XIII
Feminism repudiates, from time to time, the charge against it of belittling Motherhood. Yet how can it profess to credit the maternal function with due values or significance when it denies the obligations and responsibilities thereof, asks no economic concessions for it? And when, in place of demanding privileges indispensable to its exercise and complete fulfilment, it makes no distinction, in respect of work and the worker, between childless and unmarried women and mothers and expectant mothers? And this despite the fact that, for a period of eighteen months at very least, the mother"s best vital resources belong by rights, biological and moral, to each babe she produces--nine for the pre-natal building of its body and brain, and nine for lactation.
Her moral obligation to nurse, and the criminality of her omission when able to do so, have been emphasised as follows by Sir J.
Crichton-Browne:
"Dr. Robertson, Medical Officer of Health for Birmingham has shown that while the infant-mortality of breast-fed infants is 78 _per 1000 births_, that of infants receiving no breast-milk is 232 _per_ 1000. And Sir Arthur Newsholme, Medical Adviser to the Local Government Board, has shown that the probability of death from epidemic diarrhoea is 54 _times greater among infants fed on cow"s milk_ than among those fed on breast-milk, and 150 _times greater_ amongst infants fed on condensed milk.
"But it is not merely in a high infant death-rate that the evil effects of the want of breast-milk stand confessed. Where it does not kill it often maims, and is responsible for malnutrition, rickets, tuberculosis, and a multiplicity of ailments. Every doctor is familiar with the alabaster babies, flabby, limp, languid, and painfully pallid, who have never tasted their natural nutriment."
Dr. Truby King records the interesting fact that the finest calf-skin, known as Paris Calf, is obtained from calves reared by their mothers, in order to provide the finest veal for Paris. So supple and smooth-haired and superior is the skin of these mother-suckled creatures that dealers are able to distinguish it at once from the skin of calves that have been artificially fed.
About this, Mr. Horace G. Regnart kindly supplies me with the following significant data:
"If we feed a calf, "on the bucket," the calf"s coat loses its shine and becomes dull. We say it is "dead." A couple of days is sufficient to deaden the coat. And it takes three weeks or a month "on a cow" to get the gloss back. _A quart of milk direct from the cow is as good as a gallon of milk out of a bucket._
"We do not attempt to feed our female calves so well as we feed the bulls. It is too costly. Our heifers are put on "the bucket" when three days old. I buy a cow to rear my bull-calves on. I once reared a bull on "the bucket" satisfactorily. But I gave him twelve gallons of new milk every day after he was five months old, and kept it up till he was fourteen months. _One cow that gives three gallons does a calf just as well as twelve gallons_ via _the bucket, and is much cheaper._ Some crack bulls have three and four five-gallon cows at once, and go to Shows with all their nurses in attendance.
"Once I reared a bull as we rear the heifers. But he was a failure. His daughters are only half the size they ought to be."
(An example of direct developmental inheritance--in terms of deterioration--from father to daughter.)
XIV
Comparing a calf with a human baby, it becomes self-evident that the diet suited for the large, crude creature which trots about on four legs shortly after birth must be wholly unsuited to the delicate digestion and the subtle psychological needs of the small and complex, highly-organised human infant, which remains so long a helpless infant.
The all-important _proteid_ of every order of creature differs from that of every other. Before any form of alien _proteid_ can be built into the body of a living organism, the digestion and a.s.similation of this creature must first have laboriously disintegrated and reconstructed it to the form of its own individual _proteid_.
The Irish tradition that persons not nursed during infancy by their mothers are beings without souls has much to justify it. Even the ill-nourished, sickly babes of working-mothers have an essentially _human_ look in eyes and features, possess far more of nervous power, and are of appreciably higher and more intelligent psychology than are the bottle-fed infants of the cultured.
The bottle-fed start handicapped for life, both in const.i.tution and mentality. It is safe to say that all great men and women have been suckled by their mothers or have come of stock thus humanly nurtured.
