Book: Woman and Womanhood

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But indeed we are far from having covered the ground in Great Britain
alone. There are many well-known preparations which consist almost
entirely of alcohol and water, together with small quantities of
flavouring matter nominally medicinal. Thus we find, for instance, the
following proportions of alcohol in--

Powell's Balsam of Aniseed 40.0%
Dill's Diabetic Mixture 35.0%
Congreve's Balsamic Elixir 25.5%
Steven's Consumption Cure 21.3%
Hood's Sarsaparilla 19.6%

There are also other compounds such as Crosby's Balsamic Cough Elixir,
Townsend's American Sarsaparilla, and Warner's Safe Cure, which contain
from 8 to 10-1/2 per cent. of alcohol. As the _British Medical Journal_
justly points out, in a mixture of which a table-spoonful is to be taken
five or six times a day a proportion of 10 per cent. of alcohol is by no
means negligible.

Let it be noted further that though most malt extracts are free from
alcohol, that which is called "bynin" contains 8.3 per cent, and
"standard liquid" 5 per cent. The _British Medical Journal_ has also
shown that there is at least one "inebriety cure" in Great Britain which
consists of a liquid containing just under 30 per cent. of alcohol.

On this whole subject it is impossible to speak too strongly, more
especially when one is concerned with the interests of woman and
womanhood. It is true that in consequence of the labours of those few
keen workers whom the impotent and the meaningless and the selfish call
fanatics, we are making a beginning in the matter of education on
Temperance. But apart from that, which amounts only to very little as
yet, it is the lamentable truth that the State does absolutely nothing
whatever to protect the community and especially its women from the
manifold evils which are involved in such figures as those here quoted.
The State wants money, and life is a trifle. Anything that can pay toll
to the State may therefore go without further question. A tax has been
paid on all the alcohol in these things. In many cases, also, a further
tax has been paid for the government stamp on patent medicines. That the
medicine may be dangerous, that it may be a cruel swindle, that it may
take from consumptives and others money which is sorely needed for air
and food, and give them in return what is worse than nothing--all these
things are nothing to the State if the tax is paid.

Preparations such as those which have been mentioned above have no place
or status whatever in scientific medicine. Their constituents are known
and their action is known. The public pays for sarsaparilla, for
instance, and simply gets a 20 per cent. solution of flavoured alcohol,
and there is no one to inform it that sarsaparilla has been exhaustively
studied by pharmacologists, employing every means of observation and
experiment in their power, and that none of them have yet been able to
detect its capacity to modify the body or any function of the body in
any degree at all whether in health or disease. This is only one of many
instances that might be named; every preparation of which the
composition is not stated is suspect. Men are paying for these things at
this moment under the impression that they are buying valuable tonics
which will save their wives from the consequences of the drink craving
and help to avert it. Large numbers of women are ruining themselves in
purse and in body quite secretly under cover of these scandalous abuses
which are allowed to go on from year to year, and which are undoubtedly
doing more injury to the feminine--that is to say, to the more
important--half of the community in each succeeding year. At least let
the facts be known. Let liberty be believed in and encouraged; but if
these things are to be made and sold and bought, let their composition
be stated on the bottles. The composition of milk is supervised by the
State; margarine, which is harmless and an excellent food, may not be
sold as butter; alcohol, which is noxious, may be sold under any lying
name, but so long as the State gets its percentage, it is well pleased.
The official organ of the medical profession in this country has done
well to draw renewed attention to this subject. Surely it ought to be
possible for the profession and the advocates of temperance to join
hands for the promotion of legislation in a direction where reform
cannot otherwise be obtained. Something, one hopes and believes, can be
done by merely writing on the subject. A certain number of women who
read this book will be deterred from buying these things on finding that
they are simply "masked alcohol" and that their medicinal virtues are
less than _nil_. But though all that is to the good, only legislation
can meet the real need. These preparations offer insidious means of
teaching women to drink, and when the habit is established, nothing can
be accomplished by revealing to the victim the history of its origin.
The minimum demand for legislation should be, at the very least, that
all preparations of this kind should have their composition stated with
every portion of them that is vended to the public. Assuredly the
champions of womanhood will have to take this matter up soon, and the
sooner the better. There is no need to be a fanatic, there is no need
even to be a teetotaler, in order to satisfy oneself that here is a
crying abuse which is ruining the unwarned and the unprotected up and
down the land, and which is quite definitely and obviously within the
capacity of legislation to control effectively and finally.

