Hypatia

So far I have refrained from any detailed discussion of modern women and maternity because it is still necessary to make it clear that a full life of activity for women is perfectly possible and permissible without it. I am quite aware that certain religious people assert as a moral principle that the purpose of sex-love is not mutual enjoyment but the perpetuation of the race. I am also aware that militarists enjoin on women the necessity of marriage and large families as a patriotic duty. Further, certain doctors have gone out of their way to try to prove that the use of contraceptives is contrary to health and nature. These same people, we may note, have no aversion from the wearing by women of internal remedial rubber supports for months on end nor to patching up with silver, papier mâché, and other foreign materials, the insides and outsides of human beings mutilated in the natural and healthy pursuit called war. I am not concerned with the morals of convention or superstition, but with the morals of experience. It is the experience of modern women that sex is an instinctive need to them as it is to men, and further that the prevention of conception brings to them no loss of poise, health, or happiness. On the contrary, when once they embark on the task of maternity, contraception is a blessed safeguard to health and recovery in the periods of rest between pregnancies. I am not going to deny that the most perfect delight known to human beings is the completely reckless, mutually adoring union of two people of vitality and intelligence who hope to create another human being as a constant reminder of the beauty of that moment. But many considerations, which we shall discuss, forbid a yearly child. I read recently in an article by G. K. Chesterton, that sex without gestation and parturition is like blowing the trumpets and waving the flags without doing any of the fighting. From a woman such words, though displaying inexperience, might come with dignity; from a man they are an unforgivable, intolerable insult. What is man’s part in sex but a perpetual waving of flags and blowing of trumpets and avoidance of the fighting? The vast majority of men are not even tender or kindly to their pregnant or nursing wives, nor will they give help or consideration to the care of their young children.

A revolt against motherhood under present conditions is not surprising, nor is it entirely regrettable. There are quite a number of women whose minds and bodies are not fitted or have not been fitted by their upbringing and education to produce and care for children. This is a source of distress to many people, who, as was suggested earlier, did not think of it at the right moment, when the education of women in public and private schools was being developed. Even now these same people stand in the way of the surest remedy: which is to teach science, physiology, and the beauty of sex and maternity to boys and girls at an early age. The London County Council, many of whom are certainly distressed beyond measure at the falling birth-rate and the discontent and irresponsibility of modern young people, have just, in consultation with suitably selected moral headmasters and mistresses, turned down the suggestion of sex-teaching in elementary and secondary schools. We are always told that boys and girls of all classes nowadays acquire this knowledge easily for themselves, but the mere knowledge is not the only thing to the adolescent mind. Things not spoken of by parents or teachers, things dealt with in hushed voices by moral and spiritual leaders, surrounded by cant and humbug and false sentiment, are bound to be thought nasty by mild young people and to provide ribald laughter for the obstreperous.

This is not to say that sex-information should be given in a spirit of evangelical solemnity and exhortation, nor even of soft sentimentality. All that is needed is lessons in physiology, taught as a matter of course, as botany or nature-study are often taught; and then explanations to boys of the working of their bodies, how to keep them in health, how not to dissipate and destroy their energies too soon. Further, they should be told that woman is neither a chattel nor a servant, nor even an inferior, but a partner in joy as in the business of life; that there is no question or difficulty, public or private, which cannot be brought to her for discussion and judgment; and that she has a right to share in all decisions affecting a joint life, children, money, and the conduct of affairs of State. To girls in the same way could be explained the physical changes of puberty, marriage, and maternity, how the child grows, what food and care the mother, and afterwards the baby, will need. There is nothing in this too difficult or shocking to young or adolescent minds. So many of us can remember the secret conclaves with our friends when we puzzled out and pieced together what scraps of information we could glean, awakening instinct darkly supplementing this knowledge. Some of us can remember, perhaps, having noticed obscene writing on school-walls, instantly reported by shocked prefects, instantly effaced by school-mistresses with an awful and portentous gravity which made us feel we had stumbled on the brink of a secret of incredible wickedness and horror. One straightforward lecture of concise information could have dispelled the lurking mystery once and for all and imparted a sense of magic and wonder and ambition. Some of the more fortunate of us, through study in libraries and dreaming over poems, created for ourselves a finer attitude. With no teaching other than that we might find someone who would marry us some day, and that marriage was an excellent destiny even for educated women, and with no belief in any of the moral taboos current around us, some of us can none the less remember the pride of caring for the body, safeguarding health and looks, avoiding excess, severe strain, and overwork, because we cherished our dreams of the children that our bodies were to make—not ordinary children, of course not: Promethean creatures, endowed with every gift that mortal man could steal from the jealous gods, strong, beautiful, intelligent and bold—kings and conquerors, not of their fellow-creatures but of nature and the mystery of the world. There is not a woman, unless completely warped by early training, in whom such dreams and visions will not stir if we try to wake them. If not, then let her pass: we do not need her to perpetuate the race. And do not trick her into motherhood by false sentiment and information, or by withholding from her the means to protect herself if she is not fully resolved upon bearing a child.

