Book: Woman and Womanhood

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




Mankind must first learn to renounce Mammon and set up Life as its God;
but to that also we shall come--or perish, for Life is a jealous God and
visits the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation.




CHAPTER XXI

THE CHIEF ENEMY OF WOMEN


If we believe that the sexes are mutually dependent and, in the long
run, can neither be injured nor befriended apart, we shall be prepared
to expect that the chief enemy of civilized mankind is no less inimical
to women than to men. So long as it was supposed that drinking merely
injured the drinker, and so long as the drinkers were almost entirely
men, it could be argued by persons sufficiently foolish that indulgence
in alcohol was a male vice or delight which really did not concern women
at all--if men choose to drink or to smoke or to bet or to play games,
what business is that of women? It is an argument which would not appeal
to the mind of the primitive law-giver, and can be accepted by no one who
thinks to-day.

For the least effects of drink are those which are seen in the drinker.
The question of alcoholism is not one of the abuse of a good thing, here
and there injuring those who take it to excess, but is a national
question which affects the entire community, abstainers, and drinkers,
men, women and children, present and to come. No one who has seriously
studied the action of alcohol on civilization can question that it is
our chief external enemy. We must use the word external for the best of
good reasons, since we know that always and everywhere man's chief foes
are those of his own household--his own proneness to injure himself and
others. And alcohol, indeed, would not be our chief external enemy were
it not for the very fact that its malign power is chiefly exerted by a
degradation of the man within. It is a material thing and no part of our
psychological nature. So long as it is kept outside us it has the most
admirable uses, which are yearly becoming more various and important;
but, taken within, it alters the human constitution, and hereby achieves
its title as our worst enemy.

People who estimate the influence of alcohol by means of the alcoholic
death-rate or by the rate of convictions for drunkenness will not
readily accept the doctrine that alcohol is a greater enemy of women
than of men. Yet assuredly this is true. It is an axiomatic and first
principle that whatever injures one sex injures the other, and whilst
drinking on the part of women at present injures men as a whole in
comparatively small degree, the consumption of alcohol by men works
enormous injury upon women indirectly, in addition to that direct injury
which civilized women are yearly inflicting more gravely upon
themselves, at any rate in Great Britain.

Woman, we have argued, is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and just
as she is mediate between men and the future, so men are mediate between
her and the present. For the individual woman and the present, the
quality of the manhood which constitutes her human environment is more
important than anything else. If the manhood is withdrawn and she is
thrown upon her own resources, there is disaster; if the manhood be
damaged or degenerate, so much the worse for the woman; if the manhood
be of the best, there and only there are the best conditions provided
for the highest womanhood.

First, then, let us observe how alcohol injures women by its
contribution to the male death-rate. Allusion has already been made to a
simple statistical enquiry which I made a few years ago in regard to the
influence of alcohol as a maker of widows and orphans. The results of
that enquiry may here be quoted, having only appeared in the daily press
hitherto. They will suffice to show that alcohol on this ground alone is
a great enemy of women, and especially of wives. The following is the
conclusion published in several papers in England in November, 1908:--

"Some time ago we heard a good deal, both in and out of Parliament,
about the debenture widow whose little all is invested in brewery
securities. There is, on the other hand, the widow so made by
alcohol. I am not aware that anyone has attempted to estimate the
approximate number of each of these two classes. The following is
merely a rude approximation.

It has been stated that there are half a million persons who have
invested money in the licensed trade. Let us allow that half of
these are men. The death-rate of all males, above fifteen years of
age, is slightly over sixteen per 1,000. At the census of 1901, 536
in each 1,000 males aged fifteen years and upwards were found to be
married. Ignoring the differential death-rate of the married as
compared with bachelors and widows, it follows that about 4,100
male investors in the licensed trade die each year, of whom some
2,197 will be married men, leaving behind them the same number of
widows entirely or partly dependent on these investments.

The widows made by drink are nearly six times as many.