Let us turn now to the general question of the organic or physiological
relations between womanhood and alcohol. Both sexes of human beings are
identical in a vast majority of their characters, and the various
reactions to alcohol come within this number. There is no need to repeat
here any of the facts and conclusions which have been set forth at
length elsewhere. What was said there applies to women as to men. That
is true so far as the individual is concerned and it is also true that,
so far as the race is concerned, the germ-plasm or germ-cells in both
sexes alike may be injured by the continued consumption of large
quantities of alcohol.

There remains the important fact, which it is the present writer's
constant effort to bring to the notice of Eugenists, that alcohol has
special relations to motherhood, to which there can necessarily be no
correspondence in the case of the other sex, and though motherhood, as
such, is not the subject of this book, yet it would be most pedantically
to limit the usefulness which one hopes it may possess if we were to
omit the discussion, as brief as possible, of the effect of alcohol upon
womanhood at the time when womanhood is expressing itself in its supreme
function.

In my book on Eugenics there is merely the briefest allusion in a
foot-note to this subject, and I confess myself now ashamed of having
dealt with it in that utterly inadequate fashion. In practical
eugenics,--though sooth to say when eugenics begins to become practical
many professing eugenists seem to think that it is wandering from the
point--the great fact of expectant motherhood must be reckoned with. To
decline to do so is in effect to declare that we are greatly concerned
with bringing the right germ-cells together, but have nothing to do with
what may or may not happen to the product of their union. We desire,
however, not merely conjugated germ-cells, but worthy men and women, and
expectant motherhood is therefore part of the eugenic province.
Unfortunately it is easier to invent terms and categories and get people
to accept them than to control their use of one's terms thereafter.
Otherwise, I should forbid the use of the term Eugenist at all by anyone
who is unprepared to move a finger or utter a word on behalf of the care
and the protection of expectant motherhood.

It is quite true that the question of expectant motherhood has nothing
to do with heredity in the proper sense of that term. We are dealing now
with "nurture," not with "nature," but we are dealing with a department
of nurture which can only be understood when we realize that human
beings begin their lives nine months or so before they are born, and
that the first stage of their nurture is coincident with what we call
expectant motherhood, whilst the second stage of their nurture, normally
and properly, ought to be coincident with what we may call nursing
motherhood.

Let us then acquaint ourselves with the fact, fully established by
experimental and chemical observation, that alcohol given to the
expectant mother finds its way into the organism of the child. Thus, as
we should expect, alcohol can readily be demonstrated in a newborn child
when the drug has been given to the mother just before its birth.

It must be understood that the circulation of the mother and of her
child are each complete and self-contained. They come into relation in
the double organ called the placenta, and it has been exhaustively
proved that this organ is so constituted as in large measure to protect
the child from injurious influences acting upon and in the mother. We
may therefore speak of the placenta as a filter. Its protective action
explains the facts, so familiar to medical men and philanthropic
workers, that healthy and undamaged children are often born to mothers
who are stricken with mortal disease--most notably, perhaps, in the case
of consumption. It becomes a most important matter to ascertain the
limits of the placental power, and by observation upon human beings and
experiment upon the lower animals this matter has been very thoroughly
elucidated of late years. There are many kinds of poison, and many
varieties of those living poisons that we call microbes, which the
placenta does not allow to pass through from the mother's blood-vessels
into those of the child, and which are unable, fortunately for the
child, to break down the placental resistance. On the other hand, there
are certain microbes and certain poisons which readily pass through the
placenta. Conspicuous amongst these are alcohol, lead and arsenic, and
it is especially important to realize that alcohol injures the child not
merely by its own passage through the placenta, but by injuring that
organ, so that its efficiency as a filter is impaired. On the whole
subject of expectant motherhood and the morbid influences which may act
upon it, the greatest living authority is my friend and teacher, Dr. J.
W. Ballantyne of Edinburgh. He contributed an important paper on this
subject to our first National Conference on Infantile Mortality held in
1906.[22] I only wish it were possible to reproduce in full here Dr.
Ballantyne's paper on the Ante-Natal Causes of Infantile Mortality. The
unread critic who is so ready with the word fanatic whenever alcohol is
attacked might begin to derive from it some faint idea of the quality
and massiveness of the evidence upon which our case is based. Here it
must suffice merely to quote the verdict at which Dr. Ballantyne arrives
after surveying all the evidence on the subject that had been obtained
up to the year 1906. He summarizes as follows:--