That they were thus humanly nurtured during their momentous first nine months of life, is the reason, doubtless, why so many of our greatest men have sprung from humble origin.
The incapacity of a mother to nourish the babe she has borne should be known for a mark of degeneracy--sign, too, that she was unfitted to have borne a child, because deficient in the vital reserve requisite to carry her maternal function to its normal biological and psychological conclusion. Just as a statesman or a general would be held unfitted for _his_ function, if he should lack the physical and mental enterprise to complete his national undertakings.
That for the nine months preceding its birth the infant obtains its nourishment directly from its mother"s blood, and for nine months after birth it obtains this, normally, from her milk--_her_ digestive processes having so a.s.similated the originally brute and vegetable proteids of her food that these are now _human_ proteids, and are ready, therefore, to be built into the infant"s body with the least possible tax upon its own a.s.similative powers--proves a number of important facts.
First: that an infant"s digestive powers remain, normally, for nine months after birth, in a more or less embryonic state; slowly and gradually developing capacity to convert the products of the brute and vegetable kingdoms into forms suitable for building into its human organisation. (Just as we see the digestive organs of the child progressively developing power to a.s.similate an adult dietary.)
Secondly: that the infant"s digestion remains thus undeveloped obviously in order that as little as possible of its vital power may be expended in the complex processes of a.s.similation, all available vital-power being urgently required for its exhaustingly rapid brain- and body-building.
Thirdly: that where an artificial diet forces precocious development upon the infant-digestion--since all precocity is degeneracy, all the organs concerned in digestion will be, necessarily, more or less structurally defective and functionally inefficient; as a consequence of not having been permitted time and rest to develop slowly and stably over the normal allotted period. (Proof is supplied by the premature development of teeth, which occurs in artificially-fed babies some months before dent.i.tion is normally due. And these teeth and those that succeed them are of such perishable structure that present-day children need perpetual dental repairs.)
Fourthly: that such misapplication of vital resources for the premature development and abnormal functions of precocious digestive organs entails inevitably corresponding loss of vital power for general development.
Fifthly--and by no means lastly, but perhaps most important of all: that since the infant-digestion is quite incapable of properly converting brute and vegetable-proteids into human proteid, infants artificially fed must necessarily _build into their brains and bodies lower-grade proteids_--and proteids so imperfectly a.s.similated as to be something less than human, and, accordingly, more or less brute or vegetable still in their inherences. And since all living cells and tissues reproduce upon the plan of the parent-cells and tissues they were derived from, it is clear that the abnormal cells and tissues constructed of these half-brute, or half-vegetable proteids must be abnormal; unstable and degenerate, and p.r.o.ne to lapse readily to still further degrees of deterioration and disease.
Hence a source of our neurotic, neurasthenic, adenoid-afflicted, mentally-defective and otherwise diseased children. Hence too the increasing criminality--which is _animality_, of course--that characterises a considerable proportion of the rising generation.
Each further generation artificially fed in infancy can but deviate still further from the Human Normal, becoming ever less human; brain and body-cells reproducing themselves, throughout life, on the plan of their infant-construction of half-brute or half-vegetable proteids. One sees the ox in the dull, soulless eyes, in the bovine flesh, the stolid faces, and in the crude animal natures of many modern little ones, to whom calf-diet was fed before they had developed the digestive power of transforming this into substance highly vitalised enough for human brain and body-building. And the less their systems have rebelled against and have rejected, but, on the contrary, have conformed to and have thriven upon such brute-diet, the cruder are their organisations. Of this order are the insensate child-monsters who win prizes at Baby-shows.
To one who realises that, of all the powers of Woman, the ability to nurse her babe is second in importance only to her first and vital function of producing it, the cry and clamour and impa.s.sioned fallacy that have swirled around the trivial detail of her Suffrage-disabilities show grotesque beside the human tragedy of her increasing biological disability and her increasing psychical aversion to fulfil this indispensable and sacred mother-office. To despise which, as being a function woman possesses in common with the humbler creatures, is as narrow-sighted as it would be to scorn the genius of Shakespeare because both dog and pig, poor things! possess brains. Moreover, in forfeiting this maternal faculty, woman reverts to the mode of those crude rudimentary species _below_ the Mammalia.
