Book: Woman and Womanhood

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WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD

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BY DR. C. W. SALEEBY

WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD
HEALTH, STRENGTH AND HAPPINESS
THE CYCLE OF LIFE
EVOLUTION: THE MASTER KEY
WORRY: THE DISEASE OF THE AGE
THE CONQUEST OF CANCER: A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN
PARENTHOOD AND RACE CULTURE

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WOMAN AND WOMANHOOD

A SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES

by
C. W. SALEEBY
M.D., F.R.S.E., Ch.B., F.Z.S.

Fellow of the Obstetrical Society of Edinburgh and formerly
Resident Physician Edinburgh Maternity Hospital;
Vice-President Divorce Law Reform Union; Member of the
Royal Institution and of Council of the Sociological Society.

MITCHELL KENNERLEY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXI

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Copyright 1911 by
Mitchell Kennerley

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co.
East Twenty-fourth Street
New York

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CONTENTS

PAGE
I. FIRST PRINCIPLES 1
II. THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME 34
III. THE PURPOSE OF WOMANHOOD 52
IV. THE LAW OF CONSERVATION 64
V. THE DETERMINATION OF SEX 72
VI. MENDELISM AND WOMANHOOD 81
VII. BEFORE WOMANHOOD 92
VIII. THE PHYSICAL TRAINING OF GIRLS 99
IX. THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 128
X. THE PRICE OF PRUDERY 132
XI. EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD 151
XII. THE MATERNAL INSTINCT 163
XIII. CHOOSING THE FATHERS OF THE FUTURE 193
XIV. THE MARRIAGE AGE FOR GIRLS 197
XV. THE FIRST NECESSITY 219
XVI. ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND 234
XVII. THE CONDITIONS OF MARRIAGE 258
XVIII. THE CONDITIONS OF DIVORCE 291
XIX. THE RIGHTS OF MOTHERS 296
XX. WOMEN AND ECONOMICS 327
XXI. THE CHIEF ENEMY OF WOMEN 348
XXII. CONCLUSION 386

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CHAPTER I

FIRST PRINCIPLES


We are often and rightly reminded that woman is half the human race. It
is truer even than it appears. Not only is woman half of the present
generation, but present woman is half of all the generations of men and
women to come. The argument of this book, which will be regarded as
reactionary by many women called "advanced"--presumably as doctors say
that a case of consumption is "advanced"--involves nothing other than
adequate recognition of the importance of woman in the most important of
all matters. It is true that my primary concern has been to furnish, for
the individual woman and for those in charge of girlhood, a guide of
life based upon the known physiology of sex. But it is a poor guide of
life which considers only the transient individual, and poorest of all
in this very case.

If it were true that woman is merely the vessel and custodian of the
future lives of men and women, entrusted to her ante-natal care by their
fathers, as many creeds have supposed, then indeed it would be a
question of relatively small moment how the mothers of the future were
chosen. Our ingenious devices for ensuring the supremacy of man lend
colour to this idea. We name children after their fathers, and the fact
that they are also to some extent of the maternal stock is obscured.

But when we ask to what extent they are also of maternal stock, we find
that there is a rigorous equality between the sexes in this matter. It
is a fact which has been ignored or inadequately recognized by every
feminist and by every eugenist from Plato until the present time.
Salient qualities, whether good or ill, are more commonly displayed by
men than by women. Great strength or physical courage or endurance,
great ability or genius, together with a variety of abnormalities, are
much more commonly found in men than in women, and the eugenic emphasis
has therefore always been laid upon the choice of fathers rather than of
mothers. Not so long ago, the scion of a noble race must marry, not at
all necessarily the daughter of another noble race, but rather any young
healthy woman who promised to be able to bear children easily and suckle
them long. But directly we observe, under the microscope, the facts of
development, we discover that each parent contributes an exactly equal
share to the making of the new individual, and all the ancient and
modern ideas of the superior value of well-selected fatherhood fall to
the ground. Woman is indeed half the race. In virtue of expectant
motherhood and her ante-natal nurture of us all, she might well claim
to be more, but she is half at least.

And thus it matters for the future at least as much how the mothers are
chosen as how the fathers are. This remains true, notwithstanding that
the differences between men, commending them for selection or rejection,
seem so much more conspicuous and important than in the case of women.