"It must then be concluded that parental and especially maternal
alcoholism of the kind to which the name of chronic drunkenness or
persistent soaking is applied, is the source of both ante-natal and
post-natal mortality. It acts in all the three ways in which I
indicated that ante-natal causes can be shown to act in relation to
the increase of infantile mortality, viz.,.by causing abortions.,
by predisposing to premature labours, and by weakening the infant
by disease or deformity so that it more readily succumbs to
ordinary morbid influences at and after birth. By causing diseases
of the kidneys and of the placenta it also leads to that failure of
the filter to which I have already referred; the placenta being
damaged, not only does the alcohol more readily pass through it
itself, but it is also possible for other poisons, germs, and
toxins to cross over into the fatal economy. So it comes about that
the most disastrous consequences are entailed upon the unborn
infant in connection with syphilis, lead-poisoning, fevers, and
the like in the intemperate mother."

The foregoing was written as long ago as 1906, and various workers have
helped to confirm it since that date.

We must further learn that alcohol taken by the mother who nurses her
child has an organic relation to the child after birth. It is true,
indeed, that according to a celebrated observer, Professor von Bunge,
the influence of alcoholism in preceding generations is such that the
daughters of such a stock are mostly unable to nurse their children. It
is not quite certain that Professor von Bunge has proved his case, but
it is definitely proved that even if alcoholism in the maternal
grandparent has not altogether prevented a child from being fed in the
natural fashion, it may yet suffer gravely in consequence of receiving
alcohol in its mother's milk. In the case of the nursing mother, there
is one fresh avenue of excretion which the organism can employ for
ridding itself of the poison, and to the efforts of the lungs and the
kidneys are added those of the breasts. Alcohol can be readily traced in
the mother's milk within twenty minutes of its entry into her stomach,
and may be detected in it for as long as eight hours after a large dose.
Many cases are on record where infants at the breast have thus become
the subjects of both acute and chronic alcoholic poisoning. We have
numerous reports of convulsions and other disorders occurring in infants
when the nurse has taken liquor, and ceasing when she has been put on a
non-alcoholic diet. A most distinguished lady, Dr. Mary Scharlieb, may
be quoted in this connection, or the reader may indeed refer to the
chapter, "Alcoholism in Relation to Women and Children," contributed by
her to the volume "The Drink Problem" in my New Library of Medicine. She
says, "The child, then, absolutely receives alcohol as part of his diet
with the worst effect upon his organs, for alcohol has a greater effect
upon cells in proportion to their immaturity." Further, as she points
out, "the milk of the alcoholic mother not only contains alcohol, but it
is otherwise unsuitable for the infant's nourishment; it does not
contain the proper proportions of proteid, sugar, fat, etc., and it is
therefore not suited for the building up of a healthy body."

It is plain that here we cannot avoid criticism of an almost universal
medical practice. Our concern in the present volume is not with children
but women; and in dealing with the effects of maternal alcoholism upon
childhood, the main intention is being kept in view. As regards the
giving of alcohol to the nursing mother, there is no doubt that the
child is more seriously in danger than she is. There is no doubt also
that, as one has often pointed out, the Children Act which forbids the
giving of alcohol to children under five years old is being broken when
the nursing mother takes alcohol. I refer to this subject here because
only thus can we come to a decision on the question whether the nursing
mother owes the taking of alcohol as a duty to her child. She may be a
teetotaler; she may fear to take alcohol; and she may be authoritatively
told that it is her duty to do so because the quality of her milk will
be improved. In such a case she may yield, though often with a wry face;
and thus we have the frequent beginning of disasters to which there is
no end.

