Book: Woman and Womanhood

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Further, this book may be regarded as an appeal to those women who are
responsible for forming the ideals of girls. The idea of womanhood here
set forth on natural grounds is not always represented in the ideals
which are now set before the youthful aspirant for work in the woman's
cause. It is not argued that the principles of eugenics are to be
expounded to the beginner, nor that she is to be re-directed to the
nursery. It is not necessarily argued, by any means, that marriage and
motherhood are to be set forth as the goal at which _every_ girl is to
aim; such a woman as Miss Florence Nightingale was a Foster-Mother of
countless thousands, and was only the greatest exemplar in our time of a
function which is essentially womanly, but does not involve marriage. I
desire nothing less than that girls should be taught that they must
marry--any man better than none. I want no more men chosen for
fatherhood than are fit for it, and if the standard is to be raised,
selection must be more rigorous and exclusive, as it could not be if
every girl were taught that, unmarried, she fails of her destiny. The
higher the standard which, on eugenic principles, natural or acquired,
women exact of the men they marry, the more certainly will many women
remain unmarried.

But I believe that the principles here set forth are able to show us how
such women may remain feminine, and may discharge characteristically
feminine functions in society, even though physical motherhood be denied
them. The _racial_ importance of physical motherhood cannot be
exaggerated, because it determines, as we have seen, not less than half
the natural composition of future generations. But its _individual_
importance can easily be over-estimated, and that is an error which I
have specially sought to avoid in this book, which is certainly an
attempt to call or recall women to motherhood. It is not as if physical
motherhood were the whole of human motherhood. Racially, it is the
substantial whole; individually, it is but a part of the whole, and a
smaller fraction in our species than in any humbler form of life.
Everyone knows maiden aunts who are better, more valuable, completer
mothers in every non-physical way than the actual mothers of their
nephews and nieces. This is woman's wonderful prerogative, that, in
virtue of her _psyche_, she can realize herself, and serve others, on
feminine lines, and without a pang of regret or a hint anywhere of
failure, even though she forego physical motherhood. This book,
therefore, is a plea not only for Motherhood but for
Foster-Motherhood--that is, Motherhood all-but-physical. In time to come
the great professions of nursing and teaching will more and more engage
and satisfy the lives and the powers of Virgin-Mothers without number.
Let no woman prove herself so ignorant or contemptuous of great things
as to suggest that these are functions beneath the dignity of her
complete womanhood.

But many a young girl, passing from her finishing-school--which has
perhaps not quite succeeded, despite its best efforts, in finishing her
womanhood--and coming under the influence of some of our modern
champions of womanhood, might well be excused for throwing such a book
as this from her, scorning to admit the glorious conditions which
declare that woman is more for the Future than for the Present, and that
if the Future is to be safeguarded, or even to be, they must not be
transgressed. I have watched young girls, wearing the beautiful colours
which have been captured by one section of the suffrage movement, asking
their way to headquarters for instructions as to procedure, and I have
wondered whether, in twenty years, they will look back wholly with
content at the consequences. Some time ago the illustrated papers
provided us with photographs of a person, originally female, "born to be
love visible," as Ruskin says, who had mastered jiu-jitsu for
suffragette purposes, and was to be seen throwing various hapless men
about a room. And only the day before I write, the papers have given us
a realistic account of a demonstration by an ardent advocate of woman,
the chief item of which was that, on the approach of a burly policeman
to seize her, she--if the pronouns be not too definite in their
sex--fell upon her back and adroitly received the constabulary "wind"
upon her upraised foot, thereby working much havoc. No one would assert
that the woman's movement is responsible for the production of such
people; no reasonable person would assert that their adherence condemns
it; but we are rightly entitled to be concerned lest the rising
generation of womanhood be misled by such disgusting examples.

