Book: Woman and Womanhood

C >> C. W. Saleeby >> Woman and Womanhood







CHAPTER XVI

ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND


Brief reference was made in a previous chapter to woman's great function
of choosing the fathers of the future. Here we must discuss, at due
length, her choice of a companion for life. It is repeatedly argued, by
critics of any new idea, that the eugenist, in his concern for the race,
is blind to the natural interests and needs of the individual; that "we
are all to be married to each other by the police," as an irresponsible
jester has declared; that the sanctities of love are to be profaned or
its imperatives defied. Even serious and responsible persons assume that
there is here a necessary antagonism between the interests of the race
and those of the individual,--that the girl would, presumably, choose
one man to be her love and companion and partner for life, but another
man as the father of her children. There are those whom it always
rejoices to discover what they regard as antinomies and contradictions
in Nature, and they verily prefer to suppose that there is in things
this inherent viciousness, which sets eternal war between one set of
obligations, one set of ideals, and another. But Nature is not made
according to the pattern of our misunderstandings.

We have seen that all individuals are constructed by Nature for the
future. We are certainly right to regard them as also ends in
themselves, but Nature conceived and fashioned them with reference to
the future. In so far as marriage has a natural sanction and
foundation--than which nothing is more certain--we may therefore expect
to discover that the interests of the individual and of the race are
indeed one. In a word, the man who is most worthy to be chosen as a
father of the future is always the most worthy and, in the overwhelming
majority of cases, is also the most individually suitable, to be chosen
as a partner and companion for life. Let the girl choose wisely and well
for her own sake and in her own interests. If, indeed, she does so, the
future will be almost invariably safeguarded.

Of course it is to be understood that we are here discussing general
principles. Everyone knows that cases exist, and must continue to exist,
where an opposition between the interests of the race and those of the
individual cannot be denied. Some utterly unsuspected hereditary strain
of insanity, for instance, may show itself or be discovered in the
ancestry of an individual to whom a member of the opposite sex has
already become devoted. I fully admit the existence of such exceptions,
but it must be insisted that they are exceptions, and that they do not
at all invalidate the general truth that if a girl really chooses the
best man, she is choosing the best father for her children.

It is when the girl chooses for something other than natural quality
that the future is liable to be betrayed. But the point to be insisted
upon is that it is far more worth her while to choose for natural
quality than for any other considerations. The argument of this chapter
is that it will not in the long run be worth the girl's while to be
beguiled by a man's money, his position or his prospects, since all of
these, without the one thing needful, will ultimately fail her.

The truth is that very few girls realize how intimate and urgent and
inevitable and unintermittent are the conditions of married life. It
requires imagination, of course, to understand these things without
experience. A girl observes a friend who has made what is called "a good
marriage"; she goes to the friend's house, and sees her the triumphant
mistress of a large establishment; she sees her friend at the theatre,
meets her escorted by her husband at this place and that; hears of her
holidays abroad, covets her jewelry, and she thinks how delightful it
must be. She knows nothing at all of the realities; she sees only
externals, and she is misled. Whenever thus misled she is beguiled into
marrying a man for any other reason than that his personal qualities
compel her love, it is her seniors who are to blame for not having
enlightened her. Such a girl shall be enlightened if her eyes fall on
these pages.

Happiness does not consist in external things at all. This is not to
deny that external things may largely contribute to happiness if its
primal conditions be first satisfied. Failing those primal conditions,
externals are a mockery and a burden. In the case of the vast majority
of married people we see only what they choose that we shall see.
Almost everyone is concerned with keeping up appearances. Things may be
and very often are what they appear, but very often they are not. Any
woman of nice feeling is very much concerned to keep up appearances in
the matter of her marriage. A few or none may guess her secret, but
whatever we see, it is what we do not see--no matter how close our
friendship may be--that determines the success or failure of marriage.
The moments that really count are just those which we do not witness,
and such moments are many in married life, or should be. If the marriage
is what it ought to be, there is a vital communion, grave and gay, which
occupies every available part of life. Only the persons immediately
concerned really know how much of this they have or, if they have it
not, what they have in its place. But we may be well assured that, as
every married person knows, it is the personal qualities that matter
everything in this most intimate sphere of life, and naught else matters
at all. When the girl marries so as to become possessed of any and every
kind of external advantage, but there is that in the man which is
unlovely or which she, at any rate, cannot love, her marriage will
assuredly be a failure. As we have occasion to observe every day, she
will be glad to jump at any chance of sacrificing all externals, where
essentials thus fail her.