"... _Each mother"s breast_ _Feeds a flower of blue, beyond all blessing blest._"
Notwithstanding all this, Feminism, in its grim materialism, blind to the mystical beauty of Life and the sacredness of Individuality, regards women mainly as parts of an economic machinery. And to serve as such, it standardises all in body, mind and apt.i.tude, to economic ends; the young and tender girls whose shaping frames are shaping to become the mystical looms of evolving Humanity; the young wives in whom love and marriage have set mysterious processes in motion; the young pregnant mothers in whom the shuttle of Life is already marvellously flying, interweaving the luminous threads of a soul with a body of flesh.
Nature made women ministrants of Love and Life, for the creation of an ever more healthful and efficient, a n.o.bler and more joyous Humanity.
Feminism degrades them to the status of industrial mechanisms, whereof the commercial products are the chiefest values, and children no more than bye-products.
And what bye-products they are! G.o.d help them!--Who alone can help them--this pathetic rubble of pallid, sickly, suffering, and dejected infant- and child-Life; the violet-hued babies, with their dull eyes glazed by misery, their leaden, half-paralysed limbs; the blind and crippled, halt and deaf, the imbecile and feeble-minded children, apathetic, neurasthenic, joyless; as too, on the other hand, the low-browed, st.u.r.dy and soulless, or the debased and evil--All the generation of degeneracy which our deteriorate and enfeebled looms of womanhood are grinding out to-day.
Though shut from sight and thought, in the prisons, hospitals and other inst.i.tutions of our modern civilisations is an ever-swelling, ever-rising, further-menacing tide of diseased, defective, insane and criminal mankind, product of ours and of those others" violations of Natural Law; clogging the River of Life, choking the Springs of Evolution, damming the current of Progress.
CHAPTER VII
FEMINIST DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE DESTRUCTIVE OF WOMANLY ATTRIBUTES, MORALE AND PROGRESS
"A woman versed in that finest of all fine arts, the beautifying of daily life."
I
In _Woman and Labour_, Miss Schreiner laments as follows, picturesquely but speciously: "Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge buildings steam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands (often those of men) produce the clothings of half the world; and we dare no longer say, proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe our peoples!"
A scene is conjured of brute-men with clubs savagely attacking and destroying hapless women"s innocent spinning-wheels, as Mrs. Arkwright ruthlessly destroyed her husband"s cherished models. Yet who, regarding the subject dispa.s.sionately, sees cause for anything but gladness that modern woman has not still to spin the linen of her household and the garments of its members--for anything but thankfulness for that intelligent male-brain which carried the woman-invention of the needle to its higher adaptations in the weaving and the sewing-machine? Who can justly regret that the taking over by men, in factories, of wholesale brewings and bakings, jam-makings, and so forth, has relieved the other s.e.x of ceaseless drudgeries; and in so relieving it of drudgeries of house-keeping has left it free to develop the higher and the more intellectual arts of home-making?
"_Slowly but determinedly, as the old fields of labour close up and are submerged behind us, we demand entrance into the new_," Miss Schreiner affirms. And to emphasise our determination, the demand is printed in her book, as I have reproduced it, in Italics.
Losing sight altogether of the inestimable benefits to woman secured by the intervention of men between her and the hardest and the most debasing employments, she further protests, "any attempt to divide the occupations in which male and female intellects and wills should be employed, must be to attempt a purely artificial and arbitrary division."
"Our cry is, _We take all labour for our province!_"
Nevertheless, clever and intuitive woman as she is, she confesses (now the Italics are mine), "_It may be with s.e.xes as with races, the subtlest physical differences between them may have their fine mental correlatives_." And yet, oh why, having come upon so promising a vein of truth, did she not follow it to its logical conclusions, and find in it all the answers to her extremist demands, and, with these, the refutations of her Feminist plea and claims?