Book: Woman and Womanhood

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Let us first consider its development in the individual, for this bears
on the question when to begin education for motherhood. We find it very
early indeed. It is commonly asserted that the doll instinct is the
precursor, the infantile and childish form, of the parental instinct.
Some psychologists, as we have already noted, assure us that this is
wrong, that a small child will be just as content to play with anything
else as with a doll; that the child gets fond of its possession, and
that what we are really witnessing is the instinct of acquisitiveness.
The rest may reason and welcome, but those who are fathers know. We
have only to watch a child to learn that it very soon differentiates its
doll, or rather, the shapeless mass it calls its doll, from other
things. Try with your own children and see if you can get them to like
anything else as well as they like a doll. They will not. There are few
settled questions as yet in psychology, but we may certainly be sure
that the parental instinct and its associated emotion may be
unmistakably displayed as the master-passion in a child who is not yet
two years old. In a case where the possibility of imitation was excluded
I have seen a little girl adore a small baby, stroke its hands, whisper
quasi-maternal sweet nothings to it--"mother it," in short--as plainly
as I have seen the sun at noon; and there is no reason to suppose that
this deeply impressive spectacle was exceptional.

The parental instinct is connected subtly with the racial instinct; and
it is undisputed that, except in utterly degraded persons, the object of
the feelings which are associated with the racial instinct becomes the
object of the feelings which are associated with the parental instinct.
The object of the emotion of sex becomes also the object of tender
emotion. Thus "love," in its lower sense, becomes exalted by Love in the
noble sense.

There is also in us an instinct of pugnacity, which especially appears
when the working of any other instinct is thwarted. We know that the
parental instinct when thwarted, as in the tigress robbed of her whelps,
shows itself in pugnacity--even in the female, which commonly has no
pugnacity; and in the emotion of anger. It is a reasonable supposition
that the fine anger, the passion for justice, the passion against, say,
slavery or cruelty to children--that these indignations which move the
world are at bottom traceable to the workings of the outraged parental
instinct. When we have tender emotion towards a child, or towards an
animal, whatever it be, this is really the subjective side of the
working of the parental instinct. Now, tender emotion is what has made
and makes everything that is good in the individual, and in human
society. It is the basis of all morality--all morality that is real
morality--everything that permits us to hold up our heads at all, or to
hope for the future of the race. That is why the study of the parental
instinct, its correlate or source, is as important and serious as any
that can be imagined.

Let us begin by a quotation from Dr. McDougall, author of the best and
most searching account of this instinct yet written:--

"The maternal instinct, which impels the mother to protect and
cherish her young, is common to almost all the higher species of
animals. Among the lower animals the perpetuation of the species is
generally provided for by the production of an immense number of
eggs or young (in some species of fish a single adult produces more
than a million eggs), which are left entirely unprotected, and are
so preyed upon by other creatures that on the average but one or
two attain maturity. As we pass higher up the animal scale, we find
the number of eggs or young more and more reduced, and the
diminution of their number compensated for by parental protection.
At the lowest stage this protection may consist in the provision of
some merely physical shelter, as in the case of those animals that
carry their eggs attached in some way to their bodies. But, except
at this lowest stage, the protection afforded to the young always
involves some instinctive adaptation of the parent's behaviour. We
may see this even among the fishes, some of which deposit their
eggs in rude nests and watch over them, driving away creatures that
might prey upon them. From this stage onwards protection of
offspring becomes increasingly psychical in character, involves
more profound modification of the parent's behaviour, and a more
prolonged period of more effective guardianship. The highest stage
is reached by those species in which each female produces at a
birth but one or two young, and protects them so efficiently that
most of the young born reach maturity; the maintenance of the
species thus becomes in the main the work of the parental instinct.
In such species the protection and cherishing of the young is the
constant and all-absorbing occupation of the mother, to which she
devotes all her energies, and in the course of which she will at
any time undergo privation, pain, and death. The instinct becomes
more powerful than any other, and can override any other, even fear
itself; for it works directly in the service of the species, while
the other instincts work primarily in the service of the individual
life, for which Nature cares little.... When we follow up the
evolution of this instinct to the highest animal level, we find
among the apes the most remarkable examples of its operation. Thus
in one species the mother is said to carry her young one clasped in
one arm uninterruptedly for several months, never letting go of it
in all her wanderings. This instinct is no less strong in many
human mothers, in whom, of course, it becomes more or less
intellectualized and organized as the most essential constituent of
the sentiment of parental love. Like other species, the human
species is dependent upon this instinct for its continual
existence and welfare. It is true that reason, working in the
service of the egotistic impulses and sentiments, often circumvents
the ends of this instinct and sets up habits which are incompatible
with it. But when that occurs on a large scale in any society, that
society is doomed to rapid decay. But the instinct itself can never
die out save with the disappearance of the human species itself; it
is kept strong and effective just because those families and races
and nations in which it weakens become rapidly supplanted by those
in which it is strong.

