Book: Woman and Womanhood

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The kind of means whereby the rights of mothers may be granted them is
indicated in the Women's Charter which has lately been formulated and
advocated by Lady Maclaren. The principle there recognized is that the
husband's wages are not solely his own earnings, but are in part handed
to him to be passed on to his wife. Directly children are concerned, the
State should be.

Whatever the answer to the crudely-stated question, "Should Wives have
Wages?" it is certain that mothers should and must have wages or their
equivalent.

To many of the well-wishers of women it is disappointing that the
Women's Charter is not more keenly supported by women themselves.
Unfortunately the suffrage has become a fetish, the mere means has
become an end, preferred even to the offer of the real ends, such as
would be attained in very large measure by this Charter. We see here, it
is to be feared, the same spirit which protests against the wisest and
most humane legislation in the interests of women and children because
"men have no business to lay down the law for women."

In general terms, one would argue that the principle of insurance must
be applied to this case, as it is now voluntarily applied by thousands
of provident fathers. Here the State may guarantee and help, even by
the expenditure of money. It should help those who help themselves. This
is a principle which may apply to many forms of insurance or provision,
whether for old age or against invalidity; just as non-contributory
old-age provisions are fundamentally wrong in principle, and have never
been defended on any but party-political grounds of expedience, even by
their advocates, so the "endowment of motherhood" which meant the
complete liberation of fatherhood from its responsibilities would be
wrong in principle. But in both of these cases the State might rightly
undertake to help those who help themselves.

Fatherhood of the new order will not be so wholly irksome and unrewarded
as might at first appear to the critic who does not reckon children as
rewards themselves. It may involve some momentary sacrifices, but it
needs very little critical study of the ordinary man's expenditure to
discover that, on the whole, these sacrifices will be more apparent than
real. It is, for instance, a very great sacrifice indeed for the smoker
to give up tobacco; but once he has done so, he is as happy as he was,
and suffers nothing at all for the gain of his pocket. Both as regards
alcohol and tobacco, the common expenditure which would so amply provide
milk and the rest for children, is necessitated by an acquired habit
which, like all acquired habits, can be discarded. The non-smoker and
non-drinker does _not_ suffer the discomfort of the smoker and drinker
who is deprived of his need. These things cease to be needs at all, soon
after they are dispensed with, or if the habit of taking them is never
begun. They are luxuries only to those who use them. To those who do not
they are nothing, and the lack of them is nothing. The sheer waste they
entail is gigantic, and the expenditure on them in such a country as
England would endow all its motherhood and provide good conditions for
all its children. The father who, in the future, is compelled to yield
the rights of mothers and children, may sometimes be compelled to
practise what at first looks like great self-restraint in these
respects. The point I wish to make is that the sacrifice and the need
for restraint are transient, and that thereafter there is simply more
liberty and the promise of longer life for the wise.

The working-out will be that the legislation of the future will benefit
the right kind of husband and father, but will restrain and irk the
wrong kind. But that is precisely what good legislation should do. Thus
the right kind of father, who in any case will do his best to care for
his wife and children, will be helped in the future by the State. It
will insist that he does the duty which in any case he means to do, but
it will make the doing easier. We see admirably working parallels to
this in the German insurance laws and their provision for death, disease
and old age. They benefit those whom they appear to harass. Insurance
against fatherhood will work in the same way. The State will not be
antagonistic to the father, but will be his best friend, knowing that
_its_ best friends are good fathers and mothers. There will be far less
worry and anxiety for well-meaning parents, especially for mothers, but
also for fathers. Nor do I, for one, much mind how substantial may be
the State's contribution to the father's efforts, provided only that
those efforts are demanded and obtained.