Nothing will be said which militates for a moment against the
possibility that a woman may be womanly and yet in her later years, when
so many women combine their best health and vigour with experience and
wisdom, might replace many hundredweight of male legislators upon the
benches of the House of Commons, to the immense advantage of the nation.
If our present purpose were medical in the ordinary sense, the reader
would come to a chapter on the climacteric, dealing with the nervous and
other risks and disabilities of that period, and notably including a
warning as to the importance of attending promptly to certain local
symptoms which may possibly herald grave disease. An abundance of books
on such subjects is to be had, and my purpose is not to add to their
number. Yet the climacteric has a special interest for us because the
special case of those women who have passed it is constantly ignored in
our discussions of the woman question--which is not exclusively
concerned with the destiny of girls and the claims of feminine
adolescence to the vote. The work of Lord Lister, and the advances of
obstetrics and gynecology, largely dependent thereon, are increasing the
naturally large number of women at these later ages--naturally large
because women live longer than men. At this stage the whole case is
changed. The eugenic criterion no longer applies. But though the woman
is past motherhood, she is still a woman, and by no means past
foster-motherhood. Though her psychological characters are somewhat
modified, it is recorded by my old friend and teacher, Dr. Clouston,
that never yet has he found the climacteric to damage a woman's natural
love for children: the maternal instinct will not be destroyed. See,
then, what a valuable being we have here; none the less so because, as
has been said, she now begins to enjoy, in many cases, the best health
of her life. Whatever activities she adopts, there is now no question of
depriving the race of her qualities: if they are good qualities, it is
to be hoped they are already represented in members of the rising
generation. The scope of womanhood is now extended. The principles to be
laid down later still apply, but they are entirely compatible with, for
instance, the discharge of legislative functions. The nation does not
yet value its old or elderly women aright. We use as a term of contempt
that which should be a term of respect. Savage peoples are wiser. We
need the wisdom of our older women. It would be well for us to have Mrs.
Fawcett and Mrs. Humphry Ward in Parliament. The distinguished lady who
approves of woman's vote in municipal affairs, and fights hard for her
son's candidature in Parliament, but objects to woman suffrage on the
ground that women should not interfere in politics, could doubtless find
a good reason why women should sit in Parliament; and though she would
scarcely be heeded on matters of political theory, her splendid
championship of Vacation Schools and Play Centres would be more
effective than ever in the House, and might instruct some of her male
_confreres_ as to what politics really is.

The prefatory point here made is, in a word, that the following
doctrines are perhaps less reactionary than the ardent suffragette might
suppose, compatible as they are with an earnest belief in the fitness
and the urgent desirability of women of later ages even as Members of
Parliament. It may be added that, on this very point, there is a
ridiculous argument against woman suffrage--that it is the precursor of
a demand to enter Parliament, which would mean (it is assumed), women
being numerically in the majority, that the House would be filled with
girls of twenty-two and three. Men of a sort would be likelier than
women, it could be argued, to vote for such girls; but the wise of both
sexes might well vote for the elderly women whose existence is somehow
forgotten in this connection.

No chapter will be found devoted to the question of the vote. The
omission is not due to reasons of space, nor to my ever having heard a
good argument against the vote--even the argument that women do not want
it. That women did not want the vote would only show--if it were the
case--how much they needed it. Nor is the omission due to any
lukewarmness in a cause for which I am constantly speaking and writing.
My faith in the justice and political expediency of woman suffrage has
survived the worst follies, in speech and deed, of its injudicious
advocates: I would as soon allow the vagaries of Mrs. Carrie Nation to
make me an advocate of free whiskey. Causes must be judged by their
merits, not by their worst advocates, or where are the chances of
religion or patriotism or decency?

