Book: Woman and Womanhood

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Before we consider the actual evidence (and Mrs. Gilman does not deal at
all in evidence on these fundamentals to her argument) let us meet the
argument about the "savage woman," who works as hard as men do,--though
much less hard than early observers of savage life supposed--and who is
nevertheless a successful mother. It is completely forgotten that, just
as parenthood, both fatherhood and motherhood, demands more of the
individual as we rise in the scale of animal evolution, so, within our
own species, the same holds good. In general, the mothers of civilized
races are the mothers of babies whose heads are larger at birth (as they
will be in adult life), than those of savage babies. It is true that the
civilized woman has, on the average, a considerably larger pelvis than
that of, for instance, the negress. There must be a feasible,
practicable ratio between the two sets of measurements if babies are to
enter the world at all. But the increasing size of the human head is a
great practical problem for women. No one can say how many millions have
perished in the past because their pelves were too narrow for the
increasing demands thus made upon them, and doubtless the greater
capacity of the female pelvis in higher races is mainly due to this
terrible but racially beneficent process of selection, by which women
with pelves nearer (e. g.) to negro type, have been rejected, and women
with wider pelves have survived, to transmit their breadth of pelvis to
their daughters and carry on the larger-headed races. But even now
obstetricians are well aware that the practical mechanical problem for
the civilized woman is much more serious than for her savage sister; and
the argument that civilized women would discharge maternal functions as
well as savage women if they worked as hard is therefore worthless.

Let us return now to the question of nursing capacity. "Bass voices"
and "beards" are doubtless unlovely in woman, but their extensive
appearance would be of no consequence at all compared with the
disappearance or weakening of the mammalian function which, as everyone
knows or should know, is the dominating factor in the survival or death
of infancy. Now it may be briefly asserted that civilized woman, and
more especially industrial woman, threatens to cease to be a mammal. If
this assertion can be substantiated, and if the "economic independence
of women" necessarily involves it, no biologist, no medical man, no
first-hand student of life, will hesitate to condemn finally the ideal
toward which Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her would have us go.
Things may be bad, things _are_ very bad: the lot of woman must be
raised immensely, because the race must be raised, and cannot be raised
otherwise; but progress is going forward and not backward, Mr.
Chesterton notwithstanding. Woman will not become more than a mammal by
becoming less, and going back on that great achievement of ascending
life. Individuals may do so, and are doing so, lamentably misdirected as
many of them now are; but that is the end of them and their kind. It is
quite easy to stamp out motherhood and its inevitable economic
dependence, but with it you stamp out the future.

It is generally admitted that our women nurse their babies less than
they used to do. It is as generally admitted that this is often
deliberate choice, and we all know that it is often economic necessity:
the human mother "mingles in the natural industries of a human
creature," such as the factory affords, and cannot simultaneously stay
at home to nurse her baby, making men--for which, as a "natural
industry" of women, even as against making, say, lead-glaze for china,
there may be something to be said.

But whilst popular preachers and castigators of the sins of society
fulminate against the fine lady who asks for belladonna and refuses to
do her duty, we must enquire to what extent, if any, women no longer
nurse their babies because they cannot, try they never so patiently and
strenuously. It is the general belief amongst those whose daily work
qualifies them for an opinion, that women are tending to lose the power
of nursing. Professor von Bunge, whose name is honoured by all students
of the action of drugs, has satisfied himself that alcoholism in the
father is a great cause of incapacity to nurse in daughters. However
that interpretation may be, the fact seems clear; and the change in this
direction is evidently much more rapid than might be accounted for by
the improvement in artificial feeding of infants leading to the survival
of daughters of mothers unable to nurse, and transmitting their
inability to their children. Mrs. Gilman--having ignored menstruation
altogether--makes only one allusion to this vastly important subject,
and we shall see to what extent her sanguine assumption is justified.
According to her, "A healthy, happy, rightly occupied motherhood should
be able to keep up this function (of nursing) longer than is now
customary--to the child's great gain." There can be no question about
the child's great gain; but what is the evidence for supposing that a
mother earning her own living in free competition with men--which is
what a "healthy, happy, rightly occupied motherhood" means in this
connection--can thus spend her energies twice over, unlike any other
source of energy known?