Numerous inquiries at home and abroad agree somewhat closely in
stating _14 per cent_. of the entire death-rate to be due to
alcohol. The proportion of one in seven is accepted by Dr. Archdall
Eeid, who considers that all efforts to restrain drinking increase
drunkenness. I do not think the justness of this figure can be
disputed at all, except as an under-estimate. We are here dealing
with male deaths only, and I will do my contention the obvious
injustice of supposing that the proportion of deaths due wholly or
in part to alcohol is no higher amongst men than amongst women. If
one could allow for the existing difference, the result would be
even more terrible.

Taking the figures for 1906 for England and Wales alone, we have
167,307 deaths of males over fifteen; 23,422 of these wholly or
partly due to alcohol, and of this number 12,554 were married men
(i. e., 536 per 1,000). The average size of a family in England and
Wales is 4.62, according to Whitaker. If we multiply the number of
widows, 12,554, by 3.62, we shall have an approximation to the
number of widows and orphans made by alcohol in 1906. There were
45,445, or over 124 widows and orphans made by alcohol every day in
the year.

We may now note some further data helping us to compare the 12,554
alcohol-made widows with the 2,197 whose husbands' fortunes were
wholly or in part bound up with the welfare of the licensed trade.
(Of these latter, also, of course, a large proportion would be
alcohol-made.)

Dr. Tatham's recently published letter on occupational mortality in
the three years, 1900, 1901, 1902, informs us as to twenty-one
occupations in which the alcoholic death-rate is grossly excessive.
In these twenty-one occupations selected by Dr. Tatham as having an
alcohol mortality which exceeds the standard by at least 50 per
cent., we can work out the alcohol factor and find that it amounts
to 24.5 per cent. The table would take up too much space for me to
ask you to print it, but it is ready on demand, public or private.
The figures work out to show that 5,092 married men in these
twenty-one trades died in each year from alcohol. (I have taken
24.5 per cent, of the whole number of deaths in the three years,
and reckoned the married proportion of these.)

The calculation shows that in these twenty-one occupations the
comparative alcohol mortality is 24.5 per cent., as against only 12
per cent. in all other occupations.

Amongst the occupations in Dr. Tatham's table may be noted
coalheaver, coach, cab, etc., service, groom, butcher, messenger,
tobacconist, general labourer, general shopkeeper, brewer, chimney
sweep, dock labourer, hawker, publican, inn and hotel servants. A
glance at the table will show that in most cases the men who are
dying are "industrial drinkers," who frequent public-houses in the
districts where the reduction in the number of the licenses under
the present Bill will occur. Often nowadays the widows are heavy
drinkers, and the lives of their children centre round the
public-house.

If the only wealth of a nation is its life, and history teaches no
more certain truth--and if, since individuals are mortal, the
quantity and quality of parenthood--or of childhood, according to
the point of view--are the supreme factors in the destiny of
nations, do not the foregoing figures warrant the contention that
he who at this date is for alcohol is against England?"

It has been shown that the effect of alcohol upon the brain persists for
not less than thirty hours after the last dose. But more than two years
have now passed since the foregoing was printed, leaving ample time for
any member of the alcoholic party to "pull himself together" and
demolish it. One is therefore entitled to assume that it cannot be
demolished; on the contrary, it could easily be shown that the foregoing
figures very considerably underrate the actual number of widows and
orphans who must be made by alcohol in this country every year.

All students of modern life, however greatly they differ in their
methods and objects, are agreed that the question of the economic
position of women is one of the gravest of our time. While this is so,
it may be added that only the Eugenist can adequately realize the
importance of this question, since he knows that with it is involved the
all-important matter of the selection amongst present women for the
motherhood of the future. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the modern
trend is quite definitely in the direction of those of our guides, whom
most of us follow, knowingly or unknowingly, because they have the
brains and we have not, in favouring the economic position of women at
the expense of male responsibility. Meanwhile we have the economic basis
of society as it is, and there is no more serious indictment against
alcohol than this which I have attempted to formulate against it on the
ground of its destruction of fatherhood. Whatever the rest of the
community may incline to, it assuredly seems that the wives, from palace
to hovel, ought to be enemies of this great enemy of theirs. The time
will certainly come when the woman who is bringing up children will be
placed in a position of economic security, and when indeed all other
persons will be less secure than she because the sane State of the
future will guarantee, and regard as the first charge upon itself, the
maintenance of the conditions necessary for the production of the next
generation. But in the chaos in which we welter, widows and orphans have
to take their chance. Who will say a good word for the substance which
makes them by tens of thousands in England and Wales alone every year?