"It is impossible to believe that the operation of this, the most
powerful of the instincts, is not accompanied by a strong and
definite emotion; one may see the emotion expressed unmistakably by
almost any mother among the higher animals, especially the birds
and the mammals--by the cat, for example, and by most of the
domestic animals; and it is impossible to doubt that this emotion
has in all cases the peculiar quality of the tender emotion
provoked in the human parent by the spectacle of her helpless
offspring. This primary emotion has been very generally ignored by
the philosophers and psychologists; that is, perhaps, to be
explained by the fact that this instinct and its emotion are in the
main decidedly weaker in men than women, and in some men, perhaps,
altogether lacking. We may even surmise that the philosophers as a
class are men among whom this defect of native endowment is
relatively common."

Dr. McDougall goes on to show how from this emotion and its impulse to
cherish and protect spring generosity, gratitude, love, true
benevolence, and altruistic conduct of every kind; in it they have their
main and absolutely essential root without which they would not be. He
argues that the intimate alliance between tender emotion and anger is
of great importance for the social life of man, for "the anger invoked
in this way is the germ of all moral indignation, and on moral
indignation justice and the greater part of public law are in the main
founded."[11]

The reader may be earnestly counselled to acquaint himself with Dr.
McDougall's book, which, in the judgment of those best qualified,
definitely advances the science of psychology in its deepest and most
important aspects.

_The Transmutation of Instinct._--The last thing here meant by the
transmutation of instinct is that by any political alchemy it is
possible--to quote Herbert Spencer's celebrated aphorism--to get golden
conduct out of leaden instincts. But it is the mark of man, the
intelligent being, that in him the instincts are plastic, and even
capable of amazing transmutations. In the lower animals there is
instinct, but that instinct is an almost completely fixed, rigid, and
final thing. In ourselves there is a limitless capacity for the
development, the humanization of instinct along many lines, as when the
primitive infantile curiosity works out into the speculations of a
thinker. In other words, _we_ are educable, the lower animals are not,
or only within very narrow limits.

Yet in one respect the lower animals have the advantage over us. Their
instincts are often perfect. We cannot teach a cat anything about how to
look after a kitten; but parallel instincts amongst ourselves, though
not less numerous or potent, are not perfected, not sharp-cut. In the
cat there is no need for education; in woman there is eminent need for
it. Indeed it is the lack of education that is largely responsible for
our large infant mortality; not that woman is inferior to the cat, but
that, being not instinctive but intelligent, she requires education in
motherhood.

Human instincts in general are capable of modification; sometimes they
may take bizarre forms, and so we find that there are people without
children of their own--more commonly women--who will have twenty cats in
the house and look after them, or who will devote their whole lives to
the cause of the rat or the rabbit, or whatever it may be, while the
children of men are dying around them. These things are indications of
the parental instinct centred on unworthy objects. It is a common thing
to laugh at these aberrations--thoughtlessly, may we not say? While
orphans are to be found, we should do better if we try to bring together
the woman who needs to "mother" and the child who needs to be
"mothered."

