Book: Woman and Womanhood

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




It is necessary to add a few words to the foregoing since there has
recently appeared what purports to be a contribution to some of the
problems that have concerned us. Part of the foregoing argument has
rested upon the fact, only too definitely, variously and frequently
proved, that alcoholism in women prejudices the performance of their
supreme functions. Complicated as the maternal relation to the future
is, the relations of alcohol to the problem are correspondingly so, and
in any discussion that is to be of value we must draw the necessary
distinctions. In many scientific contributions to the subject this has
already been done. We have identified certain degenerate stocks who
display the symptoms of alcoholism. The alcohol may aggravate their
degeneracy but it is not the prime cause of it in them, though it may
have been so in their ancestors. The children of such persons are
degenerate also, and as the class is numerous and fertile there is here
a social problem which is not primarily a problem in alcohol, but is
accidentally connected therewith simply because the proneness to
alcoholism is a symptom of the degeneracy.

Quite distinct from the foregoing there is the influence of alcohol upon
mothers and motherhood that would otherwise have been healthy. Alcohol,
like lead, as has been shown elsewhere, may injure the racial elements
in the mother before even expectant motherhood occurs. Later, it may
prejudice both expectant motherhood and nursing motherhood; further it
is often the primary cause of over-laying and of chronic cruelty and
neglect. Until quite lately there was also the action of the
public-house upon the children to be reckoned with, where the mother
visited it and was allowed to take them with her. That, however, has
been at last put a stop to in England, following the example of
civilization elsewhere.

But it will be clear that the problem is a complicated one. It has been
confidently attacked by Professor Karl Pearson in a Report upon "the
influence of parental alcoholism upon the offspring," and the
conclusions of that Report have been widely circulated and are being
circulated almost wherever the monetary interest of alcohol has power.
Briefly, Professor Pearson came to the conclusion that the children of
drunken parents are, on the average, superior to those of sober parents
in physique and in intelligence, in sight and in freedom from epilepsy
and other diseases. This, of course, as everybody knows, is obvious
nonsense, and the only problem remaining is how to account for its
assertion. I have dealt with that question at length elsewhere,[24] and
here need only note in a word that Professor Pearson's Report includes
no comparison between the children of abstainers and drinkers, since the
number of abstainers was too few to be treated separately; that
Professor Pearson attaches no strict meaning to the term alcoholism, by
which he means anything from what the word really means down to a
general suspicion that the parents were drinking more than was good for
themselves or their home; and finally that in studying the influence of
alcohol upon offspring Professor Pearson has omitted to enquire in a
single case whether the alcoholism or the offspring came first. The
Report has no scientific basis whatever and has been riddled with
criticism by expert students of every kind, including not merely
students of alcoholism but also Professor Alfred Marshall of Cambridge,
the greatest English-speaking economist of the time, who has shown that
there are no grounds for the assumptions made by Professor Pearson in
that part of his argument which is based upon the economic efficiency of
drinking and non-drinking parents. The publication of this Report merely
hastens the rapid decadence of "biometry," the foundations of which have
already been sapped by the re-discovery of Mendelism in 1900; but it was
necessary to refer to the matter here, since in the advertisements and
the other printed matter paid for by the alcoholic party, the public is
being informed that the children of alcoholic parents have been proved
to be, on the whole, superior to those of non-alcoholic parents. This
question has been exhaustively studied, yet again, in London by Dr.
Sullivan, in Helsingfors by Professor Laitinen, and also in New York in
an enquiry which actually embraced no less than fifty-five thousand
school children. The elementary fallacies entertained by Professor
Pearson were of course avoided and the uniform result in these and in a
host of other enquiries that might be named is the only result which
could be imagined in a universe where causes have effects.

The particular causes under consideration have been having their effects
for a very long time. It begins to be more and more clear that they have
played a great part in the history of mankind. As the "history" we
learnt at school is more and more discredited, there is slowly coming
into being a real kind of history which deals with the essentials of
national life and death, and is based upon the principles of organic
evolution. This is a thesis which one has attempted to justify in a
previous book, but one aspect of it must be recurred to here. Our modern
study of various diseases and poisons is throwing a light on the life of
nations. Take for instance the modern theories as to the influence of
malarial poison upon Greece. In the case of alcohol, we now have
evidence which is real and unchallengeable. The properties which it
displays when we study it to-day have always been and always will be its
properties. We find that it has certain actions on living protoplasm in
the twentieth century; we know enough of the uniformity of nature to
realize that it had those actions in the tenth century, and will have
them in the thirtieth. As we study under the microscope the influence of
alcohol upon the racial tissues in the individual,[25] and therein find
confirmation of experimental study and observation by all the other
means available to science, we begin to see that the greatest facts of
history are those of which historians have no word, and not least
amongst these has ever been the influence of alcohol upon parenthood. It
is possible to adduce arguments in favour of the view that the
practically complete immunity of their parenthood from alcohol is one of
the great factors that explain the all but unexampled persistence of
the Jews and their present status in the van of the world's thought and
work. For history it is the parents that matter as against the
non-parents, and of the parents it is the mothers even more than the
fathers. The freedom of the Jews as a whole from alcoholism is more
marked than ever in the case of their women; that is to say, in the case
of their mothers.