According to official statistics, maternal lactation is steadily
decreasing in several German cities, notably in Berlin, where only 56.2
per cent. of infants under one month were suckled by their mothers in
1905, as against 65.6 per cent. in 1895, and 74.3 per cent. in 1885. At
nine months of age 22.4 per cent. were suckled in 1905, 34.6 per cent.
in 1895, 49 per cent. in 1885. Other towns show more favourable results;
a general decrease, however, is marked. These facts cannot be ascribed,
according to the author,[21] to a growing disinclination to
breast-feeding, nor to the employment of mothers (in Prussia only 5 per
cent. of the married women are employed in manufacture). The question
whether the decrease in breast-feeding is due to the industrial
employment of women before marriage, or to (inherited) degeneration,
remains to be determined.

According to a recent statement by Professor von Bunge, the conditions
are very similar now in Switzerland, where only about one mother in five
can nurse her children.

Similar evidence could be cited from other sources, and the fact being
admitted must evidently be reckoned with.

That the modern development of infant feeding will serve to replace
natural lactation, must be denied, and this without prejudice to the
magnificent work of the late Professor Budin of Paris and Professor
Morgan Rotch of Harvard. These pioneers and their followers have devised
some admirable second bests--admirable, that is, relatively to some of
the pitiable methods which they have superseded, but relatively to the
mother's breast not admirable at all. At the beginning of the campaign
against infant mortality, the creche and the sterilized milk depot and
the fractional analysis of cow's milk and its recomposition in suitable
proportions of proteid, fat, etc., as devised by Rotch, were rightly
acclaimed and admitted to save vast numbers of infant lives. All this is
mere stop-gap, wonderfully effective, no doubt, but only stop-gap
nevertheless. In France they are going ahead, and public opinion in
London is being slowly persuaded to follow along the more recent French
lines. The modern principle upon which we should act is Nature's
principle--saving the children through their mothers. Expectant
motherhood must be taken care of; we must feed, not the child, but the
nursing mother, and the child through her. If we rightly take care of
her, she will construct a perfect food for the child. There is no other
path of racial safety. It is not our present concern to deal with the
problems of infancy and childhood as they require, and surely we need
not wait to prove that nursing motherhood cannot safely be superseded,
but must be retained and safeguarded.

If this postulate be granted, we have to determine how it comes about
that the German figures, for instance, are showing this extraordinarily
rapid decline in maternal lactation. As has already been noted in
passing, we must reject the suggestion that the natural type of women is
changing. Such a change of natural type in any living race can occur
only through selection for parenthood, and such selection in the case in
question can scarcely be imagined to occur in the direction of choosing
women who are naturally less capable of nursing. On the contrary, the
tendency of the selective principle must always be toward the greater
survival of infants whose mothers can nurse them, and who in their turn,
if they are to be women, will be more likely to be able to nurse their
children. Further, the action of selection cannot demonstrate itself
more quickly than is permitted by the length of human generations. It
must therefore be rejected as any interpretation of this case. If women
are ceasing to be able to nurse their babies, and if this change is
occurring with such extraordinary rapidity as the German figures
indicate, plainly the explanation must be found in the action of some
recent and novel condition or conditions upon womanhood.

Perhaps it need scarcely be insisted that the distinction here sought to
be made is of the utmost importance. If the natural type of womanhood
were actually changing, we could scarcely do more than observe and
despair, but if it be merely that the capacities of this generation of
women are being modified by the particular conditions to which they are
subjected, plainly we who have made those conditions can modify
them--"What man has made, man can destroy."