This is only to preach once again the simple doctrine that a girl is to
marry a man not for what he has but for what he is. If, as a eugenist, I
am thinking at this time as much of the future as of the present, the
advice is none the less trustworthy. It is certain that this advice is
no less necessary than it ever was. Everyone knows how the standard of
luxury has risen during the last few decades, both in England and in the
United States. All history lies if this be not an evil omen for any
civilization. It means, among other things, that more effectively than
ever the forces of suggestion and imitation and social pressure are
being brought to bear, to vitiate the young girl's natural judgment,
deceiving her into the supposition that these things which seem to make
other people so happy are the first that must be sought by her. If only
she had the merest inkling of what the doctor and the lawyer and the
priest could tell her about the inner life of many of the owners of
these well-groomed and massaged faces! We hear much of the failure of
marriage, but surely the amazing thing is its measure of success under
our careless and irresponsible methods. For happily married people do
not require intrigues nor divorces, nor do they furnish subject matter
for scandal. It is because people do not marry for their personal
qualities, but for things which, personal qualities failing, will soon
turn to dust and ashes in their mouths, that their disappointed lives
seek satisfaction in all these unsatisfactory and imperfect ways. As we
all know, social practice differs in say, France and England, in such
matters as this; and there are those who tell us that the method whereby
natural inclinations are ignored is highly successful, and has just as
much to be said for it as has the more specially Anglo-Saxon method of
allowing the young people to choose each other. It is incomprehensible
how any observer of contemporary France, its divorce rate and its
birth-rate, can uphold such a contention. On the contrary, we may be
more and more convinced that Nature knows her business, and that
marriage, which is a natural institution, should be based, in each case,
upon her indications.

There is need here for a reform which is more radical and fundamental
than any that can be named, just because it deals with our central
social institution, and concerns the natural composition and qualities
of the next generation. I mean that reform in education which will
direct itself towards rightly moulding and favouring the worthy choice
of each other by young people, and especially the worthy choice of men
by women. It will further come to be seen that everything which vitiates
this choice--as, for instance, the economic dependence of women, great
excess of women in a community, the inheritance of large fortunes--is
ultimately to be condemned on that final ground, if on no other.

But whilst these sociological propositions may be laid down, let us see
what can be said in the present state of things by way of advice to the
girl into whose hands this book may fall. Perhaps it may be permitted to
use the more direct form of address.

You may have been told that where poverty comes in at the door, love
flies out at the window.[15] You may have heard it said that so and so
has made a good marriage because her husband has a large income. You may
be inclined to judge the success of marriage by what you see. I warn you
solemnly that the worth or unworth of your marriage, the success or
failure of your life will depend, far more than upon all other things
put together, upon the personal qualities of the man you choose.

If these be not good in themselves, your marriage will fail, certainly;
even if they be good in themselves your marriage will fail, probably,
unless they also be nicely adapted to your own character and tastes and
temperament and needs. There are thus two distinct requirements; the
first absolutely cardinal, the second very nearly so. You are utterly
wrong if you suppose that the first of these can be ignored: if your
husband is not a worthy man, you are doomed. And you are almost
certainly wrong if you suppose that lack of community in tastes and in
interests, in objects of admiration and adoration does not matter. But
let us consider what are the factors of the man for which a girl _does_
choose.

