Chapter XIII

.) that girls ought not to be expressly trained to be mothers, and to prevent misunderstanding, it may be well to touch upon positive education.

Nothing in all the circumstances of a girl’s upbringing ought to be allowed to injure her health, and, in consequence, her physical capacity to bear healthy children. Much of the anxiety expressed as to whether a girl may be perfectly healthy, as an individual, and yet unable to bear children, is misplaced. It is quite true that the finest types of women are likely to be less prolific than the more degraded type. The feeble-minded are the most prolific of all. It seems you cannot have both quantity and quality. But the great need of the world is precisely quality. Healthy girls are not sterile, and the causes of sterility are not to be found in the women’s movement; they are to be found in idleness and luxury on the one hand, and in poverty on the other; beyond everything, they are to be found in vice and excess. The miserable health of the women of our working classes—the enormous majority of our women, that is to say—is one of the greatest dangers and social crimes of the day. But even all middle-class girls are not as healthy as they might be. There is a certain amount of overpressure in lessons and in games, and one knows of many cases where girls at home are worried into sickness by the conflicting claims upon them. Sometimes one hears of grotesque ignorance on the part of school- and house-mistresses, even on the part of mothers, of the very elements of personal hygiene. Girls should be taught from an early age to practise the hygiene of their own bodies, and to take a pride in being and keeping fit, and they should not think shame of easing off when they are not fit. It is most important in schools to get a sensible public opinion that encourages neither slackness nor prudery, and it is for the teachers to be well enough grounded in physiology to know how to direct and maintain this public opinion. A considerable amount of toughening is good for girls as for boys. Looking into the causes of overpressure, both mental and physical, one sees that most of it would never have occurred, if men had not made it so hard for women to get opportunities. Men have in the past so often argued that women and girls should have the desired opportunities, if they could fulfil the same conditions as boys and men, and I can remember in my schooldays a tremendous pressure to show that girls could fulfil the same conditions as boys. The women of the future will claim freedom and endowment when they fulfil the conditions suitable for women and girls.

Girls, as well as boys, should, _before puberty_, be taught the simple facts of sex, and this should be done in connection with other simple science teaching. They will accept these facts quite serenely, if they are not greatly stressed and differentiated from other knowledge. They should not be troubled with pathology until they are full grown. Boys and girls should be brought up together, and the barrack system of living should be entirely abolished for both sexes. This does not mean that boys and girls should do all the same things, either in work or play; these should be adapted to the ascertained capacities of the individuals and not arranged on rigid _a priori_ schemes. If the girl has grown to young womanhood with a healthy and active body and mind, she will have all the essentials for good motherhood, and if she wishes to learn the details of mothercraft, by all means give her opportunity to do so. But it is not necessary, or even desirable, to force every young woman to do this. If she is broadly developed as a human being, she can learn mothercraft when she is about to marry. Then, indeed, she should learn it, and the man who is about to marry should also study the duties of parentage.

It is one of the fond delusions of middle-class reactionaries that a girl will be a better mother if she idles about at home when she has left school, instead of taking up some definite and attaching work. This is absolutely untrue. Many of the qualities that go to make a good mother can be developed and strengthened in other work. The aimless, vacuous young woman of our middle classes is a standing reproach to her parents, who are silly enough to require or allow her so to waste all her virtue, and in the end allow it to die of atrophy. The parasitic daughters require a whole book to themselves, and I hope they will get it. For my part, when I consider the mixture of petting and tyrannising to which they are subjected in the home, I am more often surprised by their sense than by their folly. That they ever do anything useful is to their credit, when one thinks how their lives are ordered to discourage purpose, concentration, thoroughness, independence and responsibility.

Women, who bear the children, will be increasingly concerned, as they grow in mental stature, with the quality of the children produced. Theirs, it is said, is the task of handing on the torch of life. They must ask themselves, with ever deepening sense of responsibility, what is the life they are making? Is it worthy? And, while sterility will rightly trouble them, because it is the result of disease, they will not allow themselves to be frightened by the smaller birth-rate per woman. They will perhaps think that the best remedy would be to make motherhood possible for the millions of maidens, now childless against their will. As they know more, they will recognise with joy that a woman’s natural instinct to give herself when she loves and not otherwise, is a sound racial instinct, and that many problems will be solved when the action of natural selection is counter-balanced by sexual selection. When invited by reactionaries to widen still further the breach between men and women, and to admire the effects of specialisation and division of labour, women will perhaps ask themselves what these have done, even in the industrial world, and question whether they desire the same results in the family. The worker has lost his old joy in the work; the product of his work has lost beauty and excellence; the relations between employer and employee have become inhuman. Do we really wish, we women, to see these results in the home? Do men?

