Book: Woman and Womanhood

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




Our business in the present volume is not with childhood. It is not
possible to go fully into the statistical details of the comparative
death-rate of the sexes, but the data can readily be obtained by any
interested reader.[17]

It may be argued that the questions now under consideration are foreign
to a chapter entitled "The Conditions of Marriage," but the excess of
women in a community is one of the most fundamental conditions of
marriage therein, and the question is not the less necessary to be dealt
with because, so far as one can ascertain, its consequences have escaped
the notice of previous students.

Having dealt with the waste of male life in infancy, in childhood and in
war, we must pass on to a totally different factor of our problem, and
that is the emigration to our colonies and elsewhere of a greatly
disproportionate number of men. One does not assert for a moment that
the men should not go, but merely that if they do, so should women also.
As everyone knows they go for many reasons and purposes. These are
largely industrial and imperial. The Civil Service claims a large
number. These bachelors go in the cause of Empire, whether as actual
servants of the State or in the interests of commerce. They are largely
picked men, capable of discipline and initiative and of withstanding
hardships; and also in large degree intellectually able. It is certainly
not good for them to be alone, and it is worse for the women whom they
leave behind. All this may seem right and the only practicable thing for
the day, but it is fundamentally wrong because it is wrong for the
morrow.

If other needs were not so pressing, one might well devote an entire
volume, not inappropriately in these days of fiscal controversy, to the
question of vital imports and exports. Year after year passes, and
politicians in Great Britain grow more and more voracious and, if
possible, less and less veracious on the subject of what they
misunderstand by imports and exports. The subject is really one for
knowledge, not for politicians. With great ceremony at intervals, they
go through the highly superfluous performance of calling each other
liars, as who should say that Queen Anne is dead: and while this
tragical farce continues the question of vital imports and exports is
ignored. Within it there lies the key to the Irish question, for
instance, since no nation can be saved which persistently exports the
best of its life. And in this question also lies the key to a great part
of the woman question and to a great part of the colonial question.
Politicians who have not even discovered yet that trade is a process of
exchange, and who assume that in every bargain someone is being worsted,
pay no heed to the questions what sort of people leave our shores, and
what sort of people enter them. Or rather, as if in order to emphasize
their blindness to fundamentals, they make a point about passing an act
against alien immigration, which merely serves to throw into prominence
our national neglect of this great issue. This is not the time and the
place in which I can deal with it in its entirety, but it must be
referred to in so far as it bears on the proportion of the sexes. Toward
the end of 1909 there was a long correspondence in the _Times_ on the
subject of "Unmarried Daughters." One may print in the text the
admirable letter in which a finger is put upon the heart of the
question. We are told about the incompetence of women to deal with
national affairs, but here we find a woman writing to the _Times_ on a
fundamental matter for the Imperialist, though no member of our Houses
of Parliament has yet given any attention to it.

SIR: Only two of your numerous correspondents on this subject have
really reached the root of the matter.

For more than thirty years the young men of the British Isles have
found it increasingly difficult to make a living in their native
land. Therefore there has been--and still is--a steady exodus of
our male population to our Colonies, where they are unhampered by
the many disadvantages prevailing here. Unfortunately they are
obliged to leave the corresponding proportion of women behind. The
result is a surplus of 1,000,000 women in Great Britain; but let me
hasten to add (lest the mistake be laid upon Nature when it is not
hers) that there is a proportionate shortage of 1,000,000 women in
our colonies. I have recently been on a tour throughout Canada and
the States, and was most struck by the scarcity of women in Western
Canada--there are about eight men to one woman. And in America the
saddest sight of all is the appalling number of half-castes, a blot
on the civilization of the States, but a blot for which Europeans
are responsible. The absence of white women is answerable for the
worst type of population, so that in reality this is a very
pressing Imperial question; and all those interested in the growth
and future of Canada should turn their attention to it. For, unless
we can induce the right sort of British women to emigrate we shall
not have the Colonies peopled with our own race or speaking our own
mother tongue.

Canada wants unmarried women, her cry is for our marriageable
daughters, and each one would find her vocation out there.

Canadian men are one of the finest types of manhood possible, but
they are too hard working to be able to return here in search of a
wife. How gladly they would welcome the possibility of sharing
their homes with a sister or a wife can only be guessed by those
who have been there.

I am so greatly impressed with the advisability of encouraging
English women to go out there that I strongly urge every suitable,
healthy, and useful woman between the age of twenty-five and
thirty-five to depart (if she has nothing to prevent her), and,
through the British Emigration Society, Imperial Institute, I shall
hope to do all that I can to assist them financially.

I am, sir,
Yours faithfully,
SOPHIE K. BEVAN.

(_Times_, Dec. 24, 1909.)

