A year of prophesying

7.6.24

The British Labour movement is being agitated at present by one of the most important questions in the world, the question whether a woman has a right to clear and complete knowledge about her own body and the fundamental facts of her life. It is a searching and dividing question that may very well split the party into two discordant sections. The old-fashioned politicians who haven’t yet observed that women have now got votes, consider the question ought to be left outside politics. It is too real a question for the old parliamentary game. What would the grand Old Man have said about it? The Elder Spinsters of the Labour movement also rally to the protection of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s gentility, his fine old-fashioned statesmanlike evasiveness. But the Labour Women’s Conference carried a resolution against the blushingly tactful Elder Spinsters. These younger women believe that women really are responsible citizens, that democracy does mean treating adults with respect instead of concealing anything that matters most to them from them; that women ought to know what marriage means for them and how motherhood may be undertaken or declined before diseases and children and such-like intense and overwhelming things blot out their youth and health.

The demand the younger, more intelligent women in the Labour movement are making is that knowledge should be freely, easily, and honourably accessible to all British women. It is well to get this precisely clear. No one purposes to force this knowledge upon anyone. That typical political artful dodger, Mr. Wheatley, the Labour Minister of Health, pretends obstinately that that is so. But no woman who likes to be coyly ignorant, and to be overtaken by illness and offspring before she understands anything about them, need seek such knowledge. All that the innovators ask is that it should be there available for those women who want to know what they may do and what they can do with their lives, who want to go into motherhood or refuse or delay going into motherhood with their eyes open. Personally, I think that innocence is a charm confined to immaturity, and that every adult of eighteen ought to know clearly all that is of vital importance to conduct in married life before marriage, but in this I go far beyond the modest ambitions of the advanced section of the Labour Party. They want this knowledge to be available only to the married. They want the medical men engaged at such public institutions as child-welfare centres and the like to be free—subject only to their interpretation of their professional honour—to give such information as may be asked for upon these matters. They want doctors in receipt of public money to have the same liberty of advice that every doctor feed by an upper-class woman has. They do not want poor women living in crowded homes to be obliged to bear offspring just as cows bear offspring, whether they want to or not, out of sheer ignorance and helplessness.

Mr. Wheatley says, as his excuse for refusing this liberation of knowledge, that Roman Catholic voters will object to paying rates and taxes if this sort of use is made of public money. The Roman Catholic is to decide what the poor Protestant woman shall know and do. This is a pretty impudent claim for a religion that was formerly disenfranchised. But the whole Labour Party in Parliament cringes at the thought of the Roman Catholic vote. As a matter of fact, there is nothing in sound Roman Catholic teaching to forbid the diffusion of physiological knowledge. There is nothing, indeed, in proper Roman Catholic teaching to prohibit the practice of birth-control under any circumstances. At any time the Vatican might commend birth-control; it is not committed in the least in that respect. But a great number of priests, like our Labour Elder Spinsters, betray an extreme excitability and malignity at the thought of any sexual life that is not mainly frustrated desire. They commit the extreme sin of presumption, they invent teachings quite unsanctioned by the Church to excuse the impulses of their own troubled and unhappy thoughts. And it is of the back-street priest and not of the eternal Church that Mr. Wheatley and his Labour colleagues as pushing politicians have chiefly to think.

Now let the reader note that in this paper I have said not a word for or against the practices known as birth-control nor about anticipatory sexual hygiene. I have my own very definite opinions on these matters, but the question under discussion here is not what should or may be done, but about what may be known. It is the far profounder question of whether common poor people are to be treated as worthy of understanding and knowing about the things that concern their most intimate lives, or whether in the interests of cheap labour, the Roman Catholic, population statistics, army recruiting, racial jealousy, or out of regard to the unpleasant feelings and imaginations of priests and elderly spinsters, they are to be left and imprisoned in black ignorance even when they want to know. Here I find in myself a streak of surprisingly passionate democracy. I hold that every man and woman should be the conscious and instructed master of his or her own fate. It is amazing, it is dismaying, to find a Labour Minister as ready to consider the common people a breeding herd of human beasts and as ready to keep them helplessly in the dark as the extremist Tory could be. I am convinced that even as a politician he has blundered. When women fought for votes they fought for a symbol; the reality was the possession of themselves. And that is impossible without this, if not forbidden, at least impeded knowledge.

Most politicians have still to learn the significance of the women’s vote. Because one or two pretty ladies on the Labour side have lost their heads, adorned themselves in trains and ostrich feathers, given themselves over to the photographers and interviewers and succumbed to the delightful temptation of patronising the Queen, it does not follow that the mass of Labour women are not intensely sane and realist. Sexual questions are coming into politics, and they are coming to stay. Before the next election every parliamentary candidate will have to make up his mind whether he stands for knowledge or ignorance in this matter.