We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them. Nor should we represent motherhood as something so common and easy that everyone can go through it without harm or suffering and rear her children competently and well. Without arousing dread or horror, we should tell young women frankly the pain and agony of childbirth, and the anxiety and griefs which are the fate of every woman who is a mother by choice and therefore loves her children. Nothing whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and responsibility which they will evade. Everything is to be gained by training a woman in knowledge, courage, and physical strength, and leaving it then to her own instinct and her mind to tell her that to create new human beings is worth the discomfort and the suffering which she must necessarily undergo. Those in whom the courage to create survives when choice is free and all the facts are known are those best fitted to bring children into the world, and breed in them eagerness and intrepidity. The others will only pass on fear and distaste for life from which individuals and the community suffer far too much already.[7]

I do not mean by this that we should, scorning the aid of science, return to natural childbirth, and let its pangs scare off the weaklings and the cowards. In this matter the charges of our critics are conflicting. They condemn us for having sought the aid of science to mitigate our suffering, and in the same breath tell us that a return to natural child-bed will bring back a primitive exhilaration and freedom from pain lost for thousands of years. I do not believe that for any comparatively civilized race, any race really worthy the name of man, childbirth has ever been painless. The upright position, held by eighteenth-century divines to be a source of pride in man, was the first injustice to women. Nor do I believe that the sufferings of modern women are any worse or their confinements any more difficult than those of women in the past. They are more closely observed and the difficulties known, and, where skill is available, the dangerous ones are less likely to be fatal. In the past the fragile woman died, or continued ailing, unobserved by a doctor and afraid to complain. People who live and breed in a state of nature are by no means so healthy and vigorous as our modern Rousseaus would have us believe: more children die than survive, and those who are left have physical defects and deformities which could have been remedied by knowledge and care. These and the ravages of smallpox and other diseases, and the deformities due to the natural accidents of life unmitigated by medical care, produce far more ugliness than the mark of an obstetric instrument on temple or forehead. Then, again, youth passes more quickly. The men and women we see in modern life, still reasonably young and fresh with rounded faces and teeth stopped or supplemented by art, would in a more primitive community be dead, or else crouching useless and despised, toothless and with sunken cheeks by the fireside of their sons and daughters.