At least one economic aspect of this question may, however, be dealt
with here. In a rightly constituted society people are held responsible
for their deeds. Parenthood is a deed; in a very true sense it is a more
deliberate, a more active, more self-determined deed, on the part of the
father than on the part of the mother. At present the only act for which
men are held irresponsible--for our practice amounts to that--is the act
for which, above all others, they should be held responsible. A large
amount of the money now spent by men on alcohol and tobacco, and other
things which shorten their lives, and are needed only because they
create a need for themselves, is really required for the interests of
the race. Such is the double destruction worked by the alcoholic form of
this waste that if the average sum, say six shillings a week, expended
in the working-class family on alcohol, were invested on behalf of the
possible widows and orphans, not only would they be provided for, but
the fathers would be saved, and they would not become widows and
orphans. In days to come it will be discovered that such matters as
these are the real political economy, the absence or presence of
tariffs, the incidence of taxation and the like, being matters of no
consequence or significance whatever compared with the question,
fundamental in all times and places for every nation and for every
individual: For what are you spending: for bread or a stone, for life or
for death?

The foregoing has been chosen for the forefront of this chapter because
of its bearing on a central economic problem of the time, and also
because, for some reason or other, this alcoholic destruction of
fatherhood, though it is of the utmost importance, has hitherto escaped
the attention of sociological students. We pass now to a second point,
of a wholly different character, which particularly well illustrates
certain of the general principles with which we began. The supreme
importance of alcohol or of anything else for human happiness is
attained only through its influence on the selves of men and women. It
is upon these that our happiness depends--upon the nature and the
nurture, from hour to hour, of our selves and the selves with which we
have to deal. Above all, do women as individuals depend for their
happiness upon the selves of men, as we have suggested.

Now if there be anything certain about the action of alcohol upon the
brain, it is that it degrades the quality of the self. Much of the
cruder pathology of alcohol is open to doubt. A great many of the
supposed degenerative changes in nerve-cells, which were attributed to
it and thought to be irrevocable, are now interpreted otherwise. Chronic
alcoholism is looked upon by such foremost students as Dr. F. W. Mott,
less as a disease due to organic changes produced in the brain than as a
chronic functional derangement due to the continued action of a poison.
This newer interpretation of chronic alcoholism has the very important
practical corollary of encouraging us to the belief, which is frequently
justifiable, that if the chronic intoxication ceases, the individual may
completely or all but completely recover, as would not be the case if
the fine structure of his brain had been actually destroyed. The recent
modification of our views on this subject has, however, only served to
render clearer our understanding of the mental symptoms of alcoholism.
Here is a drug which poisons the organ of the mind. The action of a
single dose persists for a far longer period than used to be supposed,
and thus we now know that in the great majority of civilized men
everywhere, the nervous system, which is the home of the self, is
continuously under the influence of alcohol.

That influence, as we have said, consistently shows itself in a
degradation of the quality of the self. The poison deranges first the
latest and highest products of evolution; it beheads a man, as we may
say, in thin slices from above downwards. Beginning as it does with the
most human, and only at the very last attacking the most animal part of
our nervous constitution, it is essentially the bestializer, save only
that the alcoholized human being is much lower than the beast, on the
general principle, _Corruptio optimi pessima_--the corruption of the
best is the worst.

