As regards human values, it is a higher privilege to be a charming personality than to be a successful stockbroker. So that in this, as in other things, woman has been privileged by her disabilities.
III
An ever-increasing number of working-cla.s.s girls, on leaving school, enter a work-shop, a factory, or an office, and spend their time and powers in minor mechanical tasks; gumming labels on jam-pots, making match-boxes or tags for boot-laces, addressing envelopes, and other such employments, deadening to female intelligence, impulse and temperament.
Their minds and natures become too warped and narrowed to adapt later, with ease and interest, to the many and varied intelligent functions of the home. They escape thence, accordingly, after a few months or years of marriage (supposing them to have given up their industrial tasks for a s.p.a.ce even), and abandoning home and children, return to the old narrow, mechanical routine, to which alone their poor stultified brains have been shaped. In the education of girls, the Subconscious mimetic element in their impressionable natures should be borne in mind. It may be turned to excellent, as to disastrous account.
M. Vologotsky, head of the Omsk Government, has called attention to a significant phenomenon of modern Russian life--namely, that the women take no interest in their homes. This he attributes to their low states of culture. Could they but be persuaded to become "house-proud"--with all that this means and entails--he considers that the task of the Regeneration of this vast unhappy, although singularly gifted, people would be greatly furthered.
Const.i.tutional deterioration, inherited or acquired, entailing defective s.e.x-development, causes many young working-women to be deficient in the maternal instinct, whence spring fondness for and interest in children.
The same defective s.e.x-development, disqualifying them for wifehood, results in the vast majority of working-cla.s.s wives lapsing, after a few years of marriage with normal, virile young men, into haggard, neurasthenic wrecks.
The whole of this vital and important department of the woman-organisation is not only ignored in so far as scope for normal development is concerned, but, despised as subserving inferior and "merely physical" functions, every other capacity and apt.i.tude is fostered or forced at the expense of const.i.tutional reserves and resources which belong, by rights of Life and Love, to this. With the result that the vast majority of modern women are physically unfitted for, as an increasing number are temperamentally averse to the s.e.x-relation--_fons et origo_ of Life.
IV
To such degree the doctrine of Expedience and Self-for-Self-solely has spread that there are women who seek now to escape wholly the natural pangs of childbirth. Such persuade their doctors to induce labour a month or more before term; in order that the smaller-sized infant may be born with less discomfort to themselves. Others restrict their diet or abstain from certain foods, in order that the babe, starved thus and ill-nourished before birth, shall be soft and frail and easier of delivery. Dread of pain at whatsoever cost to the future of a human being--and that being their own child--actuates these unnatural and pusillanimous practices.
It is becoming a vogue for expectant mothers of the wealthier cla.s.ses to enter Maternity-Homes, where, in luxurious surroundings, they are enabled, under spinal anaesthesia (Twilight Sleep), to conclude their mother-function without suffering or inconvenience; lying in a torpor of cra.s.s insensibility while the greatest of Human Events is taking place in them. Meantime, the sensitive infant-body is dosed with the powerful drug circulating in the maternal blood.
But--whither is all this trending? Can we believe that true intelligence and progress consist in grasping greedily all the pleasures and the privileges to be had from life, and basely shirking all the hardships?
Can we believe that--suffering and effort being the laws alike of Life and Progress, and the rungs whereby we have climbed the Evolutionary ladder--we can continue to climb when, with short-sighted selfishness, we shall have stripped the ladder of its rungs? The humane use of chloroform duly a.s.suages the worst pangs. While the fine courage, fort.i.tude and sweetness wherewith the soul of woman fares forth naturally upon her Great Adventure, to meet this the Apotheosis of human pain, prove and still further enhance her n.o.bility. Even weak and flimsy women rise to greatness at this crisis. Powers they had never glimmered in themselves emerge and armour them, and--be it remembered--leave eternal records upon mind and character; striking spiritual roots still deeper into living function.
V
With characteristic Feminist materialism, Olive Schreiner lightly dismisses Maternity as a merely "pa.s.sive" form of labour.
Heaven save the mark! Is it pa.s.sive so to equip a microscopic cell with living human powers and aspirations that, within the s.p.a.ce of months, it makes that miraculous pilgrimage of the pre-natal evolutionary ascent whereby it becomes Man? Pa.s.sive--so to serve for living environment to this developing organism as to supply it with the multiple, complex and diverse elements, material and vital, biological and psychical, required for the manifold needs and adjustments of its evolving life and faculties?