Conduct is at least three-fourths of life, and the great business of
education is the direction of conduct. We have seen how modern
psychology illuminates what has been so long dark, by directing us to
our instincts as the sources of our needs, and by showing us that it is
the possibility of the education of instinct which essentially
distinguishes us from the lower animals.

We must therefore distinguish between education for motherhood and
education or instruction in motherhood. It is very important that a
woman should know the elements of infant feeding, but it is more
important that, in the first place, her whole life before she becomes a
mother--nay, even before she chooses her child's father--shall centre in
the education of her instincts for motherhood. Finding good evidence, as
we do, of the maternal instinct at a very early age, and recognizing its
importance in conduct and in the formation of ideals long before the
marriage age, we are justified in discussing the maternal instinct here
instead of postponing it, as some might argue, until after we have
discussed marriage. There is nothing which I wish to assert more
strongly than that we are radically wrong in this postponement, which is
indeed our customary practice. Partly because we are blind, partly
because of our most imprudent prudery, we ignore and pervert the due
sequence of development, but here I deliberately prefer to follow the
indications of nature, and to discuss the maternal instinct now because,
in the matter of the education of girls, this is precisely the most
important subject that can be named.

Let us now note some popular misconceptions which cumber our minds and
often interfere with the work of the reformer.

To begin with what is perhaps the oldest of these, though indeed
scarcely entitled to the appellation of popular, let us assure ourselves
once and for all that we are talking about a fact natural, innate, not
acquired. The modern criticism of ancient notions of human nature, such
as those expressed in the theologians' conception of "conscience," has
inclined some to the view that our best feelings are indeed not at all
innate. No one can for a moment analyze conscience without observing the
immense disparity between the facts and the theologians' theory. And
thus we are apt to fall into the opposite error of supposing that our
impulses towards good action are entirely the products of education,
training, public opinion, and so forth. Let the reader refer, for
instance, to such a celebrated work as John Stuart Mill's
"Utilitarianism," and it will be seen how wide of the mark it was
possible for even a great thinker to go, when his ideas of mind were
unguided by the light of evolution. Even in the greatest writer of that
time not a syllable do we find as to the parental instinct. "As is my
own belief," says Mill, "the moral feelings are not innate but
acquired." Yet we have seen convincing evidence which teaches us that
the moral feelings spring essentially from the root of the parental
instinct, without which mankind could not continue for another
generation, and than which there is nothing more fundamental and
essential in any type of human nature that can persist.

The importance of noting this can be clearly stated. We are here dealing
with something which is not for us to implant, but which is already part
of the plant, so to speak, and which it is for us to tend. Like other
innate features of mankind, its transmission from generation to
generation is notably independent of the effects of education, the
effects of use and disuse. This is a difficult thing of which to
persuade people, but it is the fact. Education, environment, training,
opportunity, habit, public opinion, social prejudice--all these and
such other influences may and do affect the maternal instinct in the
individual for good or for evil. No fact is more certain or important,
and that is precisely why we must study this instinct. But the effect
upon the individual does not involve any effect upon the native
constitution of the individual's children. From age to age the general
facts and features of the human backbone persist. We do not expect to
find notable differences between the generations in such a radical
feature of our constitution, no matter what particular habits of
posture, play, and the like we adopt. The maternal instinct is scarcely
less fundamental; it is certainly no whit less essential for the
species. It is the very backbone of our psychological constitution. Thus
it is nonsense to assert that, for instance, women are becoming less
motherly, if by this is meant that the maternal instinct is failing.
That bad education may affect it for evil no one can question, but we
must distinguish between nature and nurture. We may be perfectly
confident that so far as the _natural_ material of girl-childhood and
girlhood is concerned, there is no falling off; there will not, for
there cannot, be any falling off either in the quality or in the
quantity of the maternal instinct. On the contrary, it can, and will
later be shown that through the action of heredity this instinct will be
strengthened in the future, just in so far as motherhood becomes more
and more a special privilege of those women in whom this instinct is
strong, and who become mothers for the _only good reason_--that they
love to have children of their own.