If we come to ask ourselves what these recent and novel conditions are,
the answer is only too ready at hand. The principles which will guide us
toward discovering it have been set forth at length in the earlier
chapters of this book. Let us recur to our Geddes and Thomson, and at
once we have the key. The production of milk is an act of anabolism or
building-up, such as we have seen to be characteristic of the female
sex, involving the accumulation and storage of quantities of energy so
large that if they were stated in the units of the physicist they would
astonish us. If we consider what the child achieves in the way of
movement and development and growth, and if we realize that at the most
rapid period of development and growth, all the energy therefor has been
gathered, prepared, and is dispensed by the nursing mother, we shall
begin to realize what an astonishing feat that is which she performs. It
is in reality, of course, the same feat which is performed by the
expectant mother, only that it is slightly less arduous, since after
birth the child can breathe and digest for itself.

Perhaps the reader will begin to realize what Mrs. Gilman and those who
think with her are asking us to believe when they say that the primal
physical functions of maternity will be best fulfilled by the mother who
"mingles in the natural industries of a human creature." This statement
is either ridiculously false or can be rendered true by rendering it as
a truism. The primal physical functions of maternity _are_ the natural
industries of the particular human creature we call a mother; and the
better she fulfils them, the better she fulfils them, certainly. But the
so-called natural industries in which the modern mother is desired to
be engaged whilst she is bearing or nursing her children are as
unnatural as anything can be. As at present practised, they are morbid
products of civilization which it will require to cast off if it is to
survive.

It is the student of life and its laws who must have the last word in
these matters. If he utters it wrongly or is unheeded, Nature is not
mocked, but will be avenged. The writer who can lay down a new principle
on which our life is to be based, without paying any more attention to
lactation than is to be found in the argument we have been considering,
has left out the beginning, has omitted the foundations. No measure of
earnestness or literary skill can save her case.

Of course the reply will be that the biological criticism is simply the
ancient and oriental idea of woman as a helpless dependent, reasserted
for male advantage in our own day. One cannot believe that it is
necessary to rebut that accusation. It is necessary, however, to examine
somewhat the words "economic dependence" and "economic independence"
which are employed with such naive antithesis in this controversy.

When we examine Mrs. Gilman's proposal for the salvation of woman, we
find it to mean that in future mothers are to do double work. The
glorious consummation is to be that woman is no longer "parasitic on the
male," which is Mrs. Gilman's way of expressing the great truth that the
mother for whom the father works, represents the future supported by the
present.

But the future is always supported by the present. Woman, we began by
saying, is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and the present must
live for her and die for her. When we say the future, we mean childhood.
If childhood is to appear and to survive, womanhood must be dedicated to
it, and manhood, which stands for the present, must supply its own link
in the chain. The following paragraph from an unsigned article which
appeared some years ago in the _Morning Post_ states the case in a form
which may convince the reader. It was headed "Repairs and Renewals of
the People," and ran as follows:--

"It is, indeed, seldom sufficiently realized how much a nation, so
to speak, lives always in and for the future. Broadly speaking, of
every ten persons living in the United Kingdom now, four are less
than twenty years of age, while three of the rest are women (two of
them married women)--that is to say, people also mainly concerned,
through the care of children, with the future rather than with the
present. Upon the remaining three men, one of whom be it noted is
over fifty-five, falls the bulk of the work of providing for
immediate needs and so releasing the others to provide for the
continuance of the race. A definite large share of all the present
activities of a people is required and, as it were, pledged to
provide for its renewal. If it fails to allow sufficient, it may,
just like a company or a municipal concern with an inadequate
depreciation fund, show large profits and great prosperity for a
time; it cannot be regarded as a sound concern."

The reader must decide whether there is more light and leading in the
interpretation that upon men falls the bulk of the work of providing for
immediate needs, and so enabling women to provide for the continuance
of the race, or, in Mrs. Gilman's version that woman is parasitic upon
the male. The future, if she likes to state it in that way, is parasitic
upon the present, always has been and always will be. The case which she
imagines to be unique and morbid, peculiar to civilized mankind, is
precisely the case of the hen bird who sits upon her eggs, incubating
the future, whilst the male goes and forages for her. She is parasitic
upon the male, as Mrs. Gilman would put it.