We see the part-results of this in our own time when we compare the
infant mortality amongst the Jews with that of their Gentile neighbours
in a great city such as London or Leeds. As everyone should know, there
is a huge disparity between the figures in the two cases, and in some
records it has been found that under equal conditions two Gentile babies
will die for each Jewish baby. The conditions are of course not equal,
because the Jewish babies have Jewish motherhood, splendidly backed up
as it usually is by Jewish fatherhood; whereas the Gentile babies have a
very inferior parental care. Now if it were that infant mortality, as
most people suppose, simply meant the death of a certain number of
babies, the foregoing facts would have no particular bearing upon the
questions of racial survival, except in so far as those questions depend
upon mere numbers. But the advocates of the great campaign against
infant mortality have always maintained that the actual mortality is
only one effect of the causes which produce it. When people have said
that the loss of a certain number of babies mattered little, we have
always replied that for every baby killed many were damaged. This
contention has now been proved up to the hilt in the remarkable
official enquiry, the first of its kind, made by Dr. Newsholme, now
Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board.[26] He studied
infant mortality in relation to the mortality of children and young
people at all subsequent ages, and he proved, once and for all, that
infant mortality is what we have always maintained it to be, not merely
a disaster in itself but an evidence of causes which injure the health
and vigour of the survivors at all ages. Wherever infant mortality is
highest, there child mortality is highest, and the mortality of boys and
girls at puberty and during the early years of adolescence when the body
is preparing for and becoming capable of parenthood. The evil conditions
that cause infant mortality are thus proved to be far-reaching and much
wider in their effects than any but the students of the subject have yet
realized.

This chapter must be brought to a close, but it may be added that the
emergence of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey, into contemporary
history, and the possibilities latent in China,--to mention none other
of the "dying nations," so very much alive, at whom glass-eyed
politicians used to sneer--constitutes one of the major facts of
contemporary history. No one can yet say whether these nations will have
the wisdom to retain their ancient habits or whether they will accept
our whisky along with our parliamentary institutions and motor-cars.
Much future history rests upon this issue.

But I have little doubt that whatever happens in the case of Japan and
Turkey, Jewish parenthood will retain the quality which has long ago
become fixed as a racial characteristic, and that the race which has
survived so much oppression and so many of its oppressors will survive
contemporary abuse and the abusers. Its women nurse their own babies and
have retained the power to do so. Neither before birth nor after do they
feed the life that is to be on alcohol; they lay rightly the foundations
of the future, where alone those foundations can be durably laid. The
reader is not necessarily asked to admire them or to like them or to
speak well of them, but if he desires the strength and continuance of
whatever race or nation he belongs to, he will do well to imitate them.

It seems necessary to believe in the yellow peril, though not, of
course, in its absurd form of a military nightmare. The pressure of
population is the irresistible force of history. It depends, of course,
upon parenthood, and more especially upon motherhood and therefore upon
womanhood. At present the motherhood of the yellow races is sober. If it
remains so, and if the motherhood of Western races takes the course
which motherhood has taken for many years past in England, it is very
sure that in the Armageddon of the future, those ancient races, Semitic
and Mongol, which had achieved civilization when Europe was in the Stone
Age, will be in a position of immense advantage as against our own race,
which is threatening, at any rate in England, to follow the example of
many races of which little record, or none, now remains, and drink
itself to death.




CHAPTER XXII

CONCLUSION


The plan of this book has now been satisfied. The reader may be very far
from satisfied, but not, it is to be hoped, on the ground that many
subjects have been omitted which might quite well have been included
under the title of Woman and Womanhood. It was better to confine our
search to principles.

For it seems evident that civilization is at the parting of the ways in
these fundamental matters. The invention of aeroplanes and submarine and
wireless telegraphy and the like is of no more moment than the fly on
the chariot wheel, compared with the vital reconstructions which are now
proceeding or imminent. The business of the thoughtful at this juncture
is to determine principles, for principles there are in these matters,
if they can be discovered, as certain, as all-important as those on
which any other kind of science proceeds. Just as the physicist must
hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation
and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic
principles which determine the life and continuance of living things.
Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will
come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a
thousand times in the past.