Nothing is more certain than that we are about to free ourselves from
the crass blindness of the nineteenth century in its great delusion that
the wealth of a nation consists in the number of things it makes and
possesses. Parenthood and childhood will shortly come to be recognized
as the first concern of the State that is to continue, and whilst the
birth-rate continues to fall, the honour paid to fathers and mothers
will continue to rise. We shall become as wise in time as the Jews have
been ever since we have record of them. We shall estimate the relative
value of these things as well as if we were the kinds of people we call
"Savages." Fatherhood will not be such an uncompensated sacrifice in
those days, even apart from its inherent rewards.

The point I am trying to make is that the legislation and the social
changes here advocated as necessary in the interests of women, and
indeed asserted to be their rights, do not involve any injury to men.
This common delusion is a mere instance of the poisonous principle of
politicians, notably fiscal politicians, and of many business men. Their
belief is that what benefits Germany must hurt England, that what hurts
Germany must benefit England, that all trade is a question of somebody
scoring off another or being scored off. The idea that there are great
games in which both sides stand to win, if they "play the game," is
meaningless to them. That German prosperity can favour English
prosperity, that true commerce is a mutual exchange for mutual
benefit--these are notions obviously absurd to people who think on this
horrible assumption which reigns unchallenged in a thousand columns of
fiscal controversy every morning. And when these people turn to the
question of legislation as between the sexes, they naturally assume that
anything which promises to benefit women will injure men. The vote is
thus regarded as a means of injuring men--necessarily, because it
advantages women--and assuredly such people will suppose that any
measures in the direction of granting what I here prefer to call the
"rights of mothers" (leaving to one side the "rights of women"),
necessarily involve a proportionate disadvantage to men. I deny it
utterly:

The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or God-like, bond or free.

The rights of mothers, we have seen, are fundamental for any society,
and to satisfy them is to meet the most clearly primary of social needs.
But there will be some readers of this book, perhaps, who miss any
discussion of the "rights of women." I do not care for the phrase,
because I do not think that we often see it usefully employed. For me
the propositions are self-evident that men and women, being human
beings, have the rights of human beings. Each of us has the right to the
conditions of the most complete self-development and expression that is
compatible with the granting of the same right to others. It is true
that women have been largely debarred from these conditions as a sex,
and in so far there is some meaning in the phrase "Women's rights." But
otherwise we all agree that men and women alike have the right which has
just been stated in terms that are a paraphrase of Herbert Spencer's
definition of liberty. Men's rights and women's rights are the rights to
"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." If any one disputes the
application of this principle to women as unreservedly as to men, I will
not argue with him. I write for decent people.

At this stage in the development of civilization, our business is to
see, first, that our social proceedings and reconstructions of
enterprises are compatible with the nature of the human individual, male
and female. It is always necessary for us to be reminded of the facts of
the individual, for in the last resort they will determine the failure
or the success of all our schemes. And then we must see where our
existing social structure fails to satisfy the needs of individual
development and of individual duty. In seeking to rectify what may here
be wrong, of course we must take first things first--we must set the
case right for the most important people before we go on to the others.

Now it is the simple, obvious truth,--so obvious and unchallengeable
that somehow it has never been stated--that in any human society the
parents are the most important people. The division is not between
education and the lack of it, or wealth and the lack of it, or breeding
and the lack of it. It is not the aristocracy that matters supremely;
nor the "great middle-class"; nor the masses; nor the teachers; nor the
doctors; nor the servants of modern industrialism. The classification is
a biological one--into parents and non-parents. The non-parents may be
invaluable in their way, if only they beget something that is valuable.
Heaven forbid that I should undervalue the children of the mind. But if
we are to classify any nation, the first and last classification of any
moment is none of those in which we always indulge and which all our
customs and traditions and prejudices are ever seeking to perpetuate;
but the classification into those who will die childless and those who
create the future race. That is why, for me at any rate, the subject of
women's rights is jejune and sterile compared with the subject of this
chapter. First let us ascertain the rights of mothers and grant them, to
the very uttermost; then let us do the same for the fathers. Let us
exact of each the corresponding duties; and the next generation, brought
into being under such conditions, will solve all our problems. But
whilst we neglect the first things we shall permanently solve no problem
at all. We may seem to do so, but if we dishonour parenthood, if we
leave the inferior women to mother the future, the degenerate race that
must ensue will find itself in difficulties compared with which ours are
trivial, and our solutions of them impotent.