For what, if it comes to that, does a man choose? Here is Herbert
Spencer's reply to that question:--"The truth is that out of the many
elements uniting in various proportions, to produce in a man's breast
the complex emotion we call love, the strongest are those produced by
physical attractions; the next in order of strength are those produced
by moral attractions; the weakest are those produced by intellectual
attractions; and even these are dependent less on acquired knowledge
than on natural faculty--quickness, wit, insight." It will probably be
agreed that, on the whole, this analysis, which is certainly true in the
direction it refers to, is also true in the converse direction. The girl
admires a man for physical qualities, including what may be called the
physical virtues, like energy and courage. She rates highly certain
moral attractions, such as unselfishness and chivalry, but perhaps she
attaches far more value to intellectual attractions than the man does in
her case, doubtless because they are more distinctively masculine.

No doubt, in this order of importance both sexes are consulting the
eugenic end if they knew it, as Spencer, indeed, pointed out nearly half
a century ago. The passage from which we have quoted he thus
continues:--

"If any think the assertion a derogatory one, and inveigh against
the masculine character for being thus swayed, we reply that they
little know what they say when they thus call in question the
Divine ordinations. Even were there no obvious meaning in the
arrangement, we may be sure that some important end was subserved.
But the meaning is quite obvious to those who examine. When we
remember that one of Nature's ends, or rather her supreme end, is
the welfare of posterity; further that, in so far as posterity are
concerned, a cultivated intelligence based on a bad physique is of
little worth, since its descendants will die out in a generation or
two: and conversely that a good _physique_, however poor the
accompanying mental endowments, is worth preserving, because,
throughout future generations, the mental endowments may be
indefinitely developed; we perceive how important is the balance of
instincts above described."

But here it will be well to consider and meet a possible criticism. This
is none the less necessary because there is a very common type of mind
which listens to the enunciation of principles not in order to grasp
them, but in order to point out exceptions. Such people forget that
before one can profitably observe exceptions to a principle or a natural
law it is necessary first of all to know rightly and wholly what the
principle is. Now in this particular case our principle is that the
cause of the future must not be betrayed, and the essential argument of
this chapter is that faithfulness to the cause of the future does not
involve, as is commonly supposed, any denial of the interests of the
present, since, as I maintain, he who is best worth choosing as a
partner for life is in general best worth choosing as a father of the
future.

Now what one must here reckon with is the existence of individual
cases,--much commoner doubtless in the imagination of critics than in
reality, but nevertheless worthy of study--where a man may gain a
woman's love of the real kind and may return it, and yet may be unfit
for parenthood. The converse case is equally likely, but here we are
concerned especially with the interests of the woman. She is, shall we
say, a nurse in a sanatorium for consumptives or, to suppose a case more
critical and complicated still, she may herself be a patient in such a
sanatorium. There she meets another patient with whom she falls in love.
Now these two may be well fitted to make each other happy for so long as
fate permits, but if the interests of the future are to be considered
they should not become parents. I must not be taken as here assenting
to the old view, dating from a time when nothing was known of the
disease, which regards consumption as hereditary. It is evident that
quite apart from that question the couple of whom we are thinking should
not become parents. It is possible that the disease may be completely
cured, and the situation will then be altered. But only too often the
patient's life will be much shortened and children will be left
fatherless; they also in certain circumstances will run a grave risk of
being infected by living with consumptive parents. If in the case we are
supposing the woman be also consumptive, it is extremely probable that
motherhood on her part would aggravate and hasten the course of the
disease, it being well-known that pregnancy has an extremely
unfavourable influence on consumption in the majority of cases.

Many other parallel cases may be imagined. Woman's love, based perhaps
mainly upon the maternal instinct of tenderness, may be called forth by
a man who suffers from, shall we say, haemophilia or the bleeding
disease. He may be in every way the best of men, worthy to make any
woman happy; but if he becomes the father of a son, it will probably be
to inflict great cruelty upon his child.

What, in a word, are we to say of such cases as these? There is here a
real opposition, as it would appear, between the interests of the
present and the interests of the future. But the answer is that, just
because, and just in so far as, human beings are provident and
responsible and worthy of the name of human beings, the opposition can
be practically solved. Not for anything must we betray the cause of the
unborn, but marriage does not necessarily involve parenthood, and the
right course--the profoundly right and deeply moral course--in such
cases as these, is marriage without parenthood.

