Book: Woman and Womanhood

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




This question of the care of babies offers us much less excuse for its
neglect than do questions concerned with the circumstances antecedent to
the babies' appearance. Yet we are blameworthy, and disastrously so,
here also. Prudery here insists that boys and girls shall be left to
learn anyhow. That is not what it says, but that is what it does. It
feebly supposes not merely that ignorance and innocence are identical,
but that, failing the parent, the doctor, the teacher, and the
clergyman--and probably all these do fail--ignorance will remain
ignorant. There are others, however, who always lie in wait, whether by
word of mouth or the printed word, and since youth will in any case
learn--except in the case of a few rare and pure souls--we have to ask
ourselves whether we prefer that these matters shall be associated in
its mind with the cad round the corner or the groom or the chauffeur who
instructs the boy, the domestic servant who instructs the girl, and with
all those notions of guilty secrecy and of misplaced levity which are
entailed; or with the idea that it is right and wise to understand
these matters in due measure because their concerns are the greatest in
human life.

After puberty, and during early adolescence, when a certain amount of
knowledge has been acquired, we leave youth free to learn lies from
advertisements, carefully calculated to foster the tendency to
hypochondria, which is often associated with such matters. Of this,
however, no more need now be said, since it scarcely concerns the girl.

It is the ignorance conditioned by prudery that is responsible later on
for many criminal marriages; contracted, it may be, with the blind
blessing of Church and State, which, however, the laws of heredity and
infection rudely ignore. Parents cannot bring themselves to inquire into
matters which profoundly concern the welfare of the daughter for whom
they propose to make what appears to be a good marriage. They desire, of
course, that her children shall be healthy and whole-minded; they do not
desire that marriage should be for her the beginning of disease, from
the disastrous effects of which she may never recover. But these are
delicate matters, and prudery forbids that they should be inquired into;
yet every father who permits his daughter to marry without having
satisfied himself on these points is guilty, at the least, of grave
delinquency of duty, and may, in effect, be conniving at disasters and
desolations of which he will not live to see the end.

Young people often grow fond of each other and become engaged, and then,
if the engagement be prolonged--as all engagements ought to be, as a
general rule--they may find that, after all, they do not wish to marry.
Yet the girl's mother, an imprudent prude, may often in this and other
cases do her utmost to bring the marriage about, not because she is
convinced that it means her daughter's highest welfare and happiness,
but because prudery dictates that her daughter must marry the man with
whom she has been so frequently seen; hence very likely lifelong
unhappiness, and worse.

Society, from the highest to the lowest of its strata, is afflicted with
certain forms of understood and eminently preventable disease, about
which not a word has been spoken in Parliament for twenty years, and any
public mention of which by mouth or pen involves serious risk of various
kinds. Here it is perhaps not necessary for us to consider the case of
the outcast, and of the diseases with which, poor creature, she is first
infected, and which she then distributes into our homes. Our present
concern is simply to point out that prudery, again, is largely
responsible for the continuance of these evils at a time when we have so
much precise knowledge regarding their nature and the possibility of
their prevention. Medical science cannot make distinctions between one
disease and another, nor between one sin and another, as prudery does.
Prudery says that such and such is vice, that its consequences in the
form of disease are the penalties imposed by its abominable god upon the
guilty and the innocent, the living and the unborn alike, and that
therefore our ordinary attitude towards disease cannot here be
maintained. Physiological science, however, knowing what it knows
regarding food and alcohol, and air and exercise and diet, can readily
demonstrate that the gout from which Mrs. Grundy suffers is also a
penalty for sin; none the less because it is not so hideously
disproportionate, in its measure and in its incidence, to the gravity of
the offence. These moral distinctions between one disease and another
have little or no meaning for medical science, and are more often than
not immoral.

