and Havelock Ellis in The Psychology of Sex, vol. 5, 1912, says:—

Direct evidence of the physical aspect of my thesis is found in the fact quoted by Marshall in The Physiology of Reproduction, 1910, p. 566:—

Further argument upon these lines might well be brought forward in favour of the view that the potential mother, during the months whilst she is acting as the child’s total environment in all physical ways, is also through her mental states and conditions affecting the child’s ultimate mentality and artistic and spiritual powers.

This subtle control exerted over the formation of the child may be visualized as more like some effect parallel to the remote influences of the internal secretions in controlling the other organs of the body than the more mechanical picture of things visualized by the Mendelians and those who concentrate on the purely physical and material aspects of heredity as related to chromosome structure.

The tendency in recent years in biological work has been far too much to lay stress upon the curiously mathematical laws Mendel discovered, and consequently to concentrate attention upon the physical chromosomes as containing the factors which carry hereditary qualities. Physiologists are now making an attempt to bring back into the treatment of life a more rational outlook, and nothing has contributed more to the scientific basis of this than the recent following up of the suggestions made so long ago as 1869 by Brown-Séquard. Since Starling named the internal secretions Hormones (see the Croonian Lecture, 1905) they have been much discussed by physiologists and some medical men (see for instance the recent work of Blair Bell, The Sex Complex, 1916 already quoted).

To form a rough mental picture of what is happening one must combine the physiological and the mechanical outlooks. One then obtains the idea that the mother is, through her mental states, affecting and to some extent controlling the production of the various internal secretions, and other more subtle and still undetected influences from various organs upon other organs, and that, in so doing she is making the environment for the various hereditary factors, in which their potentialities find it possible to develop or to be suppressed according to the circumstances which she thus creates. As is now beginning to be realized, we all have an immense number of latent potentialities, which may lie dormant and develop only under suitable circumstances.

Thus in my view the mother may actually and in every sense fundamentally influence and control the character of her child, working through the remote effects of internal secretions which play on the complex material factors of hereditary qualities which form the material basis of the child’s potentialities.

Thus both heredity and environment have a vital part to play in building character, but greater than either is the subtler environment within the prospective mother created by her during the nine antenatal months.

Sometimes people who would otherwise like to believe that a mother has this power, are deterred by their own experience or that of others, who have, under conditions of distress and unfavourable circumstances, had children whose dispositions seem not to have suffered, but appear as sunny and happy as a child apparently conceived under more favourable circumstances. Here, however, one is immediately faced by the difficulties of accurate observation entailing a large number of data which tend to cancel out; for the mother who may personally have been below her usual standard of health and spirits while bearing the child may, nevertheless, actually be in such a good physical condition, or be a member of such a sound, healthy stock that the child’s heredity was better than that of the average human being, and consequently that the child itself was provided with a healthy well-run body.

While to contrast with it and apparently to refute my thesis, there may be a mother full of the most ardent hopes and buoyant spirit, looking forward with supreme joy to the advent of her baby, doing all she can to give it every beautiful mental impression and physical health, whose work may yet be undone by some cruel chance, such as venereal infection, or some local malformation which has resulted in weakness in, let us say, the child’s digestion. We all know how peevish mere indigestion will make anybody. Or she, the well-intentioned and outwardly well-circumstanced mother may, unknown to herself, have been battling against the cruel handicap in some racial, heritable defect in her husband; the child, therefore, may, with all her efforts, yet fail to be joyous owing to the too strong physical bias which chance or heritable disease has given it.

The existence of such apparently conflicting and contradictory individual instances in no way refutes my main thesis, which is that granted equal conditions of clean and wholesome ancestry, granted equally favourable conditions of health and nutrition for the mother during her period of carrying the child, that that child benefits and is superior to the other who has had the advantage of a happy mother’s conscious effort to transmit to it a wide and generally intellectual and spiritual interest in the great and beautiful things of the world.

This fact is often illustrated in the different children of the same parents. Of children born under as nearly identical circumstances as may be possible within a year or two of time, the one may have a totally different disposition with totally different qualities from the other. The chance of birth, the inheritance of the innumerable possible characteristics latent in both parents might be sufficient to account for this were chance alone at work, but very often information may be obtained from the observant mother which correlates her own state while carrying the child with the after condition of the child itself.