For, in the first place, the differences between women are much greater
than appear when, for instance, we read history as history is at present
understood, or when we observe and compare the world and his wife.
Uniformity or comparative uniformity of environment is a factor of
obvious importance in tending to repress the natural differences between
women. Reverse the occupations and surroundings of the sexes, and it
might be found that men were "much of a muchness," and women various and
individualized, to a surprising extent.

But, even allowing for this, it is difficult to question that men as
individuals do differ, for good and for evil, more than women as
individuals. Such a malady as haemophilia, for instance, sharply
distinguishes a certain number of men from the rest of their sex,
whereas women, not subject to the disease, are not thus distinguished,
as individuals.

But the very case here cited serves to illustrate the fallacy of
studying the individual as an individual only, and teaches that there is
a second reason why the selection of women for motherhood is more
important than is so commonly supposed. In the matter of, for instance,
haemophilia, men appear sharply contrasted among themselves and women all
similar. Yet the truth is that men and women differ equally in this very
respect. Women do not suffer from haemophilia, but they convey it. Just
as definitely as one man is haemophilic and another is not, so one woman
will convey haemophilia and another will not. The abnormality is present
in her, but it is latent; or, as we shall see the Mendelians would say,
"recessive" instead of "dominant."

Now I am well assured that if we could study not only the patencies but
also the latencies of individuals of both sexes, we should find that
they vary equally. Women, as individuals, appear more similar than men,
but as individuals conveying latent or "recessive" characters which will
appear in their children, especially their male children, they are just
as various as men are. The instance of haemophilia is conclusive, for two
women, each equally free from it, will respectively bear normal and
haemophilic children; but this is probably only one among many far more
important cases. I incline to believe that certain nervous qualities,
many of great value to humanity, tend to be latent in women, just as
haemophilia does. Two women may appear very similar in mind and capacity,
but one may come of a distinguished stock, and the other of an
undistinguished. In the first woman, herself unremarkable, high ability
may be latent, and her sons may demonstrate it. It is therefore every
whit as important that the daughters of able and distinguished stock
shall marry as that the sons shall. It remains true even though the
sons may themselves be obviously distinguished and the daughters may
not.

The conclusion of this matter is that scientific inquiry completely
demonstrates the equal importance of the selection of fathers and of
mothers. If our modern knowledge of heredity is to be admitted at all,
it follows that the choice of women for motherhood is of the utmost
moment for the future of mankind. Woman is half the race; and the
leaders of the woman's movement must recognize the importance of their
sex in this fundamental question of eugenics. At present they do not do
so; indeed, no one does. But the fact remains. As before all things a
Eugenist, and responsible, indeed, for that name, I cannot ignore it in
the following pages. There is not only to-day to think of, but
to-morrow. The eugenics which ignores the natural differences between
women as individuals, and their still greater natural differences as
potential parents, is only half eugenics; the leading women who in any
way countenance such measures as deprive the blood of the future of its
due contribution from the best women of the present, are leading not
only one sex but the race as a whole to ruin.

If women were not so important as Nature has made them, none of this
would matter. To insist upon it is only to insist upon the importance of
the sex. The remarkable fact, which seems to me to make this protest and
the forthcoming pages so necessary, is that the leading feminists do not
recognize the all-importance of their sex in this regard. They must be
accused of neglecting it and of not knowing how important they are. They
consider the present only, and not the composition of the future. Like
the rest of the world, I read their papers and manifestoes, their
speeches and books, and have done so, and have subscribed to them, for
years; but no one can refer me to a single passage in any of these where
any feminist or suffragist, in Great Britain, at least, militant or
non-militant, has set forth the principle, beside which all others are
trivial, that _the best women must be the mothers of the future_.

Yet this which is thus ignored matters so much that other things matter
only in so far as they affect it. As I have elsewhere maintained, the
eugenic criterion is the first and last of every measure of reform or
reaction that can be proposed or imagined. Will it make a better race?
Will the consequence be that more of the better stocks, _of both sexes_,
contribute to the composition of future generations? In other words, the
very first thing that the feminist movement must prove is that it is
eugenic. If it be so, its claims are unchallengeable; if it be what may
contrariwise be called _dysgenic_, no arguments in its favour are of any
avail. Yet the present champions of the woman's cause are apparently
unaware that this question exists. They do not know how important their
sex is.