It would be none too easy to show that the medical profession in any
country has yet used its tremendous power in this direction.
Professions, of course, do not move as a whole, and we must not expect
the universal laws of institutions to find an exception here. But though
they do not move, they can be moved. It is when the public has been
educated in the elements of these matters, and has been taught to see
what the consequences of prudery are, that the necessary forces will be
brought into action. Meanwhile, what we call the social evil is almost
entirely left to the efforts made in Rescue Homes and the like. Despite
the judgment of a popular novelist and playwright, it is much more than
doubtful whether Rescue Homes--the only method which Mrs. Grundy will
tolerate--are the best way of dealing with this matter, even if the
people who worked in them had the right kind of outlook upon the matter,
and even if their numbers were indefinitely multiplied. Every one who
has devoted a moment's thought to the matter knows perfectly well that
this is merely beginning at the end, and therefore all but futile. I
mention the matter here to make the point that the one measure which
prudery permits--so that indeed it may even be mentioned upon our highly
moral stage, and passed by the censor, who would probably be hurried
into eternity if M. Brieux's _Les Avaries_ were submitted to him, and
who found "Mrs. Warren's Profession" intolerable--is just the most
useless, ill-devised, and literally preposterous with which this
tremendous problem can be mocked.

This leads us to another point. It is that the means of our education,
other than the schools, are also prejudiced by prudery. Upon the stage
there is permitted almost any indecency of word, or innuendo, or
gesture, or situation, provided only that the treatment be not serious.
Almost anything is tolerable if it be frivolously dealt with, but so
soon as these intensely serious matters are dealt with seriously,
prudery protests. The consequence is that a great educative influence,
like the theatre, where a few playwrights like M. Brieux, and Mr.
Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Granville Barker, and Mr. John Galsworthy, might
effect the greatest things, is relegated by Mrs. Grundy to the plays
produced by Mr. George Edwardes and other earnest upholders of the
censorship.

Publishers also, while accepting novels which would have staggered the
Restoration Dramatists, can scarcely be found, even with great labour,
for the publication of books dealing with the sex question from the most
responsible medical or social standpoints.

It is just because public opinion is so potent, and, like all other
powers, so potent either for good or for evil, that its present
disastrous workings are the more deplorable. It is not unimaginable
that prudery might undergo a sort of transmutation. As I have said
before, we might make a eugenist of Mrs. Grundy, so that she might be as
much affronted by a criminal marriage as she is now by the spectacle of
a healthy and well-developed baby appearing unduly soon after its
parents' marriage. The power is there, and it means well, though it does
disastrously ill. Public opinion ought to be decided upon these matters;
it ought to be powerful and effective. We shall never come out into the
daylight until it is; we shall not be saved by laws, nor by medical
knowledge, nor by the admonitions of the Churches. Our salvation lies
only in a healthy public opinion, not less effective and not more
well-meaning than public opinion is at present, but informed where it is
now ignorant, and profoundly impressed with the importance of realities
as it now is with the importance of appearances.

So much having been said, what can one suggest in the direction of
remedy? First, surely it is something that we merely recognize the price
of prudery. Personally, I find that it has made all the difference to my
calculations to have had the thing pointed out by the clerical critic
whose eye these words may possibly meet. It is something to recognize in
prudery an enemy that must be attacked, and to realize the measure of
its enmity. In the light of some little experience, perhaps a few
suggestions may be made to those who would in any way join in the
campaign for the education and transmutation of public opinion on these
matters.

First, we must compose ourselves with fundamental seriousness--with
that absolute gravity which imperils the publication of a book and
entirely prohibits the production of a play on such matters. There is
something in human nature beyond my explaining which leads towards
jesting in these directions. An instinct, I know, is an instinct; of
which a main character is that its exercise shall be independent of any
knowledge as to its purpose. We eat because we like eating, rather than
because we have reckoned that so many calories are required for a body
of such and such a weight, in such and such conditions of temperature
and pressure. It is not natural, so to say, just because man is in a
sense rather more than natural, that we should be provident and serious,
self-conscious, and philosophic, in dealing with our fundamental
instincts. But it is necessary, if we are to be human: and only in so
far as, "looking before and after," we transcend the usual conditions of
instinct, are we human at all.