None will dare dispute these assertions, yet what do we see at the
present time? On what grounds is the woman question fought, and by what
kind of disputants? It is fought, as everyone knows, on the grounds of
what women want, or rather, what a particular section of half-instructed
women, in some particular time and place, think they want,--or do not
want--under the influence of suggestion, imitation and the other
influences which determine public opinion. It is fought on the grounds
of precedent: women are not to have votes in England because women have
never had votes in England, or they are to have votes in England because
they have them in New Zealand. It is fought on party political grounds,
none the less potent because they are not honestly acknowledged: the
Liberal and the Conservative parties favour or disfavour this or that
Suffrage Bill, or whatever it may be, according to what they expect to
be its effect upon their voting strength. It is fought upon financial
grounds, as when we see the entire force of the alcoholic party arrayed
against the claims of women, as in the nature of things it always has
been and always will be. It is fought on theological grounds by clerics
who quote the first chapter of Genesis; and on anti-theological grounds
by half-instructed rationalists who attack marriage because they suppose
it was invented by the Church.

And whose voices never fail among the disputants? Loudest of all are
those of youth of both sexes, who know nothing and want to know nothing
and who have no idea that there is anything to know in attempting to
decide such questions as this. It is argued in the House of Gramophones
and such places, by common politicians of the type the many-headed
choose, who would do better to confine themselves to the soiled
questions of tariffs and the like, in which they find a native joy. It
is argued by vast numbers of men who hate or fear women, and women who
hate or fear men, as if any imaginable wisdom on this question or any
other could possibly be born of such emotions.

Yet all the while we are dealing with a problem in biology, with living
beings, obeying and determined by the laws of life, and with a species
exhibiting those fundamental facts of heredity, variation, bi-parental
reproduction, sexual selection, instinct and the like, which are mere
meaningless names to nine out of ten of the disputants, and yet which
determine them and their disputes and the issues thereof.

If these contentions be correct, there is plainly much need for an
attempt, however imperfect, to set forth the first principles of woman
and womanhood. Evidently the time for discussion of detailed questions
has not yet come, since, to take a single instance, there is not yet to
be heard on either side of the controversy a single voice asserting the
fundamental eugenic necessity that, at whatever cost, the best women
must be selected for motherhood, and the contribution of their
superiority to the future stock.

Let us briefly sum up the substance of the foregoing pages.

First, we have stated the eugenic postulate, failing to grant which we
and our schemes, our votes and our hopes, will assuredly disappear or
decay, as must all living races which are not recruited from their
best, Secondly, we have proceeded to analyze the nature of womanhood,
its capacities and conditions, assuming that we can scarcely discover
whither it should go unless we know what it is. To the party politician,
hungry for the prizes that suit his soul or stomach, such an assumption
is mere foolish pedantry; and the ardent suffragist will have little
more to say to it. That, however, cannot be helped. It is to be hoped
that all parties, _as parties_, will unite in banning the views herein
expressed, and then one may take heart of grace and dare to hope that
there is something in them.

They may be crystallized in the dictum that woman is Nature's supreme
organ of the future. This is not a theory, but a statement of evident
truth. It is an essential canon of what one might call the philosophy of
biology, and applies to the female sex throughout living nature. Birth
is of the female alone. No sub-human male, nor even man himself, can
directly achieve the future; the greatest statesman or law-giver or
founder of nations can only work, if he knew it, through womanhood. The
greatest of these, and their name is very far from legion, was evidently
Moses, as history shows, and he acted on this principle. On the other
hand, those who have sought to achieve the future, as Napoleon did,
failed because they defiled and flouted womanhood. The best men died on
the battlefield and the worst were left to aid the women in that supreme
work of parenthood by which alone, and only through the co-operation of
men and women, the future is made.

Thirdly, we have seen it to follow from this dedication of the greater
and vastly more valuable part of woman's energies to the future that,
just in proportion as she serves it and devotes herself thereto, she
needs present support. Biology teaches us that the male sex was invented
for this purpose; doubtless one should say for this "increasing
purpose," since it is scarcely more than foreshadowed at first in the
history of the male sex. The study of life has clearly proved that the
male sex is secondary and adjuvant, and that its essentially auxiliary
functions for the race have been increasing from the beginning until we
find them in perfection wherever two parents join in common consecration
and devotion to their supreme task, upon which all else depends and
without which nothing else could be.

And just as woman is mediate between man and the future, so man is
mediate between woman and the present. Woman is the more immediate
environment, the special providence, so to say, of childhood; and man,
in a rightly constituted society, is the special providence, the more
immediate environment of woman, standing between her and inanimate
Nature, guarding her, taking thought for her, feeding her, using his
special masculine qualities for her--that is to say, in the long run,
for the future of the race; this indeed being the purpose for which
Nature has contrived all individuals of both sexes. If we prefer such
phrases, we may say that the future or the children are parasitic upon
woman, and that woman is "parasitic upon the male," which is one woman's
way of putting it. Or we may say that these are the natural and
therefore divine relations of the various forms in which human life is
cast, and that our business is to make them more effective, more
provident and freer from the factors which in all ages have tended to
injure them.