One rather striking instance of such a correlation is by a curious chance known to me, and should be of general interest. Oscar Wilde, whose genius was sullied by terrible sex crimes, which he expiated in prison, is known to all the world as a type whose distressing perversion is a racial loss. His mother once confided to an old friend that all the time she was carrying her son Oscar, she was intensely and passionately desiring a daughter, visualizing a girl, and, so far as was possible, using all the intensity of purpose which she possessed to have a girl, and that she often in after years blamed herself bitterly, because she felt that possibly his perverted proclivities were due to some influence she might have had upon him while his tiny body was being moulded.

Evidence upon this subject of the power or otherwise of the mother to influence her coming child is wanted, and it is very difficult to obtain, partly because of the reticence of those who have been through the dim and secret mysteries of motherhood, and partly because their accuracy cannot well be tested until after the child has reached maturity. In these after years the mother is likely to be swayed by the course the child’s life has taken, into unconsciously laying stress upon one or other point which may seem correlated with its after achievements.

Evidence, however, in the form of notes kept during the time the mother is carrying the child which may be compared with the child’s life in later years are very valuable, and, if any readers have such with which they would entrust me, a sufficient body of such evidence might possibly be accumulated to assist materially in the formation of a strong spiritual asset in the creation of the best possible human beings.

The father who desires to influence his child must do so through the mother: had clever men more generally realized this we should have heard less of the lament that clever men so often have stupid sons.

Of the more physical aspects of the mother’s power to influence the form of the development of her growing child we have abundant evidence. If the mother is starved, and by starved I mean less the actual starvation from want of food than the subtler starvation of improper food or food lacking in the truly vital elements, then the child visibly suffers. For instance, rickets, a disease of grave racial significance to which reference has already been made (see Chapter II), is due to the lack of certain necessary elements in the food.

A simple diet, the simpler the better, is sufficient adequately to provide all the essentials of nourishment for the mother and her coming child, and much indeed may be done for the general health and beauty of the child by providing the mother with the best form of material from which the embryo may build itself. The use of foods containing large quantities of vitamine (real butter and oranges, for instance, are specially good) is very advisable. They are not only enriching in their action in assisting true assimilation of other foods, but they probably tend to make good the general drain on the mother’s vitality which would naturally take place were she not amply provided with these most subtle ingredients, which, though present in such minute quantities in fresh food, are yet of incalculable value. The effect of proper and specially adapted dieting, not only on the health of the mother, but also on the beauty and general vigour of the child, is a thing which is particularly expressed by various writers who have followed up the early experiments on diet made by Dr. Trall.[5]

There is also Dr. Alice Stockham’s book, Tokology, to which I have previously drawn attention. Although, as I then said, it contains errors of a comparatively trivial nature such as calling carbonaceous material “carbonates,” which may have been sufficient to prejudice the scientific mind against the rest of her work, it contains the profound and valuable message Mr. Rowbotham published in England in 1841, amplified, and to some extent enriched by this woman doctor’s experience.

Those lovers who ardently desire their child and have a mental picture of it long before its birth may delight in speaking of it to each other as though it were, as indeed it is, alive. For this a name is required, but in order to avoid the danger suggested on page 141, it is wiser perhaps to choose the name of both a girl and a boy, the name which the child would be called by according to its sex after birth, and, while it is still unseen, to link the two together in speaking of the coming child.

Sometimes for private reasons a girl in particular or a boy in particular may be desired, but the well-balanced mind of a parent, particularly of the first child, should welcome either a son or a daughter, each of whom has its peculiar charms, and neither of whom can be described as more valuable than the other. Our false estimate of boys as superior is largely due to economic conditions and the custom of male entail. This should, and of course will, be altered. It is the first child, whether boy or girl is no matter, who is “the first-born” with all that that connotes in rapture and wonder to its parents.

Owing to the fact that more boys are born than girls, there is always the greater chance of the birth of a boy than a girl. From this point of view it would appear that girls are more precious, but boys are oftener ailing and feeble and difficult to rear, so that it is perhaps well that more of them should be born than of their stronger sisters.