Decay and pain belong to nature. To arrest the one and mitigate the other has been the task which the sciences that deal in physiology have set themselves. Remedial at first, they pass on to the stage of prevention. Already the principle of intelligent medicine is to strengthen what is weak in the body by nourishment and exercise rather than provide artificial substitutes. Paralysed limbs return to life; women retain their teeth white and strong through several pregnancies. This is not done by a return to nature, but by an increase in civilization and knowledge. In that way our very landscapes have been formed. We prune, we nourish the soil, we cross-breed our plants. The vegetables upon which the enthusiast for nature urges us to live are the product of science and artifice: thousands of years of cultivation, nitrates from Chile, skill of the experimenter, skill of the gardener’s hand. The same is true of the animals we breed for meat, eggs, or milk supply. Agriculture and stock-breeding seem natural to us—they were not natural in the distant past. As regards the human body, to me at least it seems that we are now beginning to approach the right attitude. There was more dosing and doctoring of petty ailments among intelligent people in the last century. To-day we try to learn how best to live in order that such ailments may not occur, and substitute a well-balanced diet for aids to digestion and the normal functioning of our bodies. We do the same in rearing our children. And this attitude would become more general if those who rule us, Press, Church, rich men and politicians, would consider it really important that every man, woman, and child in the State should have health and happiness, and therefore supply broadcast the necessary rules of life and sufficient of healthy and staple foods for all, in place of advertisement of quack remedies and patent substitutes prepared by profiteers.

To return to the application of science and nature to maternity. A special sentimentality and superstition inherited from the completely savage periods of history cling about this, as about sex. The avoidance of suffering in childbirth is taboo in the Japanese moral code, as it was until recently in Christian morals. Religion has persisted in regarding the female body as unclean when engaged in its most important functions, and purifying it afterwards by special prayers to the Deity.[8] We find this savagery current in Judaism[9] as in Christianity, together with an exhortation to be fruitful and multiply, and therefore to pass through shame and uncleanness as often as we can. It was thought a horror and an outrage when chloroform was used to help us. It is a still greater horror when means are discovered of not having children at all. To this day most doctors and dentists refuse to give an anæsthetic and draw a rotten tooth which is wearing down a pregnant mother’s strength by sleepless nights and days of agony. Yet this can be done with reasonable care and skill. Behind all this there is the mystic belief that somehow or other nature does the work best unaided and unhindered; and this mysticism is rooted in a savage taboo. Life is, indeed, so pertinacious that somehow some of us will survive whatever we do, but this does not seem to me an adequate attitude for the rational mother.

The truth is that it is not desired or expected that mothers should be rational. Maternal instinct is so wonderful, maternal devotion so sublime, cry our sentimental brutes. Whatever we may have known of life and the outside world, it is still expected in modern times that, once married, we shall descend into a morass of instinct and ignorance from which we shall never, if the male and the vindictively-minded spinster can prevent it, emerge again. We are privileged, so we are told, in that we may bear each year a child for the State, rock the cradle, wash, mend, and make, pass on the lore of housekeeping and infant-care to our daughters just as we received it from our mothers. It is such a beautiful picture: a pity it is entirely false. The old-fashioned mother had no lore, and her instinct was inadequate. She succeeded by luck rather than by knowledge. She adored, or disciplined; she killed by kindness or by severity and neglect. She would coddle when she should have hardened, harden when she should have coddled; she would over-feed and under-feed, or give the wrong kind of food. Since it has been the fashion for women to have minds, the books for mothers have become more scientific and our intelligent inquiries have been met by research and more adequate replies. Every mother with any intelligence who has reared one or more children through the first year of life and up to five years of age would admit nowadays that scientific knowledge was of more service to her than all the instinct and adoration at her command. Indeed, I believe the so-called maternal instinct in handling and understanding babies consists of habit almost imperceptibly learnt in tending the first, blossoming into a smooth instinctive unity with the coming of the second. The fashionable mother, said to be devoid of maternal instinct because she neglects her child, has simply not learnt it, because necessity does not compel her to practical duties. This is even true, though less so, of well-to-do mothers who feed their babies at the breast.