The truth is that, like many other women dominated by sex
antagonism--which glares ferociously from such paragraphs as that which
was quoted regarding "the brutal combative instinct or the intense
sex-vanity of the male"--Mrs. Gilman, in seeking to further the
interests of her sex, proposes to dispense with the help of its best
friend, which is the other sex. It is not easy to speak with patience of
those who thus seek to set the house of mankind against itself, to the
injury of men, women and children alike.

No doubt it is true that Mrs. Gilman's attitude is engendered by sex
antagonism as we see it everywhere in men--though for some obscure
reason it is only so labelled when displayed by women. No doubt, also, a
much better case can be made out for Mrs. Gilman's proposals, up to a
point, than could be made out for corresponding proposals on the other
side. No one who thinks for a moment can question that all proposals
whatsoever to make either sex independent of the other are stark
madness; yet there is a certain short-lived plausibility in the argument
that women are to be independent of men, and this depends upon the fact
which we have already attempted to demonstrate and interpret by means of
Mendelism, that women are more than men, and that womanhood includes
latent manhood. If, therefore, we are careful with the argument and
boldly rush past the really crucial places, such as the conditions and
needs of expectant and nursing motherhood, we can make out what looks
like a case for the economic dependence of women. Each sex is to work
for itself, and then there need be no more quarrelling.

But we could not go even so far with any theory for making men
independent of women without seeing that we were no less wrong on that
side than Mrs. Gilman is on the other. Man's apparent economic
independence of women is as complete a myth as women's projected
economic independence of men. In the last resort, when we come down to
realities, and remember that both men and women are mortal, and that
unless they are replaced, everything ends, we see that the introduction
of the word economic into this question simply serves to confuse
thought, just as the older political economy confused thought and laid
itself open to the mercilessly magnificent attacks of Ruskin. Economy is
literally the law of the house or the home--where life begins. Of all
economies, life is the last judge, because there is no wealth but life.
_In the last resort the economic dependence of the sexes means nothing
because the sexes cannot independently reproduce themselves._

If Mrs. Gilman is to be arraigned for her error let us see to it most
carefully that we do not fail to arraign the men who, with not
one-thousandth part of her excuse and with no iota of her ability, fall
into the corresponding error on their side. When Women's Suffrage is
being debated, there never fails a supply of men who write to the papers
to say that men must vote and not women because men and not women "made
the State." How much simpler our problems would be if there were some
means of distinguishing children who will grow up into men of this type,
and carefully refraining from teaching them to read or write! Make the
State, indeed!--they can make nothing but fools of themselves, and
without women's assistance could not even reproduce their folly. Of
course the retort to all this nonsense is that neither sex ever yet
created anything without the other. Every human act and achievement is
the product of both sexes. When some friend of the past assures us that
women should not vote because they cannot bear arms, he is of course
reminded that women bear the soldiers. It is true and it is
unanswerable. In just the same way, when Mrs. Gilman wishes women to be
economically independent of men, whom she considers as animals
distinguished by their destructive energy, brutality and intense sex
vanity, she is simply ignoring half the truth. Let either sex try to run
the earth alone till Halley's comet returns, and what would be left for
it to see? Of all follies uttered on this subject, and they are many,
the cry, each sex for itself, is the wickedest and worst.

The reader may well declare that such criticism is easy, but of little
worth unless it be accompanied by some kind of constructive proposals
for the amelioration of present conditions. Nothing is destroyed until
it is replaced. If the present economic conditions of women involve the
most hideous wickedness and cruelty and injure the entire progress of
mankind, as they assuredly do, and if they therefore must be destroyed,
we must have something to replace them with; and if Mrs. Gilman's
proposals would simply make the difficulty a thousand times worse by
depriving women of men's help, what proposals are there to offer
instead?