Throughout its coming, the little one should be thought of in such a way that it will be equally welcome whichever its sex, and thus be given the best chance of developing fully and naturally in its own way.

CHAPTER XV
Evolving Types of Women

One of the great sources of disharmony in our social life is the extent of the extraordinary ignorance about ourselves which still persists. From this spring our conflicting opinions and diametrically opposed views, and also the apparently self-contradictory evidence on almost any point of fundamental importance which is brought before the public.

In no respect is there more conflict of opinion than concerning the age at which a woman should marry and become a mother. On the one hand, we have advocates of very early motherhood, and they point to the fact that a girl of seventeen is often already a woman and strongly sexed; they point to the hackneyed statement “that a girl matures sooner than a boy”; they point to the fine and healthy babies which very young mothers may bear and to the greater pliability and ease of birth, and these facts and their arguments may appear conclusive. On the other hand, the actual experience of many people conflicts with these apparently justified conclusions.

All the highly evolved races tend to prolong childhood and youth. All tend to replace early marriage by later marriage and parenthood to the obvious advantage of the race.

Marriage and parenthood at fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, which once were common in almost every country, are being replaced by later marriage and parenthood. As Finot 1913 says:—

The relative ages of husband and wife also have their influence, but should, to some extent, depend more on their physiological age than on their actual years. They should, however, not be widely different. As Saleeby says:—

I have observed many girls, who were in every true sense of the word girls (that is unconscious of personal sex feeling, still growing in bodily stature and still developing in internal organization) until they were nearly thirty years of age. In my opinion, the girl who is thoroughly well-balanced, with an active brain, a well-developed normally sexed body, natural artistic and social instincts is not more than a child at seventeen, and to marry her at that age or anything like it is to force her artificially, and to wither off her potentialities.

The type of woman who really counts in our modern civilization is, as a rule, not of age until she is nearly thirty. Not only does she not mature sooner than a boy; she matures actually later than a large number of men. I have now accumulated a wide and varied amount of evidence in favour of the view which I here propound, namely, that there is a most highly evolved type of woman in our midst. This type, which it will be agreed is the most valuable we possess, encompasses women of a wide range of potentialities; they have beautiful entirely feminine bodies, with all feminine and womanly instincts well developed, with a normal, indeed a rather strong, sex instinct and acute personal desires which tend to be concentrated on one man and one man alone. I will provisionally call this the late maturing type, for such a woman is generally incapable of real sex experience till she is about twenty-seven or thirty. I think that she is in line with the highest branch of our evolution, that she represents the present flower of human development, and that through her and her children the human race has the best hope of evolving on to still higher planes—but, and this is very important, she is not fitted for marriage until she is at least twenty-seven, probably later, her best child-bearing years may be after she is thirty-five, and her most brilliant and gifted children are likely to be born when she is about forty.

Personal evidence, and also facts in the interesting letters sent me by my readers have brought to my knowledge the existence of an important proportion of women who are absolutely unconscious of personal localized sex feeling until they are nearly or over thirty—one woman was nearly fifty before she felt and knew the real meaning of sex union though many years married.

From outward observation of the general physique of such of these women as I have seen face to face, I may say that, as a rule, they retain their youth long; they retain also a buoyancy and vitality which, if they are properly treated, and have the good fortune to be married at the right time to the right man, may remain with them almost throughout their lives. Such women not only prolong their girlhood, they defer their age. Such women have, of course, throughout the centuries appeared from time to time, and I fancy have generally in the past, and still often in the present, suffered acutely through marrying too young. When they marry too young they tend, by the forcing of their feelings, by the deadening through habit of their potentialities, by the trampling on the unfolded possibilities within them, to be turned artificially into a “cold type of woman.”

Women now older tell me of the fact that for the first years of their married life they could give no response, but when they were respectively twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one or more, they began first to feel they were truly women. Young husbands have written to me of their distress that their wives (aged about twenty to twenty-three), delightful girls in every respect, seemed utterly incapable of any response in the marital orgasm. Sometimes this depends on her conformation, but such an incapacity I often attribute to the girl’s marriage being premature. When she is twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps her internal development will be complete, and she will then be ripe for the full enjoyment of marriage: but if instead of a considerate husband she marries one who merely uses her, she stands little chance ever of knowing the proper relation of wifehood and motherhood.