That is why I seek to draw attention to the rights not of women as
women,--for neither men nor women have any peculiar rights as men or
women--nor yet to the rights of wives as wives, but to the rights of
mothers as mothers, whether married or unmarried, whether husbanded or
widowed. The rights of women are the rights of human beings, and no
special concern of a writer on woman and womanhood, paradoxical as the
assertion may be. The rights of wives are often discussed, but I
question whether the discussion ever helped a wife yet, except solely in
the matter of her monetary claims upon her husband. Discussion and
public opinion and consequent legislation can effect, and have effected,
something for wives as wives in this matter. In other matters, much more
vital to their happiness, each case is unique because all individuals
are unique; and the discussion of the questions can amount to no more
than futile and obvious platitude.

But when motherhood is concerned the monetary question becomes worthy of
the adjective economic, so often prostituted, for the making of future
life depends upon the provision of adequate means. The whole essence of
motherhood is that it is a dedication of the present to the future.
Every mother is in the position of the inventor or the poet or the
musician for whose work the present makes no demand and no payment. The
future is being served, but the future is not there to pay. The rights
of mothers are the rights of the future, and its claims upon the
present.

It can be abundantly shown that increasing prevision or provision marks
the ascent of organic Nature; that as life ascends the present is more
and more dedicated to the future. The completeness of this dedication is
the most exemplary fact of the many which the bee-hive provides for our
instruction and following. Consider the dedication of the hive to the
queen. Realize that she is not in any way the ruler of the hive, but she
is _the only mother in it_. She is the parent, and, on our principles,
she is therefore the most important person in the hive. No one else has
any rights but to serve her, for the future absolutely depends upon her.
So does the future of our society depend upon its mothers. In our
species there are many and not one, as in the bee-hive. If there were
just one individual who was to be the mother of the next generation,
even our politicians would perceive that she was the most important
person in the community, and that her rights were supreme. But the
principle stands, though, as it happens, human mothers are not one in
each generation, but many. They are in our society what the queen bee is
in the hive, and the future will transcend the present and the past just
in so far as they are well-chosen, and well cared for.

To the best of my belief this principle has not yet been recognized by
any one. The rights of women and the rights of wives are often
discussed, but the rights of mothers is a term expressing a principle
which is not to be called new, only because in the bee-hive, for
instance, we see it expressed and inerrably served.

Perhaps it may be permitted to close with a personal reminiscence which,
at any rate, bears on the genesis of this chapter. Some nine years ago
when I was resident-surgeon to the Edinburgh Maternity Hospital, I
proposed to get up a concert for the patients on Boxing Day, and on
asking permission of the distinguished obstetrician who was in supreme
charge, was met with the question, "Do they deserve it?" After several
seconds there slowly dawned the fact which I knew but had long
forgotten, that the mothers in the large ward where the music was
proposed, were all unmarried, and finally I answered, "I don't know."
Nor do I know to this day, and though the answer was given in weakness
and in a disconcerted voice, I doubt whether any wiser one could be
framed. We all know what desert means, and merit and credit, until we
begin to think and study: and we end by discovering that we do not know
what, in the last analysis, these terms mean. But, at any rate, these
women,--one of them, I remember, was a child of fourteen--were mothers,
and whatever favoured their convalescence unquestionably made for the
survival of their babies. It might have been argued that if the patients
did not deserve music, they did not deserve the air and light and food
and skill and kindness with which they were being restored to health.
But it is not a question of deserts. These women were mothers. If they
should not have been, they should not have been, and if the blame was
theirs, they were blameworthy. But mothers they were, with the duties
of mothers to perform, and therefore with the rights of mothers. They
got their concert and were all the better for the remarkably indifferent
music of which it consisted, as such concerts commonly do; and I am only
very sorry if any of them argued therefrom that she had nothing in the
past to regret.