The special risk run by those who would deal with these matters
seriously--or rather one of the risks--is that they will be suspected,
and may indeed be guilty, of a tendency to priggishness and cant. Youth
is very likely not far wrong in suspecting those who would discuss these
matters, for youth has too often been told that they are of the earth
earthy, that these are the low parts of our nature which we must learn
to despise and trample on, and youth knows in its heart that whatever
else may or may not be cant, this certainly is. So any one who proposes
to speak gravely on the subject is a suspect.

Meetings confined to persons of one sex offer excellent opportunities.
Much can be done, if the suspicion of cant be avoided, by men addressing
the meetings of men only which gather in many churches on Sunday
afternoons, and which have a healthy interest in the life of this world
and of this world to come, as well as in matters less immediate. It
seems to me that women doctors ought to be able to do excellent work in
addressing meetings of girls and women, provided always that the speaker
be genuinely a woman, rightly aware of the supremacy of motherhood.

Most of us know that it is possible to read a medical work on sex, say
in French, without any offence to the aesthetic sense, though a
translation into one's native tongue is scarcely tolerable. This
contrasted influence of different names for the same thing is another of
those problems in the psychology of prudery which I do not undertake to
analyze, but which must be recognized by the practical enemy of prudery.
It is unquestionably possible to address a mixed audience, large or
small, of any social status, on these matters without offence and to
good purpose. But certain terms must be avoided and synonyms used
instead. There are at least three special cases, the recognition of
which may make the practical difference between shocking an audience and
producing the effect one desires.

Reproduction is a good word from every point of view, but its
associations are purely physiological, and it is better to employ a word
which renders the use of the other superfluous and which has a special
virtue of its own. This is the term parenthood, a hybrid no doubt, but
not perhaps much the worse for that. One may notice a teacher of
zoology, say, accustomed to address medical students, offend an audience
by the use of the word reproduction, where parenthood would have served
his turn. It has a more human sound--though there is some sub-human
parenthood which puts much of ours to shame--and the fact that it is
less obviously physiological is a virtue, for human parenthood is only
half physiological, being made of two complementary and equally
essential factors for its perfection--the one physical and the other
psychical. Thus it is possible to speak of physical parenthood and of
psychical parenthood, and thus not only to avoid the term reproduction,
but to get better value out of its substitutes. One may be able to show,
perhaps, that in the case of other synonyms also a hunt for a term that
shall save the face of prudery may be more than justified by the
recovery of one which has a richer content. Terms are really very good
servants, if they are good terms and we retain our mastery of them. Let
any one without any previous practice start to write or speak on "human
reproduction," and on "human parenthood, physical and psychical," and he
will find that, though naming often saves a lot of thinking, as George
Meredith said, wise naming may be of great service to thought.

In these matters there is to be faced the fact of pregnancy. Here,
again, is a good word, as every one knows who has felt its force or that
of the corresponding adjective when judiciously used in the
metaphorical sense. The present writer's rule, when speaking, is to use
these terms only in their metaphorical sense, and to employ another term
for the literal sense. I should be personally indebted to any reader who
can inform me as to the first employment of the admirable phrase, "the
expectant mother." The name of its inventor should be remembered. In any
audience whatever--perhaps almost including an audience of children, but
certainly in any adult audience, whether mixed or not, medical or
fashionable, serious or sham serious--it is possible to speak with
perfect freedom on many aspects of pregnancy, as for instance the use of
alcohol, exposure to lead poisoning, the due protection at such a
period, by simply using the phrase "the expectant mother," with all its
pregnancy of beautiful suggestion. Here, again, our success depends upon
recognizing the psychical factor in that which to the vulgar eye is
purely physiological--not that there is anything vulgar about physiology
except to the vulgar eye.

For myself, the phrase "the expectant mother" is much more than useful,
though in speaking it has made all the difference scores of times. It is
beautiful because it suggests the ideal of every pregnancy--that the
expectant mother shall indeed _expect_, look forward to the life which
is to be. Her motto in the ideal world or even in the world at the
foundations of which we are painfully working, will be those words of
the Nicene creed which the very term must recall to the mind--_Expecto
resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi_.