The omission is due to the belief that votes for women or anybody else
are far less important than their advocates or their opponents assume.
The biologist cannot escape the habit of thinking of political matters
in vital terms; and if these lead him to regard such questions as the
vote with an interest which is only secondary and conditional, it is by
no means certain that the verdict of history would not justify him. The
present concentration of feminism in England upon the vote, sometimes
involving the refusal of a good end--such as wise legislation--because
it was not attained by the means they desire, and arousing all manner of
enmity between the sexes, may be an unhappy necessity so long as men
refuse to grant what they will assuredly grant before long. But now, and
then, the vital matters are the nature of womanhood; the extent of our
compliance with Nature's laws in the care of girlhood, whether or not
women share in making the transitory laws of man; and the extent to
which womanhood discharges its great functions of dedicating and
preparing its best for the mothers, and choosing and preparing the best
of men for the fathers, of the future. The vote, or any other thing, is
good or bad in so far as it serves or hurts these great and everlasting
needs. I believe in the vote because I believe it will be eugenic, will
reform the conditions of marriage and divorce in the eugenic sense, and
will serve the cause of what I have elsewhere called "preventive
eugenics," which strives to protect healthy stocks from the "racial
poisons," such as venereal disease, alcohol, and, in a relatively
infinitesimal degree, lead. These are ends good and necessary in
themselves, whether attained by a special dispensation from on high, or
by decree of an earthly autocrat or a democracy of either sex or both.
For these ends we must work, and for all the means whereby to attain
them; but never for the means in despite of the ends.

This first chapter is perhaps unduly long, but it is necessary to state
my eugenic faith, since there is neither room nor need for me to
reiterate the principles of eugenics in later chapters, and since it was
necessary to show that, though this book is written in the interests of
individual womanhood, it is consistent with the principles of the divine
cause of race-culture, to which, for me, all others are subordinate, and
by which, I know, all others will in the last resort be judged.

* * * * *

The whole teaching of this book, from social generalizations to the
details of the wise management of girlhood, is based upon a single and
simple principle, often referred to and always assumed in former
writings from this pen, and in public speaking from many and various
platforms. If this principle be invalid, the whole of the practice which
is sought to be based upon it falls to the ground; but if it be valid,
it is of supreme importance as the sole foundation upon which can be
erected any structure of truth regarding woman and womanhood. Our first
concern, therefore, must be to state this principle, and the evidence
therefor. This will occupy not a small space: and the remainder will be
amply filled with the details of its application to woman as girl and
mother and grandmother, as wife and widow, as individual and citizen.

Woman is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and it is as such that
she will here be regarded. The purpose of adding yet another to the many
books on various aspects of womanhood is to propound and, if possible,
establish this conception of womanhood, and to find in it a
never-failing guide to the right living of the individual life, an
infallible criterion of right and wrong in all proposals for the future
of womanhood, whether economic, political, educational, whether
regarding marriage or divorce, or any other subject that concerns
womanhood. A principle for which so much is claimed demands clear
definition and inexpugnable foundation in the "solid ground of Nature."
Cogent in some measure though the argument would be, we must appeal in
the first place neither to the poets, nor to our own naturally implanted
preferences in womanhood, nor to any teaching that claims extra-natural
authority. Our first question must be--Do Nature and Life, the facts and
laws of the continuance and maintenance of living creatures, lend
countenance to this idea; can it be translated from general terms,
essentially poetic and therefore suspect by many, into precise, hard,
scientific language; is it a fact, like the atomic weight of oxygen or
the laws of motion, that woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the
future? If the answer to these questions be affirmative, the evidence of
the poets, of our own preferences, of religions ancient and modern, is
of merely secondary concern as corroborative, and as serving curiosity
to observe how far the teachings of passionless science have been
divined or denied by past ages and by other modes of perception and
inquiry. Therefore this is to be in its basis none other than a
biological treatise; for the laws of reproduction, the newly gained
knowledge regarding the nature of sex, and the facts of physiology,
afford the evidence of the essentially biological truth which has been
so often expressed by the present writer in the quasi-poetic terms
already set forth. Let us, then, first remind ourselves how the
individual, whether male or female, is to be looked upon in the light of
the work of Weismann in especial, and how this great truth, discovered
by modern biology and especially by the students of heredity, affects
our understanding of the difference between man and woman. Setting forth
these earlier pages in the year of the Darwin centenary, and the jubilee
of the "Origin of Species," a writer would have some courage who
proposed to discuss man and woman as if they were unique, rather than
the highest and latest examples of male and female: their nature to be
rightly understood only by due study of their ancestral forms, ancient
and modern. The biological problem of sex is our concern, and we may
have to traverse many past ages of "aeonian evolution," and even to
consider certain quite humble organisms, before we rightly see woman as
an evolutionary product of the laws of life.