During the ante-natal months of this miraculous Ascent, the embryo "climbs its genealogical tree," as biologists style it. That is to say, it pa.s.ses, in turn, through all the countless evolutionary phases of all the countless evolutionary ages whereof Humanity is the culminating product. Fashioning out of formlessness, slowly it attains to form.
Shaping, shaping, ever marvellously shaping, it evolves, in succession, through fish, amphibian and other rudimentary life-grades. Climbing, climbing, ever marvellously climbing, day by day, to n.o.bler heights, it is transformed at last to human shape; lower human first, then higher human, and finally to the highest human possible to its stock, its parentage, and the resources, physical and psychical, available to it.
It is the most stupendous miracle in Nature; a miracle so sacred and so tender that every man in pa.s.sing an expectant mother should mentally bow the knee. Individually, socially, morally--she may be a person of but small significance. But because of the mystery of Life enshrined within her, she is a living Testament of Evolution. The pregnant woman is, moreover, pregnant with the destiny of Races.
During those ten lunar months there is enacted in the tender darkness of the mother"s womb the whole wonderful drama of the Human transfiguration. With lightning swiftness, the evolving babe climbs in the footsteps that its countless ancestors had trod, in forms innumerable, along the route interminable of the Human Advent. In flashes of progressive, infinitesimal transitions, through incalculable phases and mutations, the single cell of double parentage unfolds the marvel occulted in it. Until at last, the living product stands triumphant on the topmost branch of its genealogical tree, a perfect human babe awaiting birth; the last achievement of its Race, the latest and most perfect bud of its hereditary stock.
In so far as all this occurs subconsciously within the mother, the materialist may lightly dismiss the evolutionary marvel as a "pa.s.sive"
form of labour. But although subconscious, these unceasing processes demand inevitably such proportional vital potential and activities on her part from whom the powers energising it are derived, as to be a continued tax and strain upon her strength and health. There are women who feel this strain but little. A rare few of these because they are so richly endowed with maternal potence that the subconscious processes have remained, as Nature doubtless intended, for the most part subconscious and painless. Far more often, however, when Maternity exacts but little from the mother, _it is because she is contributing but little to the child_. I have observed that the finer a child in physique and in brain, the greater the stress and disability the mother had suffered prior to its birth.
VI
Indifferent, notwithstanding, to all the vital activities and psychical evolutions taking place within the mysterious laboratory of the mother"s body; reckless of the circ.u.mstance that any interference with, or hampering of the least of these must inevitably jar, and warp, the delicate complexes of infantine development, we scruple not to strain and burden, to hara.s.s and deplete, the prospective mother even further by strenuous breadwinning. Her whole physiology and psychology are profoundly altered by her momentous condition; by the new adjustments to the needs of the developing babe, of the maternal circulation and digestion, a.s.similation and elimination, mentality and intricate nervous const.i.tution and processes. Fatigue, noise, turmoil, effort, shock--any one or all of these which are inseparable from industrial employment--cannot but injuriously re-act upon the delicate evolutions mysteriously occurring in her.
The infant brain is complete at birth. From its lowest to its highest departments, all the marvel of exquisitely-delicate construction and a.s.sociation of its complex cells is achieved pre-natally. And according or not as her vital powers have been rich and otherwise unexpended, and according or not as the embryological processes of development have occurred in quietude and freedom from strain upon the mother"s part, will be the quality for life, in vigour and in sanity, of her child"s intelligence and character.
VII
In view of those lower biological grades through which the embryo pa.s.ses before arriving at the human stage, it is inevitable that maternal over-fatigue, shock or undue effort may arrest its physical development temporarily upon any of these lower levels. And such arrest must inevitably entail some warp or bias of a lower animal phase; which may so impress itself permanently on embryonic development as to detract more or less gravely from the final transition.
It is, doubtless, for this reason that many modern humans show in their configuration, degrees of reversion to ape, sheep, fish and other lower species.
Shock or nervous perturbation in the expectant mother may occasion, in the babe, appalling monstrosity, or such minor defects as cleft-palate, hare-lip, and other deformities. Showing the vital and--inevitably--the psychological effects on offspring, for good or for evil, of maternal conditions and impressions.
The Germans record that of infants born during the war, a number are gravely degenerate of type, an infant-degeneracy attributed by some to the creed of Hate obsessing German mothers. The same phenomenon is seen however in the offspring of mothers exhausted by religious preachings and marchings, in furtherance of their creed of Christian Love.
For Biology recognises no Theology except its own--that of Evolution.
At a representative meeting of London doctors, it was stated recently that the number of imbecile infants now coming into existence with us is no less than appalling.