These facts which I could vary with details from individual experiences, in my opinion, indicate a profound truth in the development of the human race. It is this: not only do the higher races of human beings have a prolonged childhood and youth, but the most highly evolved, mentally, physically and racially, of our girls have not finished their potential growth into maturity until they are in the neighbourhood of thirty years of age.

Does this then mean that all marriage should be deferred till so late? By no means, nor is the above conclusion any reflection on the type of girl who ripens much more quickly. I fully recognize that from the point of view of their sex potentialities some girls are complete women at seventeen or eighteen, and that they may then be very strongly sexed indeed. Such women should marry young.

The marked differentiation of type of these very notably different women can be traced through many other aspects of their lives. I consider, for instance, the type of whom I spoke in Chapter XII (who has a natural desire for union, representing the highest and most complex human union, the union of three) belongs very frequently to the late maturing and the most highly evolved form of femininity.

It should be recognized that there are among us not only different races, but that in the same stock, sometimes in the same family of apparently no specially mixed ancestry, we may find one or more members of the late maturing, others of the early maturing type. Sometimes of two sisters, the elder may perhaps be still in mind a girl while her younger sister is a woman, as can be observed by any one with a large circle of acquaintances. It would be well, I think, if humanity, whose proper study is mankind, were at least to know themselves sufficiently well to realize the existence of such different types, and their possible potential value as well as their differing needs. The energy at present wasted in the acrid statement of conflicting views would be so much better spent on the careful recording and recognizing of varying types.

The advice to marry young, which is in every respect socially wise and physiologically correct for some, should not be hurled indiscriminately at all women, because for the late maturing such advice is socially disadvantageous and physiologically wrong.

I am now ready to consider the question of the proper age for motherhood about which an immense variety of opinion is expressed. The general tendency has been, even in the last few years, to raise the age at which a girl may marry, and to raise the age which the medical profession advises as the earliest suitable for motherhood. But still one often hears of elders, whom one would in other respects like to follow, advising the early bearing of children.

Now I should like every potential parent to consider what type of child they want. Do they want to secure healthy, jolly little animals with no more brains than are sufficient to see them creditably through life? If so, let them have their children very early. Such healthy sound people with no special gifts are valuable, and there is much work in the world for them to do. On the other hand, do they want to take the risk for their child of a possibly less robust body, but with the possibility, indeed, in healthy families, almost the certainty, of an immensely greater brain power, and a more strongly developed temperament? Then let them have their children late. And if a man desires to have a child who may become one of the master minds whose discoveries, whose artistic creations, whose ruling power stamps itself upon the memory of our race, whose name is handed down the ages, then let the father who desires such a child mate himself with the long-young late-maturing type of woman I have just described, and let her bear that child some time between the age of thirty-five and forty-five.

How often one hears some version of the phrase: “Yes, it is so sad, poor, dear Lord So-and-So, a charming man, but no brains at all; his younger brother such a brilliant man; but that is always the way, the eldest sons in the aristocracy do seem to get the gift of property balanced by the lack of brains.” Now I enquire, and I should like my readers to enquire, into the secret of this phenomenon, which is by no means universal, but is sufficiently common to be endorsed. In my opinion, the interpretation of this fact is that the earlier children were born when the mother was still too young to endow them with brains, particularly if the mother was one of the gifted and cultivated women of the late-maturing type.

This also leads me to consider another generality which is frequently used as an argument by those who oppose conscious and deliberate parenthood. Some people say that by the direct control of the size of the family to a small limited number which the parents definitely desire, we would be eliminating genius from our midst, and their argument runs: Look at Nelson, he was a fifth son; look at Sir Walter Scott, he was a third son; and so on. This to the uncritical seems conclusive, and many people of great capacity, ideals and heart, who otherwise would be wholly on my side in my claim that every child born shall be deliberately desired, and that all other conceptions shall be consciously prevented, are swayed by this argument and say: “Yes, your position would be obviously the right one for the race if it were not that later children are so often the better.” I turn, therefore, to a consideration of the life histories of these men’s mothers. Why was Nelson the genius of his family? Because his mother was too young to bear geniuses at the time she was bearing her elder children. But this is not yet a sufficiently accurate consideration of the subject; I want to know also of which type the mother was, for, in my opinion, the right age for the parenthood of a woman depends also on the type to which she belongs, whether the early maturing or the late maturing. If she knows herself to be the latter, after it is patent, as it must become patent to every one once the idea is placed before them, that such women are in our midst, then that woman and her husband should usually defer parenthood until she has reached at least thirty years of age. If this were done, then not the fourth, fifth or seventh but the first child would stand a very great chance of being a world leader, a powerful mind, perhaps even a genius. First children have been geniuses (Sir Isaac Newton was an only child); all depends on the age, the conscious desire, the general type and the surrounding conditions during prenatal state of her infant, of the mother who bears him and the father from whom he also inherits potentialities.