But the spiritual attitude revealed in the question, "Do they deserve
it?" is one which must speedily go to its own place. Let us strive to
dignify marriage, to educate the young of both sexes for parenthood, to
reduce illegitimacy, to reward virtue. But where there is motherhood in
being, whether expectant or achieved, we have a duty which is the
highest and most sacred of all because it is the Future that we are
called upon to serve, and upon us it wholly depends.

As Mr. John Burns said to our first Infant Mortality Conference in Great
Britain in 1907, "Let us dignify, purify and glorify motherhood by every
means in our power." Evidently this can only be done through marriage,
which is in its very essence an institution for the dignifying of
motherhood. But a biological writer cannot distinguish as a theologian
can between legal and extra-legal motherhood. He may declare that
motherhood is hideously illegitimate when it is forced upon a wife
married to an inebriate degenerate. He may accept marriage with all his
heart as an institution which for him has natural sanctions millions of
years older than any Church or State or mankind itself. But for him as a
student of life all motherhood must be guarded as such--even if it be
guarded in such a fashion that it can never recur, which is our duty to
the feeble-minded mother.

If there be any reader who is unacquainted with M. Maeterlinck's "Life
of the Bee," let him or her study that instructive book. Let him ask why
the queen is the End of the hive, why all is for her. Let him ask
whether the natural law upon which this depends--the law that all
individuals are mortal--does not apply to all races, even our own, and
perhaps he will come to agree that the rights of mothers are the oldest
and deepest and most necessary of any rights that can be named.

And the recognition and granting of them--as they must necessarily be
recognized and granted in every living race that depends upon
motherhood--is even more imperative in our case than in any other, since
human motherhood makes more demands upon the individual than any other.
By our constitution we human beings must devote more of our energies to
the Future than any other race. But it is a Future better worth working
for than any of theirs.




CHAPTER XX

WOMEN AND ECONOMICS


It will be evident that the writer of the foregoing chapter must have
something to say on the question of women and economics, but though what
must be said seems to me to be very important, it can be stated at no
great length.

If we turn to the most widely-read and applauded of the feminist books
on this subject, _Women and Economics_, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we
are by no means encouraged to find it stated in the first chapter that
woman's present economic inferiority to man is not due to "any inherent
disability of sex." Wherever Mrs. Gilman may be right, here the
biologist knows that she is wrong. The argument has been fully stated in
earlier pages, and need not here be restated. But we shall not be
surprised if a premise which denies any natural economic disadvantage of
women leads to more than dubious conclusions.

Only a few pages later, Mrs. Gilman refers to the argument that the
economic dependence of women upon their husbands is defensible on the
ground that they perform the duties of motherhood, and the following is
her comment thereon:

"The claim of motherhood as a factor in economic exchange is false
to-day. But suppose it were true. Are we willing to hold this
ground, even in theory? Are we willing to consider motherhood as a
business, a form of commercial exchange? Are the cares and duties
of the mother, her travail and her love, commodities to be
exchanged for bread?

"It is revolting so to consider them; and if we dare face our own
thoughts, and force them to their logical conclusion, we shall see
that nothing could be more repugnant to human feeling, or more
socially and individually injurious, than to make motherhood a
trade."

Surely this is special pleading and not very plausible at that. It may
be replied, "Is not the labourer worthy of his hire?"--however noble the
labour. If we choose to call society's or a husband's support of
motherhood "a form of commercial exchange," it is indeed "revolting" so
to see it; let us then look at the case as it is. We applaud the "cares
and duties of the mother, her travail and her love"; but the more
assiduous her maternity, and the more admirable, the more certainly will
she require to be fed. If she cannot simultaneously feed her child and
forage for herself, somebody must forage for her; and to say that
therefore the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love,
become commodities to be exchanged for bread, is simply to cloud a clear
case with question-begging epithets. Always, everywhere, if motherhood
is to be performed at its highest, the mother must be supported. It is
not a question of commercial exchange, but of obvious natural necessity.
The foregoing chapter with its argument for the rights of mothers as a
great and neglected social principle, may be unsound throughout, but it
will certainly not be refuted by sentences such as these.