But, first, as to the individual, of whatever sex. Observing the
familiar facts of our own lives and of the higher forms of life, both
animal and vegetable, with which we are acquainted, we must naturally at
first incline to regard as worse than paradoxical the modern biological
concept of the individual as existing for the race, of the body as
merely a transient host or trustee of the immortal germ-plasm. Since
life has its worth and value only in individuals, and since, therefore,
the race exists for the production of individuals, in any sense that we
human beings, at any rate, can accept, we must be reasonable in
expressing the apparently contrary but not less true view that the
individual exists for the race. After all, that does not mean that
individuals exist and are worth Nature's while merely in order to see
the germ-plasm on its way. To say that the individual exists for the
race is to say that he, and, as we shall see, pre-eminently she, exist
for future individuals; and that is not a destiny to be despised of any.
Let us attempt to state simply but accurately what biologists mean in
regarding the individual as primarily the host and servant of something
called the germ-plasm.

When the processes of development and of reproduction are closely
scrutinized, we find evidence which, together with the conclusions based
thereon, was first effectively stated by August Weismann, of Freiburg,
in his famous little book, "The Germ-Plasm."[1] The marvellous cells
from which new individuals are formed must no longer be regarded, at any
rate in the higher animals and plants, as formerly parts of the parent
individuals. On the contrary, we have to accept, at least in general and
as substantially revealing to us the true nature of the individual, the
doctrine of the "continuity of the germ-plasm," which teaches that the
race proper is a potentially immortal sequence of living germ-cells,
from which at intervals there are developed bodies or individuals, the
business and _raison d'etre_ of which, whatever such individuals as
ourselves may come to suppose, is primarily to provide a shelter for the
germ-plasm, and nourishment and air, until such time as it shall produce
another individual for itself, to serve the same function. This is
another way of saying what will often be said in the following
pages--that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent.

We shall later see that this great truth by no means involves the
condemnation of spinsterhood, but since it determines not only the
physiology, but also the psychology, of the individual, and especially
of woman, it will guide us to a right appreciation of the dangers and
the right direction of spinsterhood, and the means whereby it may be
made a blessing to self and to others. This must be said lest the reader
should be deterred by the unquestionably true assertion that the
individual is meant by Nature to be a parent, and has no excuse for
existence in Nature's eyes except as a parent. If we are to regard the
body as a trustee of the germ-plasm, it is evident that the body which
carries the germ-plasm with itself to the grave--the "immortality of the
germ-plasm" being only conditional and at the mercy of the acts of
individuals--has stultified Nature's end; and it will be a serious
concern of ours in the present work to show how, amongst human beings,
at any rate, this stultification may be averted, many childless persons
of both sexes having served the race for evermore in the highest degree.
We must ask in what directions especially may woman, most profitably for
herself or for others, seek to express herself apart from motherhood. It
will appear, if our leading principle be valid, that it affords us a
sure guide in the welter of controversy and baseless assertion of every
kind, in which this vastly important question is at present involved.