Now wherever alcohol is consumed women have to pay the penalty for its
daily deterioration in the human scale of the men with whom they live;
nor need any reader of even the smallest experience require any writer's
assurance that in vast numbers of such cases the woman suffers more than
the man. He has its moments of compensation, inadequate though they be;
she has none.

Whilst women suffer in every respect from the influence of alcohol as a
degrader of their men, most of all do they and the race suffer through
the action of alcohol upon the racial instinct. In my book on personal
hygiene was sought an interpretation of the difference between low and
high types of mankind largely in terms of their success or failure in
achieving what may be called the "transmutation" of the racial instinct.
In less metaphorical language this transmutation depends upon the
measure of self-control and deference of present desire to future
purpose. These are supremely human characteristics, and there are none
which alcohol more surely and early attacks. Men are not so constituted
that they are at all likely to profit by any substance which keeps their
racial instinct on its original and less than human plane, and certainly
women suffer in many ways, and with them necessarily the future suffers,
just because of this action of alcohol upon men.

The argument need not be elaborated, but it may be added that the
disastrous action upon young womanhood of the consumption of alcohol by
young manhood is greatly increased when we find, as we do, that the
young women start drinking too. In these modern days, when the
controlling influence of religion and especially of religious fear is
steadily relaxing, the young woman's best protection is to be found in
her own judgment and self-control and prevision of the future. But these
are the very defences which alcohol in her nervous system saps. Every
social worker is familiar with the daily truth that young womanhood
connives at its own ruin under the influence of alcohol, where otherwise
it need not have fallen.

This last consideration leads us to the study of a phenomenon which in
many respects is new and unprecedented, while none could be of worse
omen.

It has for long been alleged that the amount of drinking amongst women
is increasing. When writing an academic thesis on the consequences of
city life, I attempted to discover definite evidence on this point.
Nothing that could be called precise was forthcoming, though the
evidence was abundant that the general assertion is correct. Drinking
amongst women means, of course, drinking amongst mothers. It means
drinking by unborn children. No one concerned with the fundamentals of
national well-being can ignore anything so minatory. Within the last few
years, much attention has been directed to the subject, and the Church
of England Temperance Society, for instance, sent out a form of inquiry
to the medical profession as to their experience in this matter. It may
now be stated, without any fear of contradiction, that drinking has
greatly increased amongst women of all classes during the last twenty
years, and especially, it seems probable, during the latter half of that
period. Along with it has gone an increase in the amount of
drug-taking; some, at any rate, of the drugs being not dissimilar to
alcohol in their action upon mind and body.

It is here necessary not so much to discuss the causes of this fact as
to insist upon its consequences and indicate some possible remedies. So
far as one can judge there seem to be three principal causes for this
increase of drinking amongst women, and quite briefly they may be named
in order to guide the subsequent discussion, though it is not necessary
to occupy space here in discussing all the evidence for this diagnosis.

A cause of some importance at work amongst women of the middle and upper
classes would seem to be the general tendency to revolt against sex
restrictions and limitations. In order to prove themselves the equals of
men, women proceed to demonstrate that they are capable of imitating
men's vices and indulgences. The trainer of chimpanzees for the
music-hall acts on the same principle. Directly the animals can smoke
and drink, they are such good imitations of men, in his judgment and
that of his patrons, as to be worthy of exhibition. Any ape, any boy,
any man, can learn to smoke and drink. It may be taken for granted that
any woman can do likewise, but the actual demonstration is worse than
superfluous.

Much more important as a cause of the increased drinking amongst women
of the lower classes are the modern conditions of factory and industrial
life which so largely take women out of the home; the making of life
being neglected in order to serve some industry or other which, if it
costs the loss of the coming life, is a national cancer, however
grateful its expansion may appear to the capitalist or the Chancellor of
the Exchequer. As the nation cares nothing for its girlhood nor for
directing employment and education for the supreme business of
motherhood, upon which the national existence is always staked, vast
numbers of women in early adolescence are now exposed to the very
conditions of temptation outside the home to which so many of their
brothers have succumbed. The factory girl learns to drink, and when she
marries she takes her drinking habits with her into her home. Modern
industrialism, therefore, is to be cited as one of the causes for the
increase in drinking amongst women. It may be noted that, in Italy, the
temperate race which, according to one elegant but baseless theory, has
been evolved through ages of past drinking, is proving itself
intemperate when its members are exposed in towns to the industrial
conditions which look like national success and the continuance of which
would mean national ruin.