Thinkers in the past have known, and many critics in the present, though
unaware of the eugenic idea, do perceive, that woman can scarcely be
better employed than in the home. Herbert Spencer, notably, argued that
we must not include, in the estimate of a nation's assets, those
activities of woman the development of which is incompatible with
motherhood. To-day, the natural differences between individuals of both
sexes, and the importance of their right selection for the transmission
of their characters to the future, are clearly before the minds of those
who think at all on these subjects. On various occasions I have raised
this issue between Feminism and Eugenics, suggesting that there are
varieties of feminism, making various demands for women which are
utterly to be condemned because they not merely ignore eugenics, but are
opposed to it, and would, if successful, be therefore ruinous to the
race.

Ignored though it be by the feminist leaders, this is the first of
questions; and in so far as any clear opinion on it is emerging from the
welter of prejudices, that opinion is hitherto inimical to the feminist
claims. Most notably is this the case in America, where the dysgenic
consequences of the _so-called_ higher education of women have been
clearly demonstrated.

The mark of the following pages is that they assume the principle of
what we may call Eugenic Feminism, and that they endeavour to formulate
its working-out. It is my business to acquaint myself with the
literature of both eugenics and feminism, and I know that hitherto the
eugenists have inclined to oppose the claims of feminism, Sir Francis
Galton, for instance, having lent his name to the anti-suffrage side;
whilst the feminists, one and all, so far as Anglo-Saxondom is
concerned--for Ellen Key must be excepted--are either unaware of the
meaning of eugenics at all, or are up in arms at once when the
eugenist--or at any rate this eugenist, who is a male person--mildly
inquires: But what about motherhood? and to what sort of women are you
relegating it by default?

I claim, therefore, that there is immediate need for the presentation of
a case which is, from first to last, and at whatever cost, eugenic; but
which also--or, rather, therefore--makes the highest claims on behalf of
woman and womanhood, so that indeed, in striving to demonstrate the vast
importance of the woman question for the composition of the coming race,
I may claim to be much more feminist than the feminists.

The problem is not easily to be solved; otherwise we should not have
paired off into insane parties, as on my view we have done. Nor will the
solution please the feminists without reserve, whilst it will grossly
offend that abnormal section of the feminists who are distinguished by
being so much less than feminine, and who little realize what a poor
substitute feminism is for feminity.

There is possible no Eugenic Feminism which shall satisfy those whose
simple argument is that woman must have what she wants, just as man
must. I do not for a moment admit that either men or women or children
of a smaller growth are entitled to everything they want. "The divine
right of kings," said Carlyle, "is the right to be kingly men"; and I
would add that the divine right of women is the right to be queenly
women. Until this present time, it was never yet alleged as a final
principle of justice that whatever people wanted they were entitled to,
yet that is the simple feminist demand in a very large number of cases.
It is a demand to be denied, whilst at the same time we grant the right
of every man and of every woman to opportunities for the best
development of the self; whatever that self may be--including even the
aberrant and epicene self of those imperfectly constituted women whose
adherence to the woman's cause so seriously handicaps it.

But it is one thing to say people should have what is best for them, and
another that whatever they want is best for them. If it is not best for
them it is not right, any more than if they were children asking for
more green apples. Women have great needs of which they are at present
unjustly deprived; and they are fully entitled to ask for everything
which is needed for the satisfaction of those needs; but nothing is more
certain than that, at present, many of them do not know what they should
ask for. Not to know what is good for us is a common human failing; to
have it pointed out is always tiresome, and to have this pointed out to
women by any man is intolerable. But the question is not whether a man
points it out, presuming to tell women what is good for them, but
whether in this matter he is right--in common with the overwhelming
multitude of the dead of both sexes.

As has been hinted, the issue is much more momentous than any could have
realized even so late as fifty years ago. It is only in our own time
that we are learning the measure of the natural differences between
individuals, it is only lately that we have come to see that races
cannot rise by the transmission of acquired characters from parents to
offspring, since such transmission does not occur, and it is only within
the last few years that the relative potency of heredity over education,
of nature over nurture, has been demonstrated. Not one in thousands
knows how cogent this demonstration is, nor how absolutely conclusive is
the case for the eugenic principle in the light of our modern knowledge.
At whatever cost, we see, who have ascertained the facts, that we must
be eugenic.