A few investigations bearing on the effect of the parent’s age have been published by the Eugenics Society and some individuals, but none of these appear to me to be of any value, for none take into account the necessary data concerning the type of the mother which I here point out, and in all the calculations crude errors occur.

The best woman, with comparatively few exceptions, is already and will still more in the future be the woman who, out of a long, healthy and vitally active life, is called upon to spend but a comparatively small proportion of her years in an exclusive subservience to motherhood. A woman should have eighty to ninety active years of life; if she bears three or perhaps four children, she will, even if she gives up all her normal activities during the later months of pregnancy and the earlier of nursing, still have cut out of her life but a very small proportion of its total. She should, indeed, after she once is a mother, always devote a proportion of her energies to the necessary supervision of her children’s growth and education, but with the increasing number of schools and specialists, nurses, teachers and instructors of all sorts, the individual mother has much less of the purely physical labour of her children than formerly. That this is not only so, but is approved by the State can be seen at once by imagining a working class mother insisting on keeping her child at home all day under her personal supervision—the School Inspector would step in and take the child from her for a certain number of hours every day. But this book is primarily for middle and upper class women, and for them motherhood increasingly should mean a widening of their interests and occupations.

The counter-idea still expressed, even by leading doctors and others, is that the whole capability of the individual mother should be devoted solely to contributing to her children. This is exemplified in the recent statement of Blair Bell: “A normal woman, therefore, would not exploit her capabilities for individual gain, but for the benefit of her descendants.” This view is a false one and is based on a narrow vision.

This pictures an endless chain of fruitless lives all looking ever to some supreme future consummation which never materializes. By means of this perpetual sinking of woman’s personality in a mistaken interpretation of her duty to the race, every generation is sacrificed in turn. The result has not been productive of good, happiness or beauty for the majority. No; the individual woman, normal or better than the average, should use her intellect for her individual gain in creative work; not only because of its value to the age and community in which she lives, but also for the inheritance she may thus give her children and so that when her children are grown up they may find in their mother not only the kind attendant of their youth, but their equal in achievement. With a woman of capacities perhaps still exceptional, but by no means so rare as some men writers would like to pretend, the pursuit of her work or profession and honourable achievement in it is not at all incompatible with but is highly beneficial to her motherhood. As Charlotte Gilman says:—

CHAPTER XVI
Birth and Beauty

When all goes well and there is no accidental hastening of the birth by shock or jar which dislodges the child too soon, the birthday finds its place in the ordinary rhythm of the woman’s existence. We speak generally of the “nine months” during which the child is borne by its mother, but this nine months is a fictitious number depending on our calendar months, and the developing child is actually ten lunar months within its mother. Just as the average almost universal period of the woman’s rhythm has twenty-eight days cycle, so on this number of days does the circle of months leading to birth depend. Ten months of twenty-eight days each is the full period of development, at the close of which the child seeks its exit through birth. As a rule the day of birth corresponds to some extent, if not quite accurately, to the former rhythm of her menstrual waves.

An interesting paper containing various scientific data (not all of which are universally accepted) is to be found in the Anat Anzeiger of 1897 by Beard. What is actually the spring behind this rhythm is as yet largely unknown, but recent work on the internal secretions from the ovary such as was described by Starling in the Croonian Lecture, 1905 (who quotes Marshall and Jolly and other workers), appears to indicate that this function like so many others in our system is due to the activities of certain glands yielding internal secretions. These, penetrating the whole system, have a controlling influence upon activities remote from their source.