On every hand in the civilized world we now see childless marriages, the
number of which incessantly increases; they are an ominous symptom of
excessive luxury and other factors of decadence, if history is to be
trusted. But it is not permissible for us, without special knowledge, to
condemn individuals, whatever we may think of the phenomenon as a whole.
Yet convention and prejudice are curious things, and people who are
themselves married and deliberately childless, others of both sexes who
are unmarried, people who have never raised their voices against
themselves or their friends who, though married, are childless, because
they have little courage or because they permit compliance with
fashion's demands to stifle the best parts of their nature--such people,
I say, will actually be found to protest, with the sort of canting
righteousness which does its best to smirch the Right, against this
doctrine, _Marry, but do not have children_, as the rule of life in the
cases under discussion. Nevertheless, this is the moral doctrine; this
is the right fruit of knowledge, and knowledge will more and more be
applied to this high end, the service alike of the present and the
future. We must not allow our minds to be bullied out of just reasoning
because the possibility of marriage without parenthood is often abused.
All forms of knowledge, like all other forms of power, may be used or
may be abused. Knowledge has no moral sign attached to it, but neither
has it any immoral sign attached to it. The power to control parenthood
is neither good nor evil, but like any other power may serve either good
or evil. Dynamite may cause an explosion which buries a hundred men in a
living grave, or it may blast the rock which buries them and set them
free. The man of science is false to his creed and his cause if he
declares that there is any order of knowledge or any kind of power which
were better unknown or unavailable. For many years past we have been
told that the power to control parenthood is wicked, flying in the face
of providence, interfering with the order of Nature--as if every act
worthy of the human name were not an interference with the order of
Nature, as Nature is conceived by fools; and even to-day the churches,
violently differing from each other in the region of incomprehensibles,
are at least agreed in anathematizing the knowledge and the power to
control parenthood. The reply to them is the demonstration, here made,
of the fact that this knowledge may be used for no less splendid a
purpose than to make possible the happiness and mutual ennoblement of
individual lives in cases where otherwise such a consummation would have
been impossible without betrayal of the life of this world to come.

There is another class of cases to which convenient reference may here
be made. The solution to be found in childless marriage, for many cases,
does not apply to those in which there is present disease due to living
organisms, microbes or protozoa which, by the mere act of drinking from
an infected cup, by kissing and so forth, may be passed from the sick to
the sound. So far as these modes of infection are concerned, such a
supposed case as that of the nurse and the consumptive patient who fall
in love with each other comes into this category. But infection of that
kind is preventable. In the case, however, of the terrible diseases to
which reference has been made in a previous chapter, we must clearly
understand that it is not only the future which is in danger, and that
therefore the solution of childless marriage does not apply. Here the
danger is irremovable from the physical _essentia_ of the marriage
itself, and in such a case, no matter how high the personal qualities of
the man who may, for instance, have been infected by accident in the
course of his duty as a doctor, even childless marriage other than the
_mariage blanc_ must be, at any rate, postponed until the disease has
been cured.

It is to be hoped that the reader will not regard these last two points,
which have had to be dealt with at some length, as irrelevant. They are
not strictly part of the general proposition that a girl should marry a
man for his personal qualities, but they are surely necessary as
practical comments upon that proposition as it will work out in real
life. We may now return to our main contention.

In our quotation from Herbert Spencer we may notice the significant
assertion that amongst intellectual attractions it is natural faculty,
quickness, wit and insight, rather than acquired knowledge, that a man
admires in a woman. In considering that point the somewhat hazardous
assertion was ventured upon that the woman rates intellectual
attractions in the man higher than he does in her. One has indeed heard
it stated that a man marries for beauty and a woman for brains. A
statement so brief cannot be accurate in such a case. But we may insist
upon the contrast between acquired knowledge and natural faculty.
Spencer was no doubt right in believing that man values the natural
faculty rather than the acquired knowledge. A woman no doubt does so
too. If she admires a man for being an encyclopaedia, it is only, one
hopes, because she admires the natural qualities of studiousness,
perseverance and memory which his knowledge involves. Nor would she be
long in finding out whether his knowledge is digested, and the capacity
to digest it, remember, is a natural faculty.