A third cause of this increase is to be found in the greatly enhanced
facility with which alcoholic drinks can now be obtained by women, not
merely outside the home, but within it. So far as Great Britain is
concerned we must trace disastrous consequences to the "heaven-born
finance" of a former illustrious Chancellor of the Exchequer, who made a
little money for the State by selling to grocers permission to sell
alcoholic liquors. That was a great blow at womanhood and especially
motherhood; not to mention its lamentable effect in raising the
death-rate amongst grocers in that intensely obvious and inevitable
manner, the increase of temptation, which nothing can persuade the
enemies of temperance reform to understand.

It is bad enough that women should be able to obtain alcohol as they do
by means of devices which may often prevent their habits from being
discovered at all until irreparable mischief has been done. Here the
cunning and the greed of commercialism have set to work to fool the
public and poison it by a systematic practice which is injurious to all
sections of the community, but especially to women, and which cannot be
too widely reprobated and exposed. All honour is due to the _British
Medical Journal_, the official organ of the British Medical Association,
for its recent attention to this subject. No one can challenge it when
it makes the following assertion regarding meat-wines and other
specifics containing alcohol, which are now so widely advertised and
consumed:--"It may be pointed out that by the use of these meat-wines
the alcoholic habit may be encouraged and established, and that it is a
mistake to suppose that they possess any high nutritive qualities." The
following are analyses to which everyone ought to be able to have
reference, and further information regarding which may be found in the
_British Medical Journal_ for March 27 and May 29, 1909. Let the reader
first note what proportions of alcohol are contained in the accepted
wines, the danger of which is admitted by all, and then let him compare
those figures with the figures which follow:--

ALCOHOL IN ORDINARY WINES

Port 20 per cent. or 3-1/4}
Sherry 20 " " " 3-1/4}Fluid drachms
Champagne 10/15 " " " 1-3/4}in a wineglassful.
Hock 10 " " " 1-1/2}
Claret 9 " " " 1-1/2}

ALCOHOL IN MEAT WINES

Bendle's 20.3 per cent. or 3-1/4}
Bivo 19.2 " " " 3 }
Bovril 20.15 " " " 3-1/4}Fluid drachms
Glendenning's 20.8 " " " 3-1/3}in a wineglassful.
Lemco 17.26 " " " 2-3/4}
Vin Regno 16.05 " " " 2-1/2}
Wincarnis 19.6 " " " 3 }

ALCOHOL IN TONIC WINES

Armbrecht's Coca Wine 15.05%
Bugeaud's Wine 14.80%
Baudon's Wine 12.75%
Busart's Wine 16.85%
Christy's Kola Wine 18.85%
Hall's Wine 17.85%
Mariani's Coca Wine 16.40%
Marza Wine 17.48%
Nourry's Iodinated Wine 11.50%
Quina Laroche 16.90%
St. Raphael Quinquina Wine 16.89%
St. Raphael Tannin Wine 14.65%
Savar's Coca Wine 23.40%
Serravallo's Bark and Iron 17.26%
Vana 19.20%
Vibrona 19.30%

In order to complete our reference to this subject, the following may be
quoted from an excellent little pamphlet which is published by the
National Temperance League. The United States Government Laboratory
affords striking evidence of the large percentages of alcohol contained
in specifics which are stated to be largely used by persons who profess
to be total abstainers. Of these the following are given as examples:--

Paine's Celery Compound 21.00%
Peruna 23.00%
Brown's Blood Purifier 23.00%
Brown's Vervain Restorer 25.75%
Hostetter's Bitters 44.30%

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