I protest, then, against many critics, especially those who used to
raise their now silent voices in opposition to the beginnings of the
infant mortality campaign a few years ago, that we who criticize modern
motherhood and find in its defects the causes of many and great evils,
as we do, are asserting nothing whatever against the women of this day
as compared with the women of former days, so far as their natural
constitution is concerned; and if we criticize the results of bad
education, that is mainly criticism of the blindness, the stupidity, and
the carelessness of men, who are responsible for the parodies of
education and the misdirection of ideals which have so grossly
afflicted, and still afflict, childhood and girlhood in all civilized
communities.

Yet, again, there is another misconception of the maternal instinct as
it exists in our own species, which is still more serious in its
results. The argument is that, not only does the maternal instinct
exist, but it is a sure guide to its possessor, who therefore requires
no instruction--least of all at the hands of men. A woman being a woman
knows all about babies, a man being a man knows nothing. Against this
error the present writer has endeavoured to inveigh for many years past,
and it is always retorted that insistence upon the ignorance of mothers
is a very unwarrantable piece of discourtesy. It is nothing of the sort.
Native ignorance is the mark of intelligence. It is just because
instinct in us has not the perfection of detail which it has in, say,
the insects, that it is capable of that limitless modification which
shows itself in educated intelligence, and all that educated
intelligence has achieved and will yet achieve. It may be permitted to
quote from a former statement of this point:--[12]

"The mother has only the maternal instinct in its essence. That could
not be permitted to lapse by natural selection, since humanity could
never have been evolved at all if women did not love babies. But of all
details she is bereft. She has instead an immeasurably greater thing,
intelligence, but whilst intelligence can learn everything it has
everything to learn. Subhuman instinct can learn nothing, but is perfect
from the first within its impassable limits. It is this lapse of
instinctive aptitude that constitutes the cardinal difficulty against
which we are assembled. The mother cat not merely has a far less
helpless young creature to succour, but she has a far superior inherent
or instinctive equipment; she knows the best food for her kitten, she
does not give it 'the same as we had ourselves'--as the human mother
tells the coroner--but her own breast invariably. None of us can teach
her anything as to washing her kitten, or keeping it warm. She can even
play with it and so educate it, in so far as it needs education. There
are mothers in all classes of the community who should be ashamed to
look a tabby cat in the face."

The human mother has instinctive love and the uninstructed intelligence
which is the form, at once weak and incalculably strong, that instinct
so largely assumes in mankind. This cardinal distinction between the
human and all sub-human mothers is habitually ignored, it being assumed
that the mother, as a mother, knows what is best for her child. But
experience concurs with comparative psychology in showing that the human
mother, just because she is human, intelligent, which means more than
instinctive, does not know. This is the theory upon which all our
practice is to be based, and upon which the need for it mainly depends.
We must never forget the cardinal peculiarity of human motherhood, its
absolute dependence upon education, needless for the cat, needed by the
human mother in every particular, small and great, since she relies upon
intelligence alone, which is only a potentiality and a possibility until
it be educated. Educate it, and the product transcends the cat, and not
only the cat, but all other living things. As Coleridge said--

"A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive."

Perhaps the foregoing will make it clear that to insist upon the natural
ignorance of the human mother and upon the necessity for adding
instruction to the maternal instinct, and even to make comparisons with
the cat (which are, in point of fact, quite worth making, even though
some women resent them) is in no way to depreciate or decry womanhood,
but simply to demonstrate that it is human and not animal, suffering
from the disabilities or necessities which are involved in the
possession of the limitless possibilities of mankind.

What, then, is it in our power to do; and how are we to do it? It may be
argued that if the maternal instinct is a thing which cannot be made or
acquired, our study of it has little relation to practice. But indeed it
is eminently practical.