This argument was set forth in full in the predecessors of this book,
which in its turn is devoted to the interests of women as individuals.
But before we proceed, it is plainly necessary to answer the critic who
might urge that the separate questions of the individual and the race
cannot be discussed in this mixed fashion. The argument may be that if
we are to discuss the character and development and rights of women as
individuals, we must stick to our last. Any woman may question the
eugenic criterion or say that it has nothing to do with her case. She
claims certain rights and has certain needs; she is not so sure,
perhaps, about the facts of heredity, and in any case she is sure that
individuals--such as herself, for instance--are ends in themselves. She
neither desires to be sacrificed to the race, nor does she admit that
any individual should be so sacrificed. She is tired of hearing that
women must make sacrifices for the sake of the community and its
future; and the statement of this proposition in its new eugenic form,
which asserts that, at all costs, the finest women must be mothers, and
the mothers must be the finest women, is no more satisfactory to her
than the crude creed of the Kaiser that children, cooking and church are
the proper concerns of women. She claims to be an individual, as much as
any man is, as much as any individual of either sex whom we hope to
produce in the future by our eugenics, and she has the same personal
claim to be an end in and for herself as they will have whom we seek to
create. Her sex has always been sacrificed to the present or to the
immediate needs of the future as represented by infancy and childhood;
and there is no special attractiveness in the prospect of exchanging a
military tyranny for a eugenic tyranny: "_plus ca change, plus c'est la
meme chose._"

One cannot say whether this will be accepted as a fair statement of the
woman's case at the present time, but I have endeavoured to state it
fairly and would reply to it that its claims are unquestionable and that
we must grant unreservedly the equal right of every woman to the same
consideration and recognition and opportunity as an individual, an end
in and for herself, whatever the future may ask for, as we grant to men.

But I seek to show in the following pages that, in reality, there is no
antagonism between the claims of the future and the present, the race
and the individual. On philosophic analysis we must see that, indeed, no
living race could come into being, much less endure, in which the
interests of individuals as individuals, and the interest of the race,
were opposed. If we imagine any such race we must imagine its
disappearance in one generation, or in a few generations if the clash of
interests were less than complete. Living Nature is not so fiendishly
contrived as has sometimes appeared to the casual eye. On the contrary,
the natural rule which we see illustrated in all species, animal or
vegetable, high or low, throughout the living world, is that the
individual is so constructed that his or her personal fulfilment of his
or her natural destiny as an individual, is precisely that which best
serves the race. Once we learn that individuals were all evolved by
Nature for the sake of the race, we shall understand why they have been
so evolved in their personal characteristics that in living their own
lives and fulfilling themselves they best fulfil Nature's remoter
purpose.

To this universal and necessary law, without which life could not
persist anywhere in any of its forms, woman is no exception; and therein
is the reply to those who fear a statement in new terms of the old
proposition that women must give themselves up for the sake of the
community and its future. Here it is true that whosoever will give her
life shall save it. Women must indeed give themselves up for the
community and the future; and so must men. Since women differ from men,
their sacrifice takes a somewhat different form, but in their case, as
in men's, the right fulfilment of Nature's purpose is one with the right
fulfilment of their own destiny. There is no antinomy. On the contrary,
the following pages are written in the belief and the fear that women
are threatening to injure themselves as individuals--and therefore the
race, of course--just because they wrongly suppose that a monstrous
antinomy exists where none could possibly exist. "No," they say, "we
have endured this too long; henceforth we must be free to be ourselves
and live our own lives." And then, forsooth, they proceed to try to be
other than themselves and live other than the lives for which their real
selves, in nine cases out of ten, were constructed. It works for a time,
and even for life in the case of incomplete and aberrant women. For the
others, it often spells liberty and interest and heightened
consciousness of self for some years; but the time comes when outraged
Nature exacts her vengeance, when middle age abbreviates the youth that
was really misspent, and is itself as prematurely followed by a period
of decadence grateful neither to its victim nor to anyone else.
Meanwhile the women who have chosen to be and to remain women realize
the promise of Wordsworth to the girl who preferred walks in the country
to algebra and symbolic logic:--

Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A woman may be made.
Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.