The reader who remembers our principle that the individual exists for
the future will not fail to see what we are driving at. Directly we
study in any critical way the causes of attraction among the sexes, we
see that under healthy conditions, unvitiated by convention or money, it
is always the inborn rather than the acquired that counts. If Spencer
had cared to pursue his point half a century ago, he had the key to it
in his hands. Youth prefers the natural to the acquired qualities.

Nature, greatest of match-makers, has so constructed youth because she
is a Eugenist, and because she knows that it is the natural qualities
and not the acquired ones which are transmitted to offspring.

And now it may be shown that this fact wholly consorts with our
contention that there is no antinomy between the happiness of the
individual and the happiness of the race in the marriage choice. For the
race it is only the natural qualities of its future parents that matter,
for only these are transmissible. From the strictly eugenic point of
view, therefore, the girl should be counselled to choose her mate, not
merely on the ground of his personal qualities but, more strictly still,
on the ground of those personal qualities which are natural and not
acquired. And my last point is that these qualities, which are alone of
lasting consequence to the race, alone will be of lasting consequence to
her during her married life. Veneers, acquirements, technical
facilities, knowledge of languages, encyclopaedic information, elegance
of speech and even of conventional manners--all the things which, in our
rough classification, we may call acquired, may attract or please or
impress her for a time, but when the ultimate reckoning is made she will
find that they are less than the dust in the balance. I do not know how
and where to find for my words the emphasis with which it would be so
easy to endow them if, instead of addressing an unseen and strange
audience, one were counselling one's own daughter. I should say to her,
for instance, "My dear, be not deceived. He dresses elegantly, I know,
and makes himself quite nice to look at. Yet it is not his clothes that
you will have to live with, but himself; and the question is what do his
clothes mean? It is his nature that you will have to live with. What
fact of his nature do they stand for? Is it that he is vain and
selfish, preferring to spend his money upon himself and upon the
exterior of his person rather than upon others and upon the adornment of
his mind; or is it that he has fine natural taste, a sense of beauty and
harmony and quiet dignity in external things?" The answer to these
questions involves his wife's happiness. How strange that though no girl
will marry a man because she is attracted by the elegance of his false
teeth, yet she will often be deceived into admiring other things which
are just as much acquired and just as little likely to afford her
permanent satisfaction as the products of his dentist's work-room! If
only she realized that these other things, though nice to look at, are
no more himself than a well-fitting dental plate.

Or again: "You like his talk; he strikes you as well versed in human
affairs; his knowledge of men and things impresses you; he has travelled
and can talk easily of what he has seen, and his voice is elegant and
can be heard in many tongues. But if he is going to say bitter things to
you, will the facility of his diction make them less bitter? If he is a
fool in his heart--and indeed the heart alone is the residence of folly
or wisdom--do you think that he will be a fool the less for venting his
folly in seven languages rather than in one? I quite understand your
admiring his cleverness; people who study the subject tell us, you know,
that a woman admires in a man things which are more characteristic of
men than of women, and that men's admiration of women is based upon the
same good principle. But in this bargain men have the best of it because
the most characteristic thing in woman is tenderness, and the most
characteristic thing in man is cleverness; and which do you think is the
better to live with? What is the virtue in cleverness coupled with, for
instance, a malicious tongue? What is the virtue in clever things if he
says them at your expense? The vital thing for you is, what are the uses
to which he puts his knowledge and capacities? That he knows the ways of
the world may impress you, but does he know them to admire them? And if
so, where does he stand compared with another, who is less versed and
versatile, but who, as your heart tells you, would hate the ways of the
world if he did know them?" ...

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