Fourthly, we have everywhere seen cause to condemn sex-antagonism, and
it is my hope that no page or line or word of this book can be accused
of illustrating or justifying or inciting to or even attempting to
palliate either form of this wholly abominable spirit of the pit. If
such places there be, there assuredly is misdirection and falsity. This
spirit is one of the great enemies of mankind. As aroused in women
against men, it has done and is doing no little harm; as exhibited by
men against the righteous claims of women, it is one of the supremely
malign forces of history. Wherever and however displayed, it is false to
the first and most essential facts of life, from the moment of the
evolution of sex, hundreds of millions of years ago, until our own time.
All who display it, however excellent their intentions, are enemies of
mankind; all who work upon it for their own ends, political and
personal, without feeling it, are beneath disgust. These are things true
and necessary to be said, though they should not deter us from
sympathizing with the unhappy individuals, not a few, whose lives have
been blasted by individuals of the other sex, and who show the natural
but tragic tendency to make their private injury cause for resentment
against one-half of mankind. Surveying the pages that are past, I am
almost inclined to regret that, the plan of the book notwithstanding, a
special chapter was not devoted to Sex-Antagonism and to a demonstration
on biological grounds of its wickedness and pestilence wherever it be
found, and whatever plausible case for it may anywhere be made.

If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters,
let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am
an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I
call Eugenists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking
for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express
in one phrase the reason why this hope is justified, it is because the
long struggle between two antithetic conceptions of human society is
reaching a definite issue.

These radically opposed ideas may for convenience be called the
_organic_ and the _internecine_. The internecine conception of society
forever sets nation against nation, race against race, class against
class, sex against sex, individual against individual, on the ground
that the interest of one must be the injury of the other. It is false.
Nay, more, for man living his life on this earth as he must and will, it
is the Great Lie.

And it is being found out. Even international trade and commerce, from
which such a service could scarcely have been expected, are here
contributing to philosophy. Our fathers talked of the comity of nations;
we are beginning to discover their interdependence. The coming of that
discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very
long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of
nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the
patriarchal family was self-sufficient still further ago.

But the interdependence of the sexes is so far from being a new fact
that it is as old as the evolution of sex, and the decadence and
disappearance of parthenogenesis or reproduction from the female sex
alone. Once bi-parental reproduction becomes necessary for the
continuance of the race, both sexes sink with either, and neither can
swim but with both. Yet so far are we from realizing this most ancient
of facts to-day that, on both sides of the woman question, wonderful to
relate, are to be found controversialists who are seeking to deny this
continuous lesson of so many million ages. The reader may take his
choice of folly between them. On the one hand, there are the feminists
who seek to do without man,--except for the minimum physiological
purpose. The women are to sustain the present and create the future
simultaneously, and man is to be reduced, apparently, to the function of
the drone. Thus Mrs. Gilman in "Women and Economics." Over against her
and those who think with her are to be set the men, and women too, who
tell us that "men made the State,"--a sufficiently shameful
admission--and that women have no business with these things. Do not
their mothers blush for such; to have travailed so much, and to have
achieved so little?

Fortunately, however, the greater number of those who think and
determine the deeds of the mass are beginning, though the dawn is yet
very faint, to perceive that this truth of the interdependence of the
sexes, which is part of the greater truth that mankind is an organic
whole, is not only much truer than ever to-day, but is vital to our
salvation; and save us it will. In so far as we are keeping women
inferior to men, we must raise them; in so far as we are keeping men, in
other and certainly no less important respects, inferior to women, we
must raise them. The future needs and will obtain the utmost of the
highest of both sexes. Thus and thus only "springs the crowning race of
human kind": wherein, as we hasten to the dust, living for a day, yet
for ever, our eyes prophetic may behold the sure and certain hope of a
glorious resurrection.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------




INDEX OF SUBJECTS


Adolescence, 124
---- and advertisements, 135
---- and alcohol, 228

Alcohol, 54, 100
---- accessibility of, 360
---- and expectant motherhood, 367
---- and breast-feeding, 371
---- and industrialism, 360, 377
---- and tobacco _versus_ children, 201, 251, 354
---- widows and orphans, 350
---- and womanhood, 348 _et seq._

Alcoholism and lead poisoning, 379
---- and offspring, 380
---- and Jewish survival, 382 _et seq._

Anti-Suffrage societies, 16

Asceticism, old and new, 102

Bees, arguments from, 31, 84, 322

Birth-rate, fall of, 288 _et seq._
---- and infant mortality, 301
---- and marriage-rate, 312

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.