Part 4

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.

[11] A woman of 45 years of age gave birth recently at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, Paddington, to her 23rd child. Ten children is not uncommon.

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.

[12] Professor MacBride, dealing recently with the “Inheritance of Defect” (_Daily Telegraph_, January 8, 1925) said: “The question of questions was whether the failure of the lowest strata of society was due to their surroundings or to their inborn characters. Such questions must be ultimately decided by experiment; and proper experimental work could only be done with animals; we were not entitled to make _corpora vilia_ of our fellow human beings. For this reason he would direct attention to the common goldfish, whose weird monstrosities were all originally due to the starvation of the eggs with respect to light and air in the earliest stages of development. The result of this starvation was to weaken the developmental power and to produce a disharmonious arrest of growth of various organs. Similar arrests of growth occurred in human beings, and were the causes of mental and bodily defects. Their original cause, however, must be sought in the starvation and poisoning of the blood of the mother, but, once started, they were hereditary.”

[13] Working people live on tinned milk, margarine, and substitute eggs――all deficient in necessary vitamins.

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.

[14] I am strongly of opinion that experience of maternity, even more than of marriage alone, would help the teacher. Some women, even teachers, are bored by children until they have one of their own, whereupon all children of all ages become interesting.

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.

V

JASON AND ADMETUS _Men_

Before we pass on to an attempt at a summary and conclusion of the argument, it may be as well to re-state briefly what is the matter with men. Certainly they are not such fierce tyrants as when first we fought them; certainly they have some grounds to complain of the feminine arrogance which, not content with proving equality, wants to go on and prove women the superior sex. We might, on grounds of science perhaps, advance this claim, urging that, since a female being needs one more chromosome for its creation than a male, it must, therefore, be of higher importance. Should we do so, and seek to live alone on the planet, producing our children by parthenogenesis, our pride would be doomed to a fall. Such children, there is reason to believe, would all be males. At least, that is what happens when the experiment is tried by sea-urchins. Men, on the other hand, like to pretend that our assumption of intelligence and independence is but a momentary spurt in a race which must end in masculine victory and feminine submission. They admit that the great development of our freedom in body and mind has given us a serious advantage, and the more discerning among them urge their fellows to press on and catch us up. Others trundle the golden apples beseechingly, but still Atalanta runs.

I believe it to be true that the education and outlook of men is more old-fashioned than that of women reared in the freedom of feminist traditions. Men have not yet realized how women’s outlook is changing, nor attempted very seriously to adapt themselves to the change. They will do so, of a certainty; for, true as it may be that above all desires in woman is that to be pleasing to men, it is still truer that the desire of desires in man is to be pleasing to women. I believe that Puritanism or asceticism, of which they accuse us, is very strong in them. One of the compliments or insults that has been hurled during the sex-war is that the feminine mind is pervaded by the physical harmony of the feminine body. One may perhaps retort that the dualism of mind and matter is a very masculine philosophy; and one which, moreover, men have translated into their everyday lives by the sharp division they like to make between fighters and thinkers, games-playing idiots and thin intellectuals. Too often a woman of vitality and intelligence must choose between a soldier-gentleman and Chaucer’s clerk.[15] Should she choose the former, she takes a plunge into the past. This man exults in murder, whether of animals or of his fellow-creatures; deep down within him he is still convinced that women are divided into good and bad――and both require the handling of a master. His wife must beware how she responds to his advances; she may be thought forward or impure. Decency must above all things be preserved. Though games and the classics may have taught the English gentleman the beauty of paganism and the joy of the naked body where man is concerned, he is still stuffy in his approach to sex. He rarely brings the freshness of the morning and the joy of the open skies to the love of mistress or of wife. Plush, gilt and silk stockings express the one; pipe, the armchair at the fireside, dinner, and a coldly furnished bedroom, the other. Conversation is a masculine monologue, punctuated by assent. He will be good to his children, provided they are not odd, and will protect his wife. He will never lift her to rapture. She fears, and will probably deceive him.

[15] A clerk ther was of Oxenford also

That unto logyk hadde longe y-go. As leene was his hors as is a rake, And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,

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And him was lever have at his beddes heed Twenty bokes clad in black or reed.

The intellectual――perhaps by reason of the monastic tradition of learning, perhaps because he finds Jason so revolting――does all that he can to forget the needs of the body. Woman counts as one of them. She is a burden, a responsibility, a distraction, an incursion of the material into a world of contemplation. As for children and domestic life, they would make an end to all thought, to all art. An instinctive life――so he thinks――is possible only in spasm, if at all, for a man with serious mental work to accomplish. If woman persists in keeping him company, then she must shoulder the burdens, tend him and care for him, and leave him alone when he doesn’t want her. It is this contempt for the natural play of instinct which eats the heart out of life for many intellectuals, men and women, of to-day. They dread the gift of themselves, the loss of independence which passion would bring, and therefore they never give freely. In part, they are cherishing the medieval tradition that to be worthy of spiritual or mental labour man and woman must go aside and renounce; in part, they are inspired by a tight conception of materialism, in which individuals are hurled like lumps of matter by dynamic forces through space, unable to do more than come near, but never mingle one with another. This view of life and the medieval are combining to destroy our world in lovelessness and despair.