A medical wiseacre has adventured the amazing dictum that _Every infant is born healthy_! He might, with equal truth, have said that every infant is born wealthy, or is born a Chinaman. Some infants are born alive, a great number are born dead. And between those born alive and healthy and the still-born, lie all the infinite gradations of const.i.tutional condition between life and health, between disease and death.
One child inherits from its parents a tuberculous tendency; another a neurotic, another a strain of alcoholism or other taint. One is born blind or a hopeless idiot; another with hare-lip or clubbed-foot; another with congenital heart-disease. One babe is born with a beautiful head; all its brain-faculties n.o.bly developed and splendidly balanced.
Another is born headless, or with a skull which, from crown to brows, is a rapid descent--showing lack of all the brain-powers involved in higher mentality; is born, in short, of criminal inherency.
The degrees in which individuals strive against inherited tendencies differ greatly, as do the life-conditions wherein their will and moral power are tested--to make or to break them. Man is not, of course, _the creature_ merely of his heredity or of his environment. But he whose mother has equipped him with physical defects instead of with qualities, even though he fight against his disabilities, is obviously handicapped for the life-struggle. A great musician may charm fine music from a poor fiddle, but in no degree so fine as he will bring out of a more perfect instrument.
VIII
A phenomenon which has baffled vital statisticians is a curious relation between the Birth-rate and Infant-Mortality. A high birth-rate is found to be a.s.sociated with a high rate of infant-mortality; while with a lower birth-rate, the death-rate among infants and children decreases.
Long and careful observation has left me in no doubt as to the cause of this phenomenon. Which is, that under strain of disease, of industrial exhaustion or strenuous activities of any sort, but particularly as result of _the const.i.tutional drain entailed by pregnancy_, mothers may so draw upon the vital powers of their children in order to recruit their own, as to occasion fatal illness in their families.
The evil is so great in its effects, not only upon the health and const.i.tution of the rising generation, but, as well, upon the physical and mental development thereof, that such maternal depletion is, I am a.s.sured, a cause of widespread disease among children; of infantile paralysis, degeneracy and mortality. It is reason enough, in all conscience, to call for the legalised prohibition of all mothers with young families from engaging in professional or industrial employment.
Because although such depletion of her children"s health is graver in degree during a mother"s pregnancy, at all times over-worked, sickly, or strenuous women recruit their powers from the const.i.tutional resources of others. Only, indeed, by such depletion of their neighbours can many of our present-day neurotic, overactive women (some of them with ill-nourished bodies and feeble a.s.similation, but with, nevertheless, indefatigable energies) contrive to keep going.
Strong-willed, self-centred women, keen in pursuit of business, athletics or pleasure, will, by sapping the nervous forces of these, keep all the members of their households--husband, children, servants--more or less de-vitalised, neurasthenic and characterless; one or more actually invalided, perhaps.
If nervous energy is, indeed, a complex form of electrical energy, this nervous interchange is intelligible; obeying the law that bodies under-charged with electricity charge themselves from bodies more highly charged, until equilibrium is established.
Who among doctors does not know the wan and listless, semi-paralytic babes that working-mothers--and most particularly _pregnant_ working-mothers--bring to the consulting-room? The hapless victims lie limply, or sit hunched upon the woman"s lap, nerveless, wasted, apathetic; faces white and hopeless, abdomen lax and tumid; the blenched limbs soft as b.u.t.ter, weak and dangling. They are suffering, perhaps, from some specific ailment, bronchitis, paralysis, gastric or intestinal troubles; perhaps only from mysterious wasting and inanition. Not seldom there is an elder child too, white and weak and fretful, and the subject of "infantilism"; growth stunted, development arrested. Such children, in their mental hebetude and physical degeneracy, suggest a degree of cretinism. And in the suggestion, a possible cause appears for the cretinous offspring of the hard-living, over-worked mothers of Swiss cantons.
IX
Drummond says of Motherhood:
"_Even on its physical side ... this was the most stupendous task Evolution ever undertook._"
While on the physical side, we see that Nature has made infancy and childhood increasingly helpless as species advances in evolutionary values, in order to call forth increasingly intelligent, and sympathetic response and resource in the mother. Feminism in _un_making the mother, is undoing the labours of countless ages of evolutionary advance. The intensifying mentality of woman, destined for the more subtly intelligent and sympathetic nurture of the Race"s increasingly valuable and complex offspring, is being diverted, more and more, by Feminist counsel and practice from human and vital into merely economic channels.