The reply is that we must go back to first principles. We must drop all
our phrases about economic independence or dependence. They have urgent
and real meanings for each one of us at any given time, but when applied
to the problems of the reconstruction of society as a whole, they mean
nothing because they are based upon no vital truths whatever. A man may
be economically secure when he is producing absinthe or whisky, or he
may die of starvation because he is producing the songs of Schubert.
Economic independence and dependence mean very much to the prosperous
distiller whom men pay for poison, and to the immortal composer whom men
do not pay at all, but who yet produces that which nourishes the life of
all the future. The maker of death may live, and the maker of life may
die; we see it every day and history is the continuous record of it.
These economic dependences and independences consist only in the
relations of one man or woman to the others. They have nothing to do
with the real issue, which is the relation of mankind as a whole to
Nature. These economic questions are simply concerned with money--the
means whereby one man has more or less claim upon another: society may
have to be reconstructed in such a fashion that economic independence
and dependence, as at present understood, would have no meaning
whatever. Yet all the real economic questions would remain, even though
money or private property were abolished. The real economy is the making
and preserving of life and the means of life. We live in a chaos where
the elementary conditions of human existence are constantly forgotten.
The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the
questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply--the relations not
between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind,
living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live.
The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will
be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern
industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be
appraised and paid for in proportion to their _real_ value, their
strength or availableness for life.

In "Unto This Last" and "Munera Pulveris," Ruskin has laid down, on what
are really unchallengeable biological grounds, the foundations of the
political economy of the future. We are going to have done with the
industries which eat up men. We cannot much longer afford to grow whisky
where we might grow wheat, for there are ever more mouths to be fed, and
wheat is running short. Cheap and dear mean nothing when we get down to
realities. Is a thing vital or is it mortal?--that is the only
question. It may be vital and costless, like air, or mortal and dear,
like alcohol. The question is not how much money can you get from
another man for your product, but how much life can mankind get from
Nature for it. Thus we shall return to a sane appreciation of the
primary importance of agriculture as against manufacture, of food as
against anything else,--for unless one is fed, of what use is anything
else? And as nations gradually begin to discover that the means of life
are the really valuable things, they will go on to learn, what primitive
races, hard-pressed races, races making their way in the world against
heavy odds, have always known--that at all costs the insatiable
destructiveness of Death must be compensated for by Birth. If the means
of life are the real wealth, the life itself is more real still, and
unless we abolish death, the makers and bearers and nourishers of life
are at all times and everywhere the producers, the manufacturers, the
workers of the community above and beyond all others. And these are the
women in their great functions as mothers and foster-mothers, nurses,
teachers.

The economics of the future will be based upon these elemental and
perdurable truths. No writer in his senses will then be guilty of such
immeasurable folly as to place the "natural industries of a human
creature" _in antithesis_ to "the primal physical functions of
maternity." The sex which came first and remains first in the immediacy
and indispensableness of its relations to the coming life will base its
economic claims--in the vulgar and narrow sense of that term--upon the
worth of those relations. The society which cannot afford to pay
for--that is, to sustain--the characteristic functions of womanhood,
cannot continue; and societies have continued and will continue in
proportion as they hold hard by these first conditions of their lives.
The case of Jewish womanhood is the supreme illustration of a thesis
which requires no experimental demonstration, but is necessarily true.

Here, then, is the solution, as the future will prove, of the problem of
the economic status of woman. At present, though Ellen Key is the only
feminist writer who recognizes it, women can compete successfully with
men only at the cost of complete womanhood,--and that is a price which
society as a whole cannot afford to pay, if it wishes to continue.
Therefore we must, in effect, pay women in advance for their work, the
actual realization of the value of which is always necessarily deferred.
The case is parallel to that of expenditure upon forestry. In the
planting of trees or the nurture of babies the State will get value for
its money in the long run, but it must be prepared to wait. States are
slowly becoming more provident, and already we are coming to see this
about trees. Soon we shall see it about babies, and the problem of the
economic status of woman will then be solved in practice as it is
assuredly soluble in principle.

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