People will persist in imagining that uncivilized women were always able to feed their children in natural fashion. Very often they were obliged to seek the help of another mother, and, when that was not forthcoming, the baby died. It is quite true that our adaptation to modern conditions of life, nerve-stress, combined with overwork for women in towns and industrial districts, has caused breast-feeding to be less common than it was in the past. But here again the way of life is not back to nature, which is impossible because we cannot at a blow destroy industrialism and the towns—but onwards, to greater knowledge. Instead of bullying the mothers and telling them it is wicked not to feed their babies at the breast, let them know how, by pre-natal care of health and strength, by diet, by deliberate nerve-control, they can feed their babies with comfort and delight and without detriment to their health and the work which they must necessarily do—or even to their beauty. Here again, if choice is free and the child therefore ardently desired, there is more chance of success with breast-feeding. And knowledge of the chemical constituents of cow’s milk and patent foods as compared with human milk is more likely to induce the modern mother to suckle her child than volumes of abuse or sentimental twaddle.

Then as to the hygiene of pregnancy. Could our mothers have taught us about the different food-values, about protein, nitrogenous foods, calcium from the green foods for teeth and bones, avoidance of too many albuminous foods? Knowledge of what diet can do to help us in pregnancy and our children in early youth is in its infancy, but it is there, none the less. Shall we fling it aside and return to pure instinct? What massage and remedial exercises have taught can be applied to our bodies during pregnancy and after childbirth. It is probable that closer study of the functions of the muscles of the back and the abdomen would enable us to teach women to exercise and control them in a way that would make childbirth almost painless, and the recovery of poise and activity afterwards more rapid and more thorough. Under present conditions, muscles that are often too rigid or too feeble expand and never recover their tone; others—the back muscles, it may be—go out of use temporarily and similarly do not recover. In the middle-class woman laziness is often the cause of difficult confinements and poor recovery of the figure; in the working mother a too speedy return to work which is too hard and does not exercise the body harmoniously; in both the ignorance which leads to wrong kinds of nourishment during pregnancy, and fear of doing harm to the child which leads to rigid and over-careful movement, are responsible for a good many troubles. Psychological effects may be serious. Most women develop during pregnancy sensitiveness and a timidity protective to the child. From this the very fertile mother has no opportunity to recover. Hence many of the silly old ladies who cannot cross roads unaided by a policeman. With birth-control, in two years a determined mother can completely restore her nerve, her joy in life, and her full muscular powers.

The author of Lysistrata suggests that by diet we may produce thin babies and therefore have easier confinements. This may be true, but it is a curious fact that the experience of some mothers and doctors goes to show that much protein (which Mr. Ludovici suggests we should avoid) produces a thin baby and a corpulent mother; that, on the other hand, light and nitrogenous foods, while keeping the mother slim and supple, yield a plump 8 to 9 lbs. baby. I think the size of our babies is perhaps not so much under our control as many might wish to suggest. Heredity enters in. Children sometimes have large fathers. The sheep-breeder knows that he dare not mate certain larger types of rams with small-made ewes.

In all these problems, however, it is the frankness and intelligence which feminism has made possible for women which will bring solution and progress, rather than a return to the unguided instincts of our forefathers. The lore of motherhood is a science which is now beginning, but it is not following the lines which convention and the moralists expect. It defies sentiment, ridicules unnecessary and unintelligent sacrifice, is not content to suffer, but makes demands. It begins with birth control, which to many seems the negation of motherhood, but which to the creative mother is the key-stone of her work.

Suppose we have educated our young women sanely about physical matters, as suggested earlier in this chapter. As they reach the age of maturity and activity, what will they find? If they are middle- or upper-class, an existence that is not too intolerable. Feminism has won for them the right of entry to most professions and, provided they are fairly able, they can get work. None the less, it must be admitted that the years since the War have borne hardly upon wage-earning women of all classes. The lack of sexual freedom is a terrible burden, but the remedy ultimately lies in their own hands. Life in marriage still offers reasonable comfort and good food for man and wife and two or three children. But late marriages, from the lack of opportunity for men and the expense of living, cause girls’ young bodies to be worn with longing unless they are bold enough to follow our modern Aspasias. This waiting to marry is a real danger to young women’s health which conventional, unimaginative people refuse to face. It produces nervous disorders bordering at times on insanity.