Let any one who fancies that these pre-occupations with mere language
are trivial or misplaced here take the opportunity of addressing two
drawing-rooms under similar conditions, on some such subject as the care
of pregnancy from the national point of view. Let him in the one case
speak of the pregnant woman, and so forth, and in the other of the
expectant mother. He will be singularly insensitive to his audience if
he does not discover that sometimes a rose by any other name is somehow
the less a rose. The more fools we perhaps, but there it is, and in the
most important of all contemporary propaganda, which is that of the
re-establishment of parenthood in that place of supreme honour which is
its due, even such "literary" debates as these are not out of place.

Sex is a great and wonderful thing. The further down we go in the scale
of life, whether animal or vegetable, the more do we perceive the
importance of the evolution of sex. The correctly formed adjective from
this word is sexual, but the term is practically taboo with Mrs. Grundy.
Only with caution and anxiety, indeed, may one venture before a lay
audience to use Darwin's phrase, "sexual selection." The fact is utterly
absurd, but there it is. One of the devices for avoiding its
consequences is the use of sex itself as an adjective, as when we speak
of sex problems; but the special importance of this case is in regard to
the sexual instinct, or, if the term offends the reader, let us say the
sex instinct. Here prudery is greatly concerned, and our silence here
involves much of the price of prudery. Now since the word sexual has
become sinister, we cannot speak to the growing boy or girl about the
sexual instinct, but we may do much better.

For what is this sexual instinct? True, it manifests itself in
connection with the fact of sex, but essentially that is only because
sex is a condition of human reproduction or parenthood. It is this with
which the sexual instinct is really concerned, and perhaps we shall
never learn to look upon it rightly or deal with it rightly until we
indeed perceive what the business of this instinct is, and regard as
somewhat less than worthy of mankind any other attitude towards it. Of
course there are men who live to eat, yet the instincts concerned with
eating exist not for the titillation of the palate but for the
sustenance of life; and, likewise, though there are those who live to
gratify this instinct, it exists not for sensory gratification, but for
the life of this world to come. Can we not find a term which shall
express this truth, shall be inoffensive and so doubly suitable for the
purposes of our cause?

The term reproductive instinct is often employed. It is vastly superior
to sexual instinct, because it does refer to that for which the instinct
exists; but it hints at reproduction, and though Mrs. Grundy can
tolerate the idea of parenthood, reproduction she cannot away with. We
cannot speak of it as the parental instinct, because that term is
already in employment to express the best thing and the source of all
other good things in us. Further, the sexual instinct and the parental
instinct are quite distinct, and it would be disastrous to run the
possibility of confusing them--one the source of all the good, and the
other the source of much of the evil, though the necessary condition of
all the good and evil, in the world.

For some years past, in writing and speaking, I have employed and
counselled the employment of the term "the racial instinct." This seems
to meet all the needs. It avoids the tabooed adjective, and if it fails
to allude at all to the fact of sex, who needs reminding thereof? It is
formed from the term race, which prudery permits, and it expresses once
and for all that for which the instinct exists--not the individual at
all, but the race which is to come after him. Doubtless its satisfaction
may be satisfactory for him or her, but that does not testify to
Nature's interest in individuals, but rather to her skill in insuring
that her supreme concern shall not be ignored, even by those who least
consciously concern themselves with it.

These are perhaps the three most important instances of the verbal, or
perhaps more than verbal, issues that arise in the fight with prudery.
One has tried to show that they are not really in the nature of
concessions to Mrs. Grundy, but that the terms commended are in point of
fact of more intrinsic worth than those to which she objects. Other
instances will occur to the reader, especially if he or she becomes in
any way a soldier in this war, whether publicly or as a parent
instructing children, or on any other of the many fields where the fight
rages.