The old-fashioned mind clings to spiritual duties and consolations and the framework of Church discipline, as a bulwark against personal licence; the more modern mind is dominated by mechanism――which is, after all, no more than the rational control of matter――and seeks in an intelligent organization of the State, a framework within which each individual is to perform the duties for which he is best fitted. To neither conception is love between individuals, or sex-love between man and woman, important. In effect, personal relationships do not matter. The Christian doctrine of all-embracing love was once potent, but fails to-day because of the foundation of God, dogma, and Church on which it is built and which modern people cannot accept. “To love thy neighbour as thyself” is also inadequate without knowledge and understanding. But the rational materialists’ attitude――such, for instance, is that of the Bolsheviks――to human relationships, in particular to women and sex, is as lacking in the sense of human dignity as the Christian. Monogamy and undiscriminating licence rest upon a common basis of contempt for love and personality, both asserting that the desire of a man is for a woman, of a woman for a man, but no matter whom. Dualism, as ever, is the culprit. Sex-love is to be no more than a physical need――no part of the serious business of life. Science has brought a more modern attitude to matter which by its effect upon the imagination may change our conception of personality and sex. Force, struggle, solidity, contact, may yield to gentleness, non-resistance, intermingling and uniting――not by an ethical change, but by a change in scientific thought. We shall no longer think of mind and matter as wronging or thwarting one another, because they are not different forces; and we shall no longer be able to separate physical from mental virtue or depravity. We shall no longer value a love that suppresses or disregards the union of personality.

Taboos and superstitions, struggling dynamic individuals or States――how may we set up a new vision? Perhaps what I have written above seems far-fetched to the reader, but I do not think our life can be cut up into compartments. Philosophy and sex are more important in politics than General Elections. The revolt against the all-powerful Christian State began in the assertion of certain people that their love of good fruit and wine or their enjoyment of sex were not worthy of hell-fire. On personal conduct, on our standards of personal relationship, man to woman, parents to children, are built the customs and laws of States and ultimately their national and international policy. It is here, then, with man and woman, that we must begin. I have in mind, as I write, a piece of Chinese porcelain, on which the sage or poet sits with his book and long pipe; a lovely and elegant lady peeps over his shoulder, and close at hand plays an impish child. I do not think that the Chinese who conceived it expected that poet to write bad verses, or, if a sage, to compose worthless philosophy. On the contrary, to love with devotion, to be learned, to have children, are ideas which have shaped the harmony of Chinese life. As compared with their generous acceptance of instinct our Christian dread of sex and horror of the body are obscene.

If we are to make peace between man and woman, and by their unity and partnership change the ideas that govern our politics and our outlook on the world, it is essential that men should make a more determined attempt to understand what feminists are seeking. It is useless to go on abusing, or pretending that this is a matter of minor importance. It is essential also that women should think clearly and continue in courage and honesty of word and action, neither abandoning all for the pursuit of pleasure nor glorying in opportunities for an oppressive morality belonging to past ages. First and foremost, man or woman, we are human beings. There is a great deal of the work in the community which we can each do with equal ability, given equal training and opportunity. There are other tasks which we must agree to delegate to one another, and neither despise the other for performing them. Life and harmony, generosity and peace are the ideals which the best thought of feminism has set before us. We believe that States and individuals can put them into practice. Will man not pause to understand before he continues on the path of destruction and strife, cupidity and war? Can we not persuade Jason from barbarity and Admetus to the abandonment of his fears? To live with vigour, body and mind and imagination, without fear or shame or dread of death; to drive these baser passions from the hold they have upon our morality and our politics――this is what we ask of modern men and women. They can come to it only in a reckless love of one another, a passion that gives again and again without fear of hurt or exhaustion. It is not an abandonment to nature and to instinct that we need. Pure and barbaric instinct is no more. Our bodies are too much impregnated by inherited habit and knowledge, too much surrounded in their growth by the findings of science. Men and women are not creatures of clay, nor disembodied spirits; but things of fire intertwining in understanding, torrents leaping to join in a cascade of mutual ecstacy. There is nothing in life to compare with this uniting of minds and bodies in men and women who have laid aside hostility and fear and seek in love the fullest understanding of themselves and of the universe. You cannot measure it in inches, nor turn it on and off like a tap. You cannot stay it now and indulge it another time. You cannot come to it by religion or by unaided reason, or by the brute courage of sheer physical vitality. Jealousy is death. Dualism is nonsense, compartments unavailing. You must have in you the thought that is creation; life’s spring, and the daring of its unconquered waters――so may you transform the world and people it with gods who know no more the hates and littleness of men.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――A Table of Contents has been provided for the convenience of the reader, and is granted to the public domain.

――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.