The truth is that the medical profession has long erred in this respect.
Judgment has gone by superficials. Undoubtedly there is a greater bulk
of milk when stout and porter are taken. But everyone knows that
ordinary household milk may come from the cow or from the pump. The
question is not how much bulk is there, but what does the bulk consist
of? Definite chemical evidence, which may be repeated a thousand times,
and which is allowed to go unchallenged by the vast host of doctors who
are prescribing alcohol for nursing mothers all over the world, shows us
that its influence is to increase the bulk of the milk while reducing
the amount of its nutritive constituents, and adding to them one which
is poisonous. The increase of bulk is easy to explain. Alcohol is
exceedingly avid of water. Thus the common experience that alcoholic
liquors tend to increase the desire for liquid can readily be explained.
Alcohol, leaving the blood, tends to withdraw with itself, if it can, a
quantity of water. These two, in the milk, between them maintain the
added bulk on account of which alcoholic liquors are so widely ordered
for and drunk by nursing mothers throughout the civilized world. The
infant mortality is thus contributed to, and many women are urged and
deceived by their love for their children into a practice which achieves
their own ruin. Doctors look back a hundred years or so and observe the
amazing practices of their predecessors. They have record of
prescriptions and treatments which were ridiculous or disgusting or
trivial or painful; they have abundant record of practices which were
deadly, and for which any medical man at the present day might be called
upon to pay heavy damages or indicted for manslaughter. Yet in the
matter of the indiscriminate and ignorant employment of alcohol, in
defiance of overwhelmingly proved facts which will not be challenged by
any of those whom this criticism hits and who will virulently resent it
and decry its author, doctors of the present day are assuredly earning
the astonished contempt of their successors in times by no means remote.
A certain number of women who nurse or will nurse will read this book.
Of these not a few will be ordered various alcoholic beverages by their
medical attendant in order to aid this function. Let them obey his
orders when he has satisfactorily answered the following questions: Are
you aware that part of the alcohol will pass unchanged through my breast
into my baby's body? Are you aware that if my milk is analyzed it will
be found to contain less food for the baby with more bulk than if I were
to do without the alcohol? Are you aware that careful enquiry and
observation have shown that the best foods for the making of milk are
those which contain the constituents of milk--as seems not
unreasonable--like milk itself and bread and butter and meat? Can you
begin to explain any imaginable process by which either the animal or
the vegetable body could build up a molecule composed as the molecule of
alcohol is into any of the nutritive ingredients in milk? That catechism
is quite short, but it will suffice.

A serious error which has long been made by temperance workers consists
in supposing that the problem of alcoholism is the problem of
drunkenness. They speak of "the sin of intemperance," and by that term
they mean only such intemperance as produces what should properly be
called acute alcoholic intoxication. The friends of alcohol eagerly
accept an error which suits their case so admirably. Nothing can suit
them better than to assume that alcohol does no ill apart from causing
drunkenness. Better still, they are able to quote the case of the
incurable drunkard, suffering from an uncontrollable craving, and to
point out quite truly that he will get drunk in any case no matter how
many public-houses, for instance, we close.