And woman not only bears the child, but she is its natural protector and guardian. In the way civilised men regard assaults on children, in their helplessness to protect the child from bad men,—and women,—in the monstrous absurdity of the phrase “the criminal child,” and all the cruelties and stupidities involved in that phrase, one sees how men, with the best intentions, have failed, because they would insist upon doing women’s work. Man is legally, by the laws man has made, the only parent of the child, and the condition of the child truly reflects this legal fiction. When men go abroad for a living, for adventure, for glory or for plunder, what becomes of their regard for the child? They beget everywhere, children, surely the most deserted on earth, who have neither father nor country, and they leave the problem of half-breeds as a most bitter inheritance for their children’s children. Letourneau says that legal monogamy has for its object the regulation of succession and the division of property; so Hagar and Ishmael in all times and nations have been repudiated.

Now, at last, there are signs that the light is breaking. Knowledge is showing men that neither their own happiness nor the welfare of the child can ever be served by the subjection, the crippling or the thwarting of women. And intelligent men are coming over in their thousands. Even a very rough crowd in the Midlands, that had been stoning the women’s suffrage pilgrims, because they were supposed to be militants, cried out to them as they went home, after a meeting, “We are all for it!” meaning they were all for the enfranchisement of women, although they felt so shocked at the violence of the militants that they felt impelled themselves to resort to worse violence.

Men have said to us over and over again, “You are quite right. You ought to get it, and you will get it. Go on fighting. It is a woman’s question, and you women must solve it for yourselves.” It is strange to women that such men have not seen the baseness of this attitude. It is strange that they cannot see that they alone have the power, and that, under their fair words, they are in effect saying, “Get it, if you can,” for all the world like a bullying big boy who has stolen the smaller boy’s bread. It is strange that they should be willing in this matter to show themselves so inferior to women; for when did women ever say to their menfolk: “Your freedom, your dignity, your ideals are nothing to me. These are men’s questions; let them settle their affairs without our help”? Just as women have carried men in their arms, when they were weak and whimpering and ugly, till they could run alone; just as women have nourished the babes at their breasts, and given their lives for them, so have we women (in the words of Miss Anna Shaw) “carried all the weak causes in our arms, until they were strong and could run alone, and then—then—they forgot us!” In the French Revolution, at Peterloo, in the American crusade against slavery, among the Boers in South Africa, in the Chinese revolution, in Ireland now, when did women ever separate their lives and interests from those of men?

There is this excuse for the men: first, that they are by nature slower than women, and are only now awakening to the fact that, while men’s lives have changed greatly during the past century, women’s lives have changed immensely more, and that something like a complete revolution has taken place in the education and industrial position of women, and they cannot be expected to be the same as they were before these changes; and, secondly, that unlimited power is more demoralising even than subjection. Where men are treating women as equally human, the sense of comradeship is growing. One of the most moving speeches made at Budapest, at the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in June 1913, was a very simple statement by Miss Jenny af Forselles, a Finnish Member of Parliament. She said that, in the great national sorrow and the terrible struggle with a less civilised nation, their solace and inspiration was the comradeship between the women and men. Those who heard her will not forget the quiet thrill of her aspiration, expressed in her Biblical, slightly archaic German—“_Wir wollen seyn ein einig Volk_,” and the hope it gave, that in some distant day the union of peoples might be a union of the whole _free_ people.

I have refrained as much as possible from dogmatism about the true nature of Woman and about what women will do. I know some people confidently assert that women are better than men, and that women are going to perform miracles. Well, some of us think that the movement itself, now, is miraculous, and have had ample reward in the comradeship of men in the movement.

“Divinity hath surely touched my heart; I have possessed more joy than earth can lend; I may attain what time shall never spend. Only let not my duller days destroy The memory of thy witness and my joy.”

Our faith would be weak if it could be dashed by the human faults in women, and of women in the movement as well as all the other women. It is cowardice, merely, to turn from the complex, fascinating, troublesome, real woman to a vapid ideal, or a devitalised norm. We must understand the real women and the real men, and have faith in them. Fear and distrust are no leaders for brave folk. The prayer which the worker in human material must ever have at heart is, “Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.”

_Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, Edinburgh_

FOOTNOTES

[1] The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in twelve months raised, at headquarters and among its affiliated societies, £42,000. I have assumed that the Women’s Social and Political Union raised as much. It seems likely that if we add together all the other societies (thirty odd), and also reckon the immense amount of money spent in travelling and so forth by voluntary workers, the total of £100,000 is well within the mark.

[2] _Realities and Ideals: The Work of Woman_, by Frederic Harrison, p. 125.

[3] _Letters to a Friend on Votes for Women_, by A. V. Dicey, K.C., LL.D., Hon. D.C.L.

[4] _The Social Evil in Chicago_, p. 114.

[5] _Sex Antagonism_, by Walter Heape, F.R.S.

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