As regards the care of her body in pregnancy and childbirth, and the feeding of her children, the middle-class mother is in a position to carry out what modern science has to teach. She cannot have a large family, it is true, and the cry goes up on all sides that it is very hard for the middle-classes to pay for the proper education of their children.[10] The best stocks are being penalized and extinguished, so we are told. This is part of a much bigger problem, and a problem that involves the class-war. All ambitious mothers, from miners’ wives to the aristocracy, would like to breed the fine types who receive a thorough education and then enter one of the intellectual professions. Obviously this cannot be. And, given equal ability in two children of different classes of life, there is no just reason for driving the worker’s child, who has less good food and conditions and is therefore less fitted to stand the strain, through the worry of the scholarship system, whilst the other child’s path is made smooth to a ruling position. Man for man, woman for woman, the workers would be the equals of the middle-class in strength and ability, given the same nourishment, comfort and training. In actual fact, the middle-class is perpetually being replenished in one generation, or two at most, from below. Middle-class fathers and mothers have no right to claim the privilege of a large family unless their children, if they are strong but not clever, are prepared to work the railways or dig coal in the mines. Professional people, scientists, artists, research workers, pure mathematicians, as well as skilled engineers, are, indeed, the salt of the earth, and the community that fails to produce them and give them scope is doomed in this modern world. But they are supported by manual labor, and it cannot be denied that their number cannot be indefinitely extended except by an increase of productivity and wealth. A more equal system of society will diminish drudgery and make it possible for all to have a fine development of intelligence and understanding, whatever the work on which they are employed.

Feminism in the mother has led us far from maternity. That is what it is bound to do. The working mother to-day looks straight from her kitchen, if she is lucky enough to have one, on to one of the most complex situations in history. And the intelligent ones are not blind to the situation. That is why I suggested that, though middle-class feminism has conquered the professions, the feminism of working mothers might bring a new and powerful contribution to our work.

The life of the working woman who intends maternity is becoming well-nigh impossible, and she knows it. When she has found a husband the community denies them a decent house. Possibly they find one room or two at an exorbitant rent, with no water and a grate unsuited for cooking. There are no restaurants at which the pair can afford to feed. Therefore they exist on partially or casually-cooked food, innutritious bread, and food from tins. Things may not be so bad if the wife can go on with work at a mill and get food that is fairly good at the canteen, her wages helping the meals taken at home.

The coming of a baby too often means a search for another lodging. The Bishops and the Generals like babies, but landladies don’t. Another room is found, perhaps. The mother works till the last moment, has a difficult confinement and inadequate attention, and gets up too soon. It is not easier for her than for a delicately-nurtured woman, and it is not less painful. Probably it is worse, because the working mother has from birth been underfed and has weaknesses and deformities—a contracted pelvis, perhaps—that a woman well-fed and cared for escapes. Then it goes on, baby after baby up to ten and eleven,[11] always in one room and no more money coming in. The mother works whenever she can to help keep the family. Frequently she is cursed or beaten by her husband for her fertility. Should the husband die, she must work continually and harder or send her children to the workhouse. In the opinion of the Bishops, she deserves the “stigma of the Poor Law,” and, in the opinion of all right-thinking people, anything done for her by individuals or the State is in the nature of a charity.