Where is the woman, recognizable as such, who will question that the
brother of Dorothy Wordsworth was right?

In the following pages, it is sought to show that, women being
constructed by Nature, as individuals, for her racial ends, they best
realize themselves, are happier and more beautiful, live longer and more
useful lives, when they follow, as mothers or foster-mothers in the wide
and scarcely metaphorical sense of that word, the career suggested in
Wordsworth's lovely lines.

It remains to state the most valuable end which this book might possibly
achieve--an end which, by one means or another, must be achieved. It is
that the best women, those favoured by Nature in physique and
intelligence, in character and their emotional nature, the women who are
increasingly to be found enlisted in the ranks of Feminism, and fighting
the great fight for the Women's Cause, shall be convinced by the
unchangeable and beneficent facts of biology, seen in the bodies and
minds of women, and shall direct their efforts accordingly; so that they
and those of their sisters who are of the same natural rank, instead of
increasingly deserting the ranks of motherhood and leaving the blood of
inferior women to constitute half of all future generations, shall on
the contrary furnish an ever-increasing proportion of our wives and
mothers, to the great gain of themselves, and of men, and of the future.

For in some of its forms to-day the Woman's Cause is _not_ man's, nor
the future's, nor even, as I shall try to show, woman's. But a Eugenic
Feminism, for which I try to show the warrant in the study of woman's
nature, would indeed be the cause of man, and should enlist the whole
heart and head of every man who has them to offer. For here is a
principle which benefits men to the whole immeasurable extent involved
in decreeing that the best women must be the wives. "The best women for
our wives!" is not a bad demand from men's point of view, and it is
assuredly the best possible for the sake of the future.

It is claimed, then, for the teaching of this book that, being based
upon the evident and unquestionable indications of Nature, it is
calculated to serve her end, which is the welfare of the race as a
whole, including both sexes. No one will question that the position and
happiness and self-realization of women in the modern world would be
vastly enhanced by the reforms for which I plead, though some men will
not think that game worth the candle. But I have argued that men also
will profit; nor can there be any question as to the advantage for
children. It is just because our scheme and our objects are natural that
they require no support from and lend no warrant to that accursed spirit
of sex-antagonism which many well-meaning women now display--doubtless
by a natural reflex, because it is the spirit of the worst men
everywhere. It is primarily men's desire for sex-dominance that
engenders a sex-resentment in women; but the spirit is lamentable,
whatever its origin and wherever it be found. It is most lamentable in
the bully, the drunkard, the cad, the Mammonist, the satyr, who are
everywhere to be found opposing woman and her claims. There is no
variety of male blackguardism and bestiality, of vileness and
selfishness, of lust and greed, whose representatives' names should not
be added to those of the illustrious pro-consuls and elegant peeresses
and their following who form Anti-Suffrage Societies. Before we
criticise sex-antagonism in women, let us be honest about it in men; and
before we sneer at the type of women who most display it, let us realize
fully the worthlessness of the types of men who display it. But if this
be granted--and I have never heard it granted by the men who deplore
sex-antagonism as if only women displayed it--we must none the less
recognize that this spirit injures both sexes, and that it is
necessarily false, since none can question that Nature devised the sexes
for mutual aid to her end. By this first principle sex-antagonism is
therefore condemned. This book, written by a man in behalf of
womanhood--and therefore in behalf of manhood and childhood--is
consistently opposed to all notions of sex-antagonism, or sex-dominance,
male or female, or of competing claims between the sexes. Man and woman
are complementary halves of the highest thing we know, and just as the
men who seek to maintain male dominance are the enemies of mankind, so
the women who preach enmity to men, and refusal of wise and humane
legislation in their interests because men have framed it, are the
enemies of womankind. At the beginning of the "Suffragette" movement in
England, I had the pleasure of taking luncheon with the brilliant young
lady whose name has been so prominent in this connection; and my
lifelong enthusiasm for the "Vote" has been chastened ever since by the
recollection of the resentment which she exhibited at every suggestion
of or allusion to any legislation in favour of women--notably with
reference to infant mortality and to alcoholism--whilst the suffrage was
withheld. Substitute "destroyed" or "reversed" for "chastened," and you
have a more typical result in quite well-meaning men of sex-antagonism
as many "advanced" women now display it.

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