It was always a gross error to suppose that drunkenness was the whole of
the evil done by alcohol; if, indeed, it be one per cent. of it, which
we may doubt. This is not a point which one need trouble to argue here,
except in so far as our right understanding of it is necessary if we are
to see the meaning of current changes in the drinking habits of the
people. That women are drinking more, everyone grants. That this is evil
not merely for the women of the present but for both sexes in the
future, I am constantly asserting. But it will not do at all to use mere
drunkenness as our measure of what is happening amongst women. We know
that in either sex a single bout of drinking, say once a week on
Saturday night, may leave the individual little worse, may injure health
quite inappreciably, if at all; it may not interfere with his work, and
may even be of small economic importance. In such a coal-mining county
as Durham, for instance, where alcohol cannot be drunk in association
with work because the workman and his fellows know that the safety of
their lives will not permit it, we find a huge proportion of arrests for
drunkenness, and it might be supposed that in this most drunken county
in England we should find the highest proportion of permanent
consequences of alcoholism. On the contrary, as Dr. Sullivan says,
"owing to their relative freedom from industrial drinking coal-miners
show a remarkably low rate of alcoholic mortality, ranking in fact with
the agriculturists and below all the other industrial groups." Here is a
simple statistical fact which continues true year by year, and the
significance of which must be insisted upon.

In the case of women, the very obvious and natural tendency is for the
proportion of drunkenness to the alcohol consumed to be much lower than
in the case of men. Drunkenness is commonly the result of convivial
drinking. A company of men get together, and they help each other to get
drunk. Women are not subjected to so many temptations in this respect.
Their drinking is industrial drinking,--above all, at the supreme
industry, which is the culture of the racial life. Like other industrial
drinking, it is less conspicuous than convivial drinking; it leads to
few arrests for drunkenness, but it has far graver effects on the
individual, and it shows its consequences in the industrial product with
which in this case no other industrial product can compare. Now unless
we disabuse ourselves once and for all of the notion that the drink
question is merely the drunkenness question, we shall never succeed in
rightly approaching and dealing with this most ominous development of
modern civilization, to which I have done such imperfect justice in the
present chapter.

Dr. Sullivan[23] has some important remarks on this subject from which
one cannot do better than freely quote. As a distinguished and
experienced Medical Officer in H. M. Prison Service, notably at
Holloway, where so many women have been under his care, Dr. Sullivan has
very special credentials, even if the internal evidence of his book did
not convince us. He says that:--

"The domestic occupations which are the chief field of women's
activities obviously allow ample opportunity for the continuance of
alcoholic habits formed prior to marriage. This is a matter of much
importance. For the ordinary existence of the working man's wife,
with its succession of pregnancies and sucklings, and the
management of a brood of children in cramped surroundings, will of
itself be very likely to promote tippling; and if a knowledge of
the effect of alcohol as an industrial excitant has been acquired
by the factory girl, it is pretty sure of further development in
the married woman. Instances of this sort, in which the discomforts
of the first pregnancy stimulate the growth of a rudimentary habit
of industrial drinking to confirmed intemperance, are tolerably
common in any wide experience of the alcoholic."

The following paragraph must also be quoted for its clear indication of
a matter which is of prime importance, which no one denies, and yet of
which no statesman or politician has begun to take cognizance:--

"The employment of women in the ordinary industrial occupations not
only involves a disorganization of their domestic duties if they
are married, but it also interferes with the acquisition of
housewifely knowledge during girlhood. The result is that appalling
ignorance of everything connected with cookery, with cleanliness,
with the management of children, which make the average wife and
mother in the lower working class in this country one of the most
helpless and thriftless of beings, and which therefore impels the
workman, whose comfort depends on her, not only to spend his free
time in the public-house, but also tends to make him look to
alcohol as a necessary condiment with his tasteless and
indigestible diet. Both directly and indirectly, therefore, the
employments that withdraw women from domestic pursuits are likely
to increase alcoholism, and, it may be added, to increase its
greatest potency for evil, namely its influence on the health of
the stock."

Elsewhere I have endeavoured to deal with the general physiology of
alcohol and its relations to race-culture. Here our special concern has
been woman, and not woman as mother, but rather woman as individual. We
have had specially to refer, however, to expectant and nursing
motherhood because each of these offers special temptations and
opportunities for the beginning of the alcoholic habit or strengthening
its hold in a deadly fashion, and it is certainly necessary for us to
know that the supposed advantages to the child, which constitute a new
argument for alcohol at these times, are not advantages but injuries
which may be grave and often fatal. The utterly incomprehensible thing
is how anyone can suppose or ever could suppose otherwise.

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