If I but had the eloquence of Hecuba mourning her slaughtered sons! The crime of war is bad enough: this butchery of hope and promise and human lives is one so black that the heart and mind of every woman who has borne a child should revolt against it until it is tolerated no more. It is easy to escape into an aristocratic theory of society. It has been done before, and ends in the guillotine. These working mothers are the people who must be lied to and terrified by bogies for fear that they use their votes to help themselves. And it is they who, when they sit in conference, demand of the State the right to stem the tide of children, to endow mothers, to pension widows, to teach and tend maternity and ensure rest for pregnant and nursing women; to see that houses and schools are built, and to control and purify the food-supply. Here is the most serious problem for the mothers, and one which the middle-class politician does not touch, because for the middle-class pure and fresh food is almost always obtainable. It is for the working mother to tackle those tins. She cannot now destroy industrialism, which dragged her work and her after it to the mill; but she can claim her right to control it in the name of life and the destiny of her children. Control of the population is essential to solving the food-problem and improving national health. Women in small houses know it. They know, moreover, that contraceptives are better than infanticide and war. The survival of the fittest is a false doctrine in child-bearing as in fighting. Every child which starts with a reasonably good constitution can, by the right care up to one year and food up to five, grow up to be strong and well. And, if the weak and unhealthy are discouraged from breeding and healthy mothers given proper care, great improvements are possible. Poor food and over-crowding are the ladder down which we go to mental deficiency and ultimate complete feebleness of mind.[12] If we cared for life, the best food would by law go to the pregnant and nursing mothers instead of, as at present, to clubs for fat old gentlemen and the frequenters of palatial hotels. It is probable that at present we do not produce enough milk, or produce and import enough butter and eggs to distribute adequately to all.[13] But, by stabilizing or decreasing our population, and by co-operation, intensive culture and control of marketing abroad and of marketing and purity at home, we could see to it that everybody had enough and that what they had was really good.

To feed an industrial population in a small island is a peculiar and special problem and one demanding expert care and advice. Food must come long distances and must “keep.” Hence the preservatives and tins and the need to be watchful beyond measure against poisoning and the loss of what is vital to our well-being. With research, the problem would be easy; but we must make it clear that it is important. Science would easily enable us to produce more from the soil, and, as regards the food of mothers, since the assimilation of extra minerals, salts, etc., in their natural state is not always satisfactory or easy during pregnancy, we might find ways of growing food, through treatment of the soil, to provide for the special needs of their condition.

What then must feminist mothers demand? The right first of all to the recognition of their work—the most dangerous of all trades and the most neglected and despised. They should ask for endowment from the community. This is opposed by many on the ground that fathers delight to support their children, and it is they who should claim from the community an adequate family-wage. But, after all, it is the mother who bears and tends the child, and, although many women receive the whole of their husbands’ wages, others must fight a humiliating battle against drink and tobacco for the wherewithal to build their children’s bodies. This struggle is exemplified on a large scale in the spending of State revenue, most of which goes on armaments and the forces of destruction, and an infinitesimal portion to aid and support life. If Jason cannot give up his murderous playthings, let him have neither sons to destroy nor daughters to drag through misery. His children shall never be conceived. I have indicated that this is happening already, not as a deliberate revolt, but as a counsel of despair in a world which offers no hope, no joy, and no opportunity to the young.

The mother has a right to demand two years’ rest between pregnancies; and the right to decide the number of her children. For some the call of motherhood is insistent and its charm grows with experience; they would be good mothers and might well have large families. They could help others by superintending nursery-schools in which children from one to five years might have their important meal of the day. But it is imperative that the woman who has children should not be shut out from public life. The ideal would be for a woman to continue her education at least till eighteen, have the first child at twenty-four, then perhaps three others at two-year intervals. This assumes that large numbers of women do not choose to breed. At thirty-five every mother of four children would, in a community of good schools, convenient houses, and well-run restaurants, be free again to take part in public life. It does not follow that she would be separated from her children; they would go to day-schools. But the mother would do the work for which she was best fitted in school,[14] kitchen, hospital, shop, mill, or Parliament. In this way her opinion would count, and her attitude to life help to permeate the community, which is otherwise left to be guided by the outlook of the single woman and the male. Problems of unemployment and competition due to married women’s work are really questions of population pressure, muddled thinking, and bad organization. To discuss all this in close detail is hardly within the scope of this book.

In conclusion, it may be said that the community should never, except on the strongest grounds, deny parenthood to man or woman. Therefore marriages which after two years did not result in a child should be dissoluble at the wish of either party to the contract. This, apart from all other reasons for which the cancelling of marriage should be allowed. Partnership in marriage should in effect be regarded as a partnership for parenthood, and as such should not be entered upon lightly.