It was of interest for the student of opinion and practice to compare
this letter with another which appeared in the _Times_ within a few days
of it. This was an official letter from another Emigration Society and
advocated the object, worthy in itself, of sending boys to Australasia.
The letter ended with the following assertion regarding such boys: "They
are the pioneers of Empire, they will be the founders of nations to
come."

But the point exactly is that at present the nations to come in our
Colonies are not coming: much more likely as nations to come in
Australasia, as things go at present, are the Chinese and Japanese.
Before nations can be founded, the co-operation of women is
indispensable. We complain of the birth-rate in our Colonies, or at
least those few persons do who know that parenthood is the key to
national destiny. But we should complain of our own folly in so
interfering with the natural balance of the sexes as to create pressing
problems, wholly insoluble, alike at home and in our Colonies. At all
times "England wants men," but wherever it wants men it wants
women,--even in war we are now beginning to realize the importance of
the trained nurse. There can be no future for our Colonies if they are
to be inhabited by a bachelor generation, and the excess of women at
home prejudices the stability of the heart of empire. Either we must
cease exporting our boys and young manhood--which I certainly do not
advocate--or our girlhood must go also--which I certainly do advocate.
This is only one aspect of the question of vital imports and exports,
upon which a book of vital importance for any nation, and above all, for
England, might well be written.

Once again let us remind ourselves how cogently this question concerns
the conditions of marriage. It means that the conditions are now such
that in our Colonies a woman can exercise her rightful function of
choosing the best man to be her husband and a father of the future,
while at home this is possible only for the very few, and for vast
numbers marriage is wholly impossible. I return, then, to the original
proposition: are we to follow the advice of our gay, irresponsible
sociologists so-called, who advise us to abolish monogamy in the
circumstances, or are we to alter the alterable conditions which so
disastrously prejudice and complicate that great institution in the
heart of our empire to-day? Surely there can be but one answer to this
question when we realize that all the causes of the present
disproportion between the sexes at home--causes such as infant
mortality, child mortality, war, and the exportation of one sex in great
excess to the Colonies--are evil in themselves quite apart from their
influence upon the practice of monogamy. Unfortunately, it is a modern
custom in this age of transition for clever people to criticize on
abstract, patriotic, sociological, quasi-ethical, and such like grounds,
institutions and practices which irk them personally. Unfortunately,
also, sociology is in the position, at present and yet for a little
while inevitable, of shall we say medicine in its earliest stages, when
anyone may be accepted as qualified who simply asserts that he is.
Lastly, sociology is the most complicated of all the sciences because
the chain of causation is longer; and very few of those who write or
read about it have the patience to go back through psychology to biology
and the laws of life in their analyses. An institution like marriage is
criticized by those who think that it is an ecclesiastical invention of
yesterday, and that what hands have made, hands can destroy, though
marriage is aeons older even than the mammalian order. They take
transient, artificial conditions, lasting not for a second in the
history of mankind seen as a whole, and simply accepting these
conditions as part of the order of nature, they ask us to overthrow an
institution which is immeasurable ages older than man himself. The odds
are somewhat against them, one may surmise, but they may do considerable
injury to their own age notwithstanding.

After having dealt with this fundamental biological condition of
marriage, we must next turn to a psychological question which is
scarcely less important. The human being is immensely complex both in
composition and in needs, and the institution of monogamy does not
become easier of maintenance as human complexity increases. Amongst the
lower animals or even amongst the lower races of mankind, the relations
between the sexes are mostly confined to one sphere, but amongst
ourselves the problem is to mate for life complex individuals whose
needs are many, ranging from the purely physical to the purely
psychical. Thus it is a matter of common experience that whilst one
woman meets one part of a man's needs, another meets another, and this
of course with grave prejudice to monogamy. Some of the modern writers
to whom allusion has been made suggest that these different needs want
sorting out; that one woman is to be the intellectual companion of a
man, and another the mother of his children. But though men and women
are multiple and complex, they are in the last resort unities. These
absolute distinctions between one need and another do not work out in
practice. Anything which tends toward splitting up the human personality
must be a disservice to it. Nor do we desire that women of the higher
type, best fitted to be the intellectual companions of men, shall be
those who do not contribute to the future of the race. From the eugenic
point of view the mother is every whit as important as the father. I do
not believe for a moment that these more or less definite proposals of
Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are soundly based, and perhaps indeed it is not
necessary to argue against them at greater length. Of more value is it
to ask ourselves whether feminine nature may not prove itself quite
equal to the task of meeting all the needs of masculine nature.

It seems to me that the right answer, in many cases at any rate, to the
wife's question, how is she to retain the whole of her husband's
interest, is hinted at in Mr. Somerset Maugham's recent play
"Penelope"--she must be many women to him herself. And this the wise and
happy woman is, though I do not think the phrase "many women" at all
covers the variety of feeling to which the ideal woman can appeal.