For, in the first place, this priceless possession, this parental
instinct and tenderness, is inheritable. We know by observation amongst
ourselves that hardness and tenderness are to be found running through
families--are things which are transmissible. Let us, then, make
parenthood the most responsible, the most deliberate, the most
self-conscious thing in life, so that there shall be children born to
those who love children, and only to those who love children, to those
who have the parental instinct naturally strong, and who will, on the
average, transmit a high measure of it to their offspring. In a
generation bred on these principles--a generation consisting only of
babies who were loved before they were born--there would be a proportion
of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract,
world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such
as no age hitherto has seen.

It was necessary to insert this eugenic paragraph because it expresses
the central principle of all real reform, as fundamental and
all-important as it is unknown to all political parties, and I fear to
nearly all philanthropists as well. But, for the present, our immediate
concern is the application, if such be possible, of our knowledge of the
parental instinct to the education of girls. Being indeed an instinct it
can be neither made nor acquired, but, like every other factor of
humanity that is given by inheritance, it depends upon the conditions in
which it finds itself. Education being the provision of an environment,
there is no higher task for the educator than to provide the right
environment for the maternal instinct in adolescence. We are to look
upon it as at once delicate and ineradicable. These are adjectives which
may seem incompatible, yet they may both be verified. Any one will
testify that, in a given environment, say that of high school or
university or that of the worst types of what is called society, the
maternal instinct may then and there, and for that period, become a
nonentity in many a girl. Hence we are entitled to say that it is
delicate; much more delicate, for instance, than what we have agreed to
call the racial instinct, which is far more imperious and by no means so
easily to be suppressed.

But, on the other hand, just because this is an instinct, part of the
fundamental constitution, and not a something planted from without, it
is ineradicable. I doubt whether even in the most abandoned female
drunkard it would not be possible to find, when the right environment
was provided, that the maternal instinct was still undestroyed. One is,
of course, not speaking of that rare and aberrant variety of women in
whom the instinct is naturally weak--naturally weak as distinguished
from the atrophy induced by improper nurture.

Our business, then, having recognized, so to speak, the natural history
of this instinct, and further, having come to realize its stupendous
importance for the individual and the race, is to tend it assiduously
as the very highest and most precious thing in the girls for whom we
care. As educators we must seek to provide the environment in which this
instinct can flourish. It is a good thing to be an elder sister, not
merely because the girl has opportunities of learning the ways of babies
and the details of their needs, but for a far deeper reason. Babies do
have very detailed and urgent needs, but these can be learnt without
much difficulty, and, if necessary, at very short notice. More important
is it for the whole development of the character and for the making of
the worthiest womanhood that an elder sister is provided with an
environment in which her maternal instinct can grow and grow in grace.

Much might be said on this head as to some of our present educational
practices. The kind of educationist with whom no one would trust a
poodle for half an hour may and does constantly assume, on a scale
involving millions of children, from year to year, that all is well if
the girl be taken from home and put into a school and made to learn by
heart, or at any rate by rote, the rubbish with which our youth is fed
even yet in the great name of education: though perchance whilst she is
thus being injured in body and mind and character, she might at home be
playing the little mother, helping to make the home a home, serving the
highest interests of her parents, her younger brothers and sisters and
herself at the same time--not to mention the unborn. Such a protest as
this, however, will be little heeded. There is no political party which
cares about education or even wants to know in what it consists. The
most persistent and clever and resourceful of those parties--of which, I
fear, the Fabian Society is far too good to be representative--only half
believes in the family, and is daily, and ever with more lamentable
success, seeking to substitute for the home some collective device or
other precisely as rational as that scheme of Plato's whereby the babies
were to be shuffled so that no mother should recognize her own baby,
while the fathers, need it be said, were to be as gloriously
irresponsible as under the schemes for the endowment of motherhood.
"Socialism intervenes between the children and the parents.... Socialism
in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual
must vanish before it, just as the old waterworks of private enterprise,
or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it." Thus Mr. H. G.
Wells.

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