Briefly, Mrs. Gilman proposes to "do away with the family kitchen and
dining-room, to transform all domestic service from the incapable,
hand-to-mouth standard of untrained amateurs to that of professional
experts, to raise the work of child nursing and rearing to a scientific
and skilled basis, to secure the self-support of the wife and mother
through skilled labour, so that she may be economically independent of
her husband."

But if her child nursing and rearing are to be scientific and skilled,
and she is simultaneously to support herself through skilled labour, she
clearly requires to be two women or one woman in two places at the same
time. This, in effect, is what Mrs. Gilman expects. We have seen that
Mr. H. G. Wells's proposed help for motherhood consists in discharging
fatherhood from its duties: Mrs. Gilman's idea is to double the mother's
work. Both come to much the same thing.

All women, mothers or other, are to become economically independent,
instead of being "parasitic on the male," our author's unpleasing way of
recognizing that fatherhood has reached high and responsible estate
amongst mankind. Now if Mrs. Gilman's solution be feasible, we must
return to our fundamentals and see whether they are compatible with it.
She has no doubt of it. Thus:--

"If it could be shown that the women of to-day were growing beards,
were changing as to pelvic bones, were developing bass voices, or
that in their new activities they were manifesting the destructive
energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of
the male, then there would be cause for alarm. But the one thing
that has been shown in what study we have been able to make of
women in industry is that they are women still, and this seems to
be a surprise to many worthy souls ... 'the new woman' will be no
less female than the 'old' woman ... she will be, with it all, more
feminine.

"The more freely the human mother mingles in the natural industries
of a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, the
peasant woman, the working-woman everywhere who is not overworked,
the more rightly she fulfils these functions."[20]

We may not be so sure that there is not some evidence for "growing
beards," "developing bass voices," and "manifesting the destructive
energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the
male"; and in our brief attempt to make a first study of womanhood in
the light of Mendelism, we have seen good reason to understand why
masculine characters may come to the surface in the female whose
femininity has worn thin. Several of the lower animals definitely show
us the possibilities.

But we need not accept the issue on the grounds of such superficial
manifestations as these, for there are others, more subtle and vastly
more important, on which must be fought the question whether women in
industry are women still, and whether the "new woman" is more feminine
than the old. Let us dismiss the extremes in both directions. We need
not adduce the members of the Pioneer Club, who show their increasing
femininity by donning male attire; nor need we question that large
numbers of women in industry continue to remain feminine still. The
practical question which we must determine, if possible, is the average
effect of industrial conditions and the assumption of the functions
commonly supposed to be more suitably masculine, upon women in general.
Here we definitely join issue with Mrs. Gilman.

It is impossible to discuss, as we might well do, the available evidence
as to the effect of external activities upon that wonderful function of
womanhood which, in its correspondence with the rhythm of the tides,
hints, like many other of our attributes, at our distant origin in the
Sea--the mother of all living. Reference was made in an earlier chapter
to this function, and its use as, in most cases at any rate, a criterion
of womanhood and a gauge of the effect of physical exercise or mental
exercise thereupon. The writer of "Women and Economics" has nothing to
say on this subject--less, if possible, than on the subject of
lactation. The menstrual function would admirably and fundamentally
illustrate the present contention, but it will be better to take the
great maternal and mammalian function of nursing as a criterion of
womanhood, and as a test of the contention that the more freely the
mother works as do the savage woman and the peasant woman, the more
rightly she fulfils the "primal physical functions of maternity."

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