This conception of the individual as something meant to be a parent will
not be questioned by anyone who will do himself or herself the justice
to look at it soberly and reverently, without a trace of that tendency
to levity or to something worse which here invariably betrays the vulgar
mind, whether in a princess or a prostitute. For it needs little
reflection to perceive that the most familiar facts of our experience
and observation never fail to confirm the doctrine based by Weismann
upon the revelations of the microscope when applied to the developmental
processes of certain simple animal and vegetable forms. The doctrine
that the individual body was evolved by the forces of life, acted on and
directed by natural selection, as guardian and transmitter of the
germ-plasm, assumes a less paradoxical character when we perceive with
what unfailing art Nature has constructed and devised the body and the
mind for their function. We flatter ourselves hugely if we suppose that
even our most enjoyable and apparently most personal attributes and
appetites were designed by Nature for us. Not at all. It is the race for
which she is concerned. It is not the individual as individual, but the
individual as potential parent, that is her concern, nor does she
hesitate to leave very much to the mercy of time and chance the
individual from whom the possibility of parenthood has passed away, or
the individual in whom it has never appeared. Our appetites for food and
drink, well devised by Nature to be pleasant in their satisfaction--lest
otherwise we should fail to satisfy them and a possible parent should be
lost to her purposes--are immediately rendered of no account when there
stirs within us, whether in its crude or transmuted forms, the appetite
for the exercise of which these others, and we ourselves, exist, since
in Nature's eyes and scheme we are but vessels of the future. In later
chapters we shall have much occasion, because of their great practical
importance in the conduct of woman's life from girlhood onwards, to
discuss the physiological and psychological facts which demonstrate
overwhelmingly the truth of the view that the individual was evolved by
Nature for the care of the germ-plasm, or, in other words, was and is
constructed primarily and ultimately for parenthood.

Nor is this argument, as I see it and will present it, invalidated in
any degree by the case of such individuals as the sterile worker-bee;
any more than the argument, rightly considered, is invalidated by any
instance of a worthy, valuable, happy life, eminently a success in the
highest and in the lower senses, lived amongst mankind by a non-parent
of either sex. On the contrary, it is in such cases as that of the
worker-bee that we find the warrant--in apparent contradiction--for our
notion of the meaning of the individual, and also the key to the problem
placed before us amongst ourselves by the case of inevitable
spinsterhood. Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high
and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but,
in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which
she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to
represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far
from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive
characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility. But when we
come to ask what are her distinctive characters and utilities we find
that they are all designed for the future of the race. She is, in fact,
the ideal foster-mother, made for that service, complete in her
incompleteness, satisfied with the vicarious fulfilment of the whole of
motherhood except its merely physical part. The doctrine, therefore,
that the individual is designed by Nature for parenthood, the
individual being primarily devised for the race, finds no exception,
but rather a striking and immensely significant illustration in the case
of the worker-bee, nor will it find itself in difficulties with the case
of any forms of individual, however sterile, that can be quoted from
either the animal or the vegetable world. Natural selection, of which
the continuance of the race is the first and never neglected concern,
invariably sees to it that no individuals are allowed to be produced by
any species unless they have survival-value, a phrase which always
means, in the upshot, value for the survival of the race--whether as
parents, or foster-parents, protectors of the parents, feeders or slaves
thereof. Our primary purpose throughout being practical, it is
impossible to devote unlimited time and space to proceeding formally
through the known forms of life in order to marshal all the proofs or a
tithe of them, that all individuals are invented and tolerated by Nature
for parenthood or its service.

We shall in due course consider the peculiar significance of this
proposition for the case of woman--a significance so radical for our
present argument, even to its _minutiae_ of practical living, that it
cannot be too early or too thoroughly insisted upon. But before we
proceed to the special case of woman it is well that we should clearly
perceive as a general guiding truth, which will never fail us, either in
interpretation, prediction, or instruction, the unfailing gaze of
Nature, as manifested in the world of life, towards the future. There is
no truth more significant for our interpretation of the meaning of the
Universe, or at least of our planetary life: there is none more relevant
to the fate of empires, and therefore to the interests of the
enlightened patriot: there is none more worthy to be taken to heart by
the individual of either sex and of any age, adolescent or centenarian,
as the secret of life's happiness, endurance, and worth. It may be
permitted, then, briefly to survey the main truths, and, therefore, the
main teachings of the past, as they may be read by those who seek in the
facts of life the key to its meaning and its use.

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