and
domestic life, they would make an end to all thought, to all art. An
instinctive life――so he thinks――is possible only in spasm, if at all,
for a man with serious mental work to accomplish. If woman persists in
keeping him company, then she must shoulder the burdens, tend him and
care for him, and leave him alone when he doesn’t want her. It is this
contempt for the natural play of instinct which eats the heart out of
life for many intellectuals, men and women, of to-day. They dread the
gift of themselves, the loss of independence which passion would bring,
and therefore they never give freely. In part, they are cherishing the
medieval tradition that to be worthy of spiritual or mental labour man
and woman must go aside and renounce; in part, they are inspired by a
tight conception of materialism, in which individuals are hurled like
lumps of matter by dynamic forces through space, unable to do more than
come near, but never mingle one with another. This view of life and the
medieval are combining to destroy our world in lovelessness and despair.
The old-fashioned mind clings to spiritual duties and consolations and
the framework of Church discipline, as a bulwark against personal
licence; the more modern mind is dominated by mechanism――which is,
after all, no more than the rational control of matter――and seeks in an
intelligent organization of the State, a framework within which each
individual is to perform the duties for which he is best fitted. To
neither conception is love between individuals, or sex-love between man
and woman, important. In effect, personal relationships do not matter.
The Christian doctrine of all-embracing love was once potent, but fails
to-day because of the foundation of God, dogma, and Church on which it
is built and which modern people cannot accept. “To love thy neighbour
as thyself” is also inadequate without knowledge and understanding.
But the rational materialists’ attitude――such, for instance, is that
of the Bolsheviks――to human relationships, in particular to women and
sex, is as lacking in the sense of human dignity as the Christian.
Monogamy and undiscriminating licence rest upon a common basis of
contempt for love and personality, both asserting that the desire
of a man is for a woman, of a woman for a man, but no matter whom.
Dualism, as ever, is the culprit. Sex-love is to be no more than a
physical need――no part of the serious business of life. Science has
brought a more modern attitude to matter which by its effect upon the
imagination may change our conception of personality and sex. Force,
struggle, solidity, contact, may yield to gentleness, non-resistance,
intermingling and uniting――not by an ethical change, but by a change
in scientific thought. We shall no longer think of mind and matter
as wronging or thwarting one another, because they are not different
forces; and we shall no longer be able to separate physical from mental
virtue or depravity. We shall no longer value a love that suppresses or
disregards the union of personality.
Taboos and superstitions, struggling dynamic individuals or States――how
may we set up a new vision? Perhaps what I have written above seems
far-fetched to the reader, but I do not think our life can be cut up
into compartments. Philosophy and sex are more important in politics
than General Elections. The revolt against the all-powerful Christian
State began in the assertion of certain people that their love of good
fruit and wine or their enjoyment of sex were not worthy of hell-fire.
On personal conduct, on our standards of personal relationship, man to
woman, parents to children, are built the customs and laws of States
and ultimately their national and international policy. It is here,
then, with man and woman, that we must begin. I have in mind, as I
write, a piece of Chinese porcelain, on which the sage or poet sits
with his book and long pipe; a lovely and elegant lady peeps over his
shoulder, and close at hand plays an impish child. I do not think that
the Chinese who conceived it expected that poet to write bad verses,
or, if a sage, to compose worthless philosophy. On the contrary, to
love with devotion, to be learned, to have children, are ideas which
have shaped the harmony of Chinese life. As compared with their
generous acceptance of instinct our Christian dread of sex and horror
of the body are obscene.
If we are to make peace between man and woman, and by their unity and
partnership change the ideas that govern our politics and our outlook
on the world, it is essential that men should make a more determined
attempt to understand what feminists are seeking. It is useless to go
on abusing, or pretending that this is a matter of minor importance.
It is essential also that women should think clearly and continue in
courage and honesty of word and action, neither abandoning all for the
pursuit of pleasure nor glorying in opportunities for an oppressive
morality belonging to past ages. First and foremost, man or woman, we
are human beings. There is a great deal of the work in the community
which we can each do with equal ability, given equal training and
opportunity. There are other tasks which we must agree to delegate to
one another, and neither despise the other for performing them. Life
and harmony, generosity and peace are the ideals which the best thought
of feminism has set before us. We believe that States and individuals
can put them into practice. Will man not pause to understand before he
continues on the path of destruction and strife, cupidity and war? Can
we not persuade Jason from barbarity and Admetus to the abandonment of
his fears? To live with vigour, body and mind and imagination, without
fear or shame or dread of death; to drive these baser passions from the
hold they have upon our morality and our politics――this is what we ask
of modern men and women. They can come to it only in a reckless love
of one another, a passion that gives again and again without fear of
hurt or exhaustion. It is not an abandonment to nature and to instinct
that we need. Pure and barbaric instinct is no more. Our bodies are
too much impregnated by inherited habit and knowledge, too much
surrounded in their growth by the findings of science. Men and women
are not creatures of clay, nor disembodied spirits; but things of fire
intertwining in understanding, torrents leaping to join in a cascade of
mutual ecstacy. There is nothing in life to compare with this uniting
of minds and bodies in men and women who have laid aside hostility and
fear and seek in love the fullest understanding of themselves and of
the universe. You cannot measure it in inches, nor turn it on and off
like a tap. You cannot stay it now and indulge it another time. You
cannot come to it by religion or by unaided reason, or by the brute
courage of sheer physical vitality. Jealousy is death. Dualism is
nonsense, compartments unavailing. You must have in you the thought
that is creation; life’s spring, and the daring of its unconquered
waters――so may you transform the world and people it with gods who know
no more the hates and littleness of men.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――A Table of Contents has been provided for the convenience of the
reader, and is granted to the public domain.
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.