For the birth itself, the mother should be in experienced hands, preferably those of a highly trained and certified midwife or maternity nurse such as Queen Charlotte’s or the London Hospital supplies, one who is experienced in all that has to be done in normal, healthy circumstances, and who can detect at once any necessity for specialized help. If the mother has lived rightly and wisely, dieted as I suggest and is properly formed (as, of course, should be assured through examination some time before the birth is expected), the birth should be, however terrible an experience, yet one which is safely passed.

In the days which follow she will have much to endure, and instead of the peace and quietness which she expected, she will find that she has constant disturbances incidental to the nursing of one who is, in essentials, a surgical case.

Possibly due to the inconveniences involved in staying in bed, there is a tendency at present to encourage the mother to get up and at least walk about the room and be up for an hour or two within ten days or less of the date of the birth. Almost every one with whom I have come in contact, advises this, and in a certain school, particularly those who go in for what is called “Twilight Sleep,” there is not only an effort to get the mother up early, but a pride on the part of the mother and her advisers when she gets up perhaps within two or three days of the birth.

Some women who have had a good many children boast of how they are up and about in ten days. I glance critically at all who tell me that, examining both their figures and their general appearance. Only one woman of all who have ever discussed this matter with me urged the entirely old-fashioned month in bed following the birth. But, and this is very important, she was the only one who, having had many children, at the same time had done most notable and arduous brain work, and also retained her youthful figure and general appearance.

This quite exceptional and old-fashioned advice is what I would hand on to women to-day. The modern craze for getting up quickly is absolutely wrong, and has a fundamentally deleterious effect on the general health of our women. I should go so far as to say that not only should a woman stay in bed the entire month, but that she should for two weeks longer scarcely put her foot to the ground. She may lie out of doors or on sofas, but, after a birth, she should lie about for the whole of six weeks.

This may startle my readers. I, who look so keenly into the future, who am so progressive, so modern and so desirous of the great and rapid evolution of women, to return to the old custom of our grandmothers, and demand, not only the month in bed, to ask even more, that there should be six weeks spent practically lying about all the time! Is this not an anachronism? No. It will be observed that throughout this and my other books, my advice always has a biological basis, depending on the actual structure or the history of our bodies, and there is a very profound and physiological basis for the advice I now give. It is this—that not only during the birth is the whole system of the mother to some extent jarred and shaken; she suffers in all her nerves the sudden relief from the strain upon her muscles and in the whole readjustment of her system an extremely profound shock, and the treatment for shock entails rest. More than that, the womb which lies centrally and is so important an organ in her body, so enormously enlarged during the last months through which the child inhabited it, returns to its permanent size slowly; its strong, muscular walls tensely contract, but this contraction which reduces its size very much in the first day or two does not complete itself, does not bring the tissues back to the size which they will afterwards permanently maintain, until six weeks have elapsed. For the whole of six weeks, therefore, the womb will be larger and heavier than normal and with a tendency to get out of place, while all the muscles of the body wall are weakened and out of condition by being so long stretched. A woman, therefore, should not put any strain on her muscles like standing or walking or taking any active exercise before the six weeks has elapsed, though she should, lying both on her back and on her face, do exercises calculated to restore the strength of these muscles and fit them to take on their work directly she rises. One exercise, particularly valuable and but little known, is to raise the diaphragm without breathing. This can be done during the six weeks in bed, but is particularly valuable on first rising and standing or walking. This internal pull upwards of all the organs strengthens both the internal and the outer body wall muscles. Such control deliberately and frequently exerted throughout the day does more perhaps than any one other thing to retain a slender well-formed trunk. It has also a curiously bracing and exhilarating mental effect, and as the action can be done at any time unobserved, its effect can be utilized at will. The ancient Greeks laid great stress on the value of control of the diaphragm.