The ideal love is that in which the whole nature is joined, in all its
parts, upon one object which appeals alike to every fundamental instinct
in our composition. The ideal woman does not require to be "many women"
to a man of the right kind in the sense suggested in Mr. Maugham's play.
She requires rather to be in herself at one and the same time or at
different times, mother, wife and daughter. This condition satisfied,
behold the ideal marriage.

It is probably fair to say that the three strongest and most important
needs of a man's nature are those which are satisfied by mother, wife,
and daughter. Primarily, perhaps, his wife must be to him his wife, his
contemporary and partner, and there must be a physical bond between
them. (Doubtless there are many happy marriages where this primary
condition is not satisfied, this primitive form of affection being
substantially absent, and its presence being proved non-essential: but
such must be a state of unstable equilibrium at best, though the
concession must be made.) Now the problem for the wife is to unite in
her person and in her personality those other feelings which are part of
normal human nature. Every man likes to be mothered at times, and it is
for his wife to see that she performs that function better than any
other; better even than his own mother. Where he finds merely physical
satisfaction, he also finds, happy man, sympathy and comfort, protection
and solace, balm for wounded self-esteem--everything that the hurt or
slighted child knows he will find in his mother's arms.

Yet again, a man likes not only to be mothered but he likes to play the
father. Let his wife be a daughter to him; let her be capable of
shrinking, so to say, into small space, becoming little and confident
and appealing and calling forth every protective impulse of her
husband's nature.

To one who knew nothing of human nature it might sound as if we were
asking more of womanhood than is within its capacity. But many a man and
many a woman will know better. The right kind of woman can be and is
mother, wife and daughter to her husband; and in every one of these
capacities she strengthens her hold in the other two. Let the happily
married examine their happiness, and they will discover that the
Preacher was right when he said: "and a threefold cord is not quickly
broken."

What has here been said is perhaps far more fundamental, just because it
is based upon the primary instincts of humanity, than much of the
ordinary talk about intellectual companionship and the like. What a man
wants is sympathy, not intellectual companionship as such; what a man
wants from another man, indeed, is sympathy, and not merely intellectual
parity as such. The man who annoys us is not he who is incapable of
appreciating our arguments, or he who does not share our knowledge, but
he who is out of sympathy with us, and we find far more happiness with
the rawest youth who, though entirely ignorant, is at least on our
side--caring for the things for which we care. Capacity to share the
same intellectual work may be a very pleasant addition to marriage, but
it is no essential. What a man wants is that his wife shall be on his
side in his pursuits. A boy does not require that his mother shall be
able to play football with him, but he does require that she shall care
whether his side wins or loses. The wife who is a true mother to her
husband, in this sense, need not be concerned because she cannot, let us
say, follow his working out of a geometrical proposition. Let her be on
his side whether he fails or succeeds, thus playing the mother; and for
the rest, if she asks him what those funny marks mean, she can play the
daughter too, and hold his heart with both hands at once.

It is to be hoped that such arguments as these will persuade the reader
to assent to our rejection of the psychological grounds on which it is
proposed to abolish monogamy. We extend all the sympathy in the world to
those whose fortune has been unfortunate, and we admit that the ideal
does not always coincide with the real, but we deny that the supposed
argument against monogamy is based upon a sound understanding of human
nature, its needs and its unity in multiplicity.

If we are to stand by monogamy it behoves us to examine very carefully
certain of its present conditions which militate against the full
realization of its value for the individual and for the race. The
disproportion of the sexes we have already discussed, and it may here be
assumed that that grave obstacle to the success of monogamy is removed.
There remains the fact, probably on the whole a quite new fact of our
day, that under modern conditions a large proportion of women, whose
quality we must consider, are declining monogamy as at present
constituted.

Let it be granted that a certain number of these women are cranks,
aberrant in various directions, unfitted for any kind of marriage,
undesirable from the eugenic standpoint, and perhaps less often
declining to be married than failing of the opportunity. There remains
the fact that a large and probably increasing number of women are
nowadays being educated up to such a standard of ideals that, even
though their decision involves the sacrifice of motherhood, they cannot
consent to marriage under present conditions. It is not that they are
without opportunity, for many of them during ten or fifteen years of
their lives may refuse one proposal after another, and spend the
intervals in avoiding the onset of such attentions. It is not
necessarily that the men who propose are of an inferior type. Such women
may refuse many men who come well up to or far surpass the modern male
standard. It is not that they are by any means without capacity for
affection; nor can one be at all certain that in many cases they would
not do better to marry, after all, heavy though the price may be.