It is not the purpose of the present chapter to deal with that which
must be said, notwithstanding prudery, and in order that the price of
prudery shall no longer be paid. But one final principle may be laid
down which is indeed perhaps merely an expression of the spirit
underlying the foregoing remarks upon our terminology. It is that we are
to fly our flag high. We may consult Mrs. Grundy's prejudices if we find
that in doing so we may directly serve our own thinking, and therefore
our cause. This is very different from any kind of apologizing to her.
All such I utterly deplore. We must not begin by granting Mrs. Grundy's
case in any degree. Somewhere in that chaos of prejudices which she
calls her mind, she nourishes the notion, common to all the false forms
of religion, ancient or modern, that there is something about sex and
parenthood which is inherently base and unclean. The origin of this
notion is of interest, and the anthropologists have devoted much
attention to it. It is to be found intermingled with a by no means
contemptible hygiene in the Mosaic legislation, is to be traced in the
beliefs and customs of extant primitive peoples, and has formed and
forms an element in most religions. But it is not really pertinent to
our present discussion to weigh the good and evil consequences of this
belief. Without following the modern fashion, prevalent in some
surprising quarters, of ecstatically exaggerating the practical value of
false beliefs in past and present times, we may admit that the cause of
morality in the humblest sense of that term may sometimes have been
served by the religious condemnation of all these matters as unclean,
and of parenthood as, at the best, a second best.

But for our own day and days yet unborn this notion of sex and its
consequences as unclean or the worser part is to be condemned as not
merely a lie and a palpably blasphemous one, grossly irreligious on the
face of it, but as a pernicious lie, and to be so recognized even by
those who most joyfully cherish evidence of the practical value of lies.
Whatever may have been the case in the past or among present peoples in
other states of culture than our own, no impartial person can question
that during the Christian Era what may be called the Pauline or ascetic
attitude on this matter has been disastrous; and that if the present
forms of religion are not completely to outlive their usefulness, it is
high time to restore mother and child worship to the honour which it
held in the religion of Ancient Egypt and in many another. If the mother
and child worship which is to be found in the more modern religions,
such as Christianity, is to be worth anything to the coming world it
must cease to have reference to one mother and one child only; it must
hail every mother everywhere as a Madonna, and every child as in some
measure deity incarnate. By no Church will such teaching be questioned
to-day; but if it be granted the Churches must cease to uphold those
conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides
involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are
palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the
Churches must and shall now be made to return.

All this will involve many a shock to prudery; to take only the instance
of what we call illegitimate motherhood, our eyes askance must learn
that there are other legitimacies and illegitimacies than those which
depend upon the little laws of men, and that if our doctrine of the
worth of parenthood be a right one it is our business in every such case
to say, "Here also, then, in so far as it lies in our power, we must
make motherhood as good and perfect as may be."

These principles also will lead us to understand how differently, were
we wise, we should look upon the outward appearances of expectant
motherhood. In his masterpiece, Forel--of all living thinkers the most
valuable--has a passage with which Mrs. Grundy may here be challenged.
It is too simple to need translating from the author's own French:[9]--

"La fausse honte qu'out les femmes de laisser voir leur grossesse
et tout ce qui a rapport a l'accouchement, les plaisanteries dont
on use souvent a l'egard des femmes enceintes, sont un triste signe
de la degenerescence et meme de la corruption de notre civilization
raffinee. Les femmes enceintes ne devraient pas ce cacher, ni
jamais avoir honte de porter un enfant dans leur ventre; elles
devraient au contraire en etre fieres. Pareille fierte serait
certes bien plus justifiee que celle des beaux officiers paradant
sous leur uniforme. Les signes exterieurs de la formation de
l'humanite font plus d'honneur a leurs porteurs que les symboles de
sa destruction. Que les femmes s'impregnent de plus en plus de
cette profonde verite! Elles cesseront alors de cacher leur
grossesse et d'en avoir honte. Conscientes de la grandeur de leur
tache sexuelle et sociale, elles tiendront haut l'etendard de notre
descendance, qui est celui de la veritable vie a venir de l'homme,
tout en combattant pour l'emancipation de leur sexe."

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