It may be argued that during the time the child was within it the womb was very much larger than it is after birth, and nevertheless then active walking exercise was recommended. Yes: but during that time the womb was supported by the increased tension on the front muscles of the body wall against which it pressed and was thus assisted in maintaining its position; but after birth, while it is so very much smaller than quite recently it has been, and, at the same time, while still much larger than normal, and more than the weakened internal muscles are prepared to support, it is no longer held firm by the tense body wall, for the body wall is now limp, crumpled and almost incapable of supporting any strain. If, therefore, the woman stands too soon, the inner organs which are again beginning to find their natural place—the long digestive tract and other organs—tend to flop downwards, to bulge out the still loose and strained abdominal muscles, and press the still too heavy womb out of its normal position, the position to which it must return, and must permanently take up if the woman is to have her general health maintained throughout the rest of her life. Hence, before she sets foot to the ground she must lie the nature-decreed six weeks, and meanwhile exercise the abdominal muscles so as to prepare them to act properly.

When I see and hear of women either forced or lured or eagerly getting out of bed in ten days or a week after child birth, I wonder what will happen to all those women ten or fifteen years hence. They will be fortunate if they do not have what is now so increasingly prevalent, namely some form of displacement of the womb with all its attendant miseries of handicapped motherhood and wifehood. I maintain that it is nothing short of cruelty and criminality to allow the modern woman to get up quickly in the way she does. It may possibly be claimed by some of the foolish and hardy pioneers of getting up rapidly, that when she is a middle-aged or elderly woman she will not be suffering from the slow relaxations and displacements which result from putting pressure too soon on abdominal muscles unprepared to bear the strain. This will not make things safe for the average woman however. It is not realized how appalling is the prevalence of womb displacements among the lower working-class women, those who are forced by circumstances to get up in a week or ten days and go back to work. I think the modern increase in displacements in middle and upper class women is partly to be traced to the tendency to get up too soon, and also to the impatient practitioner’s use of instruments to hasten a birth which would come naturally in good time. When once the perineal and inner supporting muscles have been torn, they are too often mended superficially, but inner tears are left which make the perineum an insufficient support for the womb, of which the result is its slow and gradual dropping out of place, which some years afterwards may acutely handicap the unfortunate woman.

In the name of all the fond and happy mothers that I hope the future may contain, I would urge every one who possibly can to insist on having six weeks of “lying in.” This is not only in the interests of general health but of beauty. Too long have we become tolerant of the hideous formation of the body which is common in older women. We have domesticated some animals[8] solely for our own purposes, and they are hideous indeed. Why should we women permit a comparable standard for ourselves? Why not insist on at least as much care as is devoted to the race-horse? Why not take a period of rest after the great effort of maternity proportionately as long as a she-wolf or tigress takes in her cave, fed by her mate while she lies about and plays with her cubs?[9] The standard of beauty of the racing mare, of the wild tigress or she-wolf is slender and not markedly different from that of its virgin state. Such a standard, and not that of the over-taxed, man-used, domesticated animals should be that on which we women should insist.

In this connection should be mentioned one other way in which the following of Nature and obedience to her law works for good. In the next chapter I mention the baby’s right to be fed by nature’s food, and while the infant is nursing from its mother it stimulates contractions in the womb which very much assist in bringing it to its right size and position, and so the act of nursing benefits not only the infant but its mother.

A number of researches by various experts have been made, which proves that the womb reacts to the stimulus of suckling by the child. Pfister (Beit. z. Geb. u. Gyn., 1901, vol. v, p. 421), for instance, found that very definite contractions took place during the baby’s suckling, particularly for the first eight days after its birth; also Temesváry (Journ. Obstet. and Gyn. Brit. Emp., 1903, vol. iii, p. 511) found that the natural involution of the womb after birth was distinctly more rapid in those who nursed their babies than in those who did not.

Prolonging the nursing period does undoubtedly not tend to increase the beauty of the woman’s bosom but to deteriorate it, but, for at any rate the first few months, it is very advantageous both to the mother and to the child that she should feed it naturally. If throughout the nursing period she slings her breast properly from above, and if when the nursing period ceases she massages and treats the breast properly, it should not lose its beauty in the way which is alas, to-day, too general.

Mothers, in the self-sacrifice involved in their motherhood, too often forget their duty to remain beautiful. All youth is revolted by ugliness, consciously or unconsciously. A girl should not be indirectly taught to dread motherhood herself by seeing the wreckage her own mother has allowed it to make of her. A high demand for beauty of form by mothers is not selfishness but a racial duty.

CHAPTER XVII
Baby’s Rights