What we have to recognize is that this is a phenomenon in every way
evil. There must be something wrong with any institution which does not
appeal to many members of the highest types of womanhood. Perhaps in
certain of its details this institution must be an anachronism, a
survival from times to which it may have been well suited when the
development of womanhood was habitually stunted, but inadequate to
satisfy the demands of fully developed womanhood in our own days. Now
from the eugenic point of view it is of course the finest kind of women
that we desire to be the mothers of the future--the more and not the
less fastidious, those who are capable of the highest development, those
who hold themselves in the highest honour, those who are least willing
to renounce their possession of themselves.

Men are to be heard who say that this is all nonsense; that it is
natural for women to surrender themselves, that motherhood is a splendid
reward, and that they are handsomely paid as well in material things.
But how many men would be willing to marry on the conditions with which
marriage is offered to a woman? How many men would be willing to
surrender their possession of themselves to an owner for life, so that
at no future hour can they have the right to privacy? Of course if the
conditions for marriage were for a man what they are for a woman,
scarcely any men would marry, and men would very soon see to it that
these conditions were utterly altered. They are conditions imposed in a
past age by the stronger sex upon the weaker, and no moral defence of
them is possible. It may be argued, and might long have been argued,
that a practical defence of them is possible, but that is undermined in
our own time when we find that under these conditions marriage is
declined by a large number of the best women. The practical argument is
now the other way. In the interests of elementary justice, of marriage,
of the individual and of the race, the conditions of marriage must be so
modified that they shall be equal for both sexes, and that the best
members of both sexes shall find them acceptable. This last is of course
the fundamental eugenic requirement.

The initial criticism of some will be, no doubt, that many men who now
marry will decline the bargain. But surely we need not care at all--if
the right kind of men accept it. As for the others, in the coming time,
when we take more care of our womanhood, and when they are deprived of
the economic weapon, they may go whither they will, their
non-representation in the future of the race being precisely what we
desire.

Women, then, are entitled to demand that the conditions of marriage be
so modified as, above all things, to allow them the possession of
themselves as the married man has possession of himself. The imposition
of motherhood upon a married woman in absolute despite of her health and
of the interests of the children is none the less an iniquity because it
has at present the approval of Church and State. It is woman who bears
the great burden of parenthood, and with her the decision must rest. It
is idle to reply that this is impossible, for it is possible, as there
are not a few happy wives throughout the civilized world to bear
testimony. Every new life that comes into being is to be regarded as
sacred from the first. The accident of birth at a particular stage in
its development does not in the slightest degree affect this ethical
principle, as even the law, for a wonder, recognizes. The full
acceptance of the principle that woman must decide is, I am convinced,
the only right and effective way in which to abolish altogether the
dangers at present run by the life which is at once unborn and unwanted.
The decision must be made once and for all _before_ the new life is
called into initial being, and the last word must lie with her who is to
bear it. I am strengthened in the enunciation of this principle by the
reflection that it would be ridiculed and condemned by the vote of every
public-house and music-hall throughout the civilized world.

Let it be observed that in thus allowing the wife the possession of her
own person, we are giving her only what her husband possesses, and that
her possession of herself is of vastly more moment to her than his own
liberty to him. Nothing more than sheer equality is being claimed for
her, and the claim in her case has a double strength, since it is made
valid not only by her own interests but by those of the future. The
future must be protected, and therefore she who is its vessel must be
protected. This is no more than the sub-human mother everywhere has as
her birthright, and however much this teaching may offend the common
male assumption that a wife is a form of property, the future certainly
holds within itself the establishment of this principle.

The question of divorce is so important that we must defer it to the
next chapter.

We have briefly alluded to the question of the wife's possession of
herself. We must now refer to the question, scarcely less important, of
her possession of her own property and her claims upon her husband's. It
is difficult for the present generation to realize that very few decades
have passed since the time when everything which a woman possessed
became, when she married, the property of her husband. That is now a
question which there is no need to discuss, but there remains a very
great issue, lately become prominent, and suggested by the popular
phrase, the endowment of motherhood.

We should obviously be false to our first principles if we did not
assent with all our hearts to the _fundamental_ principle expressed by
this phrase. If it is necessary that the wife be protected as a wife, it
is even more necessary that she be protected as a mother. There are
twelve hundred thousand widows in this country at the present time, and
of these a large number stand in unaided parental relation to a great
multitude of children. I showed some years ago that, as we shall see in
more detail in a later chapter, alcohol makes not less than forty-five
thousand widows and orphans every year in England and Wales. Nothing
can be more certain than that, in the interests of all except the
worthless type of man, the economic protection of motherhood is an
urgent need, less open to criticism perhaps than any other economic
reconstruction proposed by the reformer. Some will argue, of course,
that the State is to look after children directly, but I, for one, as a
biologist, have no choice but to believe that the way to save children
is to safeguard parenthood, and I cannot question that our duty is to
provide the mother with the necessary means for performing her supreme
function, whether she has a living husband or is a widow or is
unmarried.

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