THE PRICE OF PRUDERY
Just after we had succeeded in getting the Notification of Births Act put upon the Statute Book, the present writer occupied himself in various parts of the country in the efforts which were necessary to persuade local authorities to adopt the provisions of that Act. Addressing a meeting of the clergy of Islington, he endeavoured to trace back to the beginning the main cause of infant mortality, and endeavoured to show that that lay in the natural ignorance of the human mother, about which more must later be said. In the discussion which followed, an elderly clergyman insisted that the causes had not been traced far enough back, maternal ignorance being itself permitted in consequence of our national prudery.
Ever since that day one has come to see more and more clearly that the criticism was just. Maternal ignorance, as we shall see later, is a natural fact of human kind, and destroys infant life everywhere, though prudery be or be not a local phenomenon. But where vast organizations exist for the remedying of ignorance, prudery indeed is responsible for the neglect of ignorance on the most important of all subjects. Let it not be supposed for a moment that in this protest one desires, even for the highest ends, to impart such knowledge as would involve sullying the bloom of girlhood. It is not necessary to destroy the charm of innocence in order to remedy certain kinds of ignorance; nor are prudery and modesty identical. Whatever prudery may be when analyzed, it seems perfectly fair to charge it as the substantial cause of the ignorance in which the young generation grows up, as to matters which vitally concern its health and that of future generations. Let us now observe in brief the price of prudery thus arraigned.
There is, first, that large proportion of infant mortality which is due to maternal ignorance, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter. At present we may briefly remind ourselves that the nation has had the young mother at school for many years; much devotion and money have been spent upon her. Yet it is necessary to pass an Act insuring, if possible, that when she is confronted with the great business of her life—which is the care of a baby—within thirty-six hours the fact shall be made known to some one who, racing for life against time, may haply reach her soon enough to remedy the ignorance which would otherwise very likely bury her baby. Prudery has decreed that while at school she should learn nothing of such matters. For the matter of that she may even have attended a three-year course in science or technology, and be a miracle of information on the keeping of accounts, the testing of drains, and the principles of child psychology, but it has not been thought suitable to discuss with her the care of a baby. How could any nice-minded teacher care to put such ideas into a girl's head? Never having noticed a child with a doll, we have somehow failed to realize that Nature, her Ancient Mother and ours, is not above putting into her head, when she can scarcely toddle, the ideas at which we pretend to blush. Prudery on this topic, and with such consequences, is not much less than blasphemy against life and the most splendid purposes towards which the individual, "but a wave of the wild sea," can be consecrated.
This question of the care of babies offers us much less excuse for its neglect than do questions concerned with the circumstances antecedent to the babies' appearance. Yet we are blameworthy, and disastrously so, here also. Prudery here insists that boys and girls shall be left to learn anyhow. That is not what it says, but that is what it does. It feebly supposes not merely that ignorance and innocence are identical, but that, failing the parent, the doctor, the teacher, and the clergyman—and probably all these do fail—ignorance will remain ignorant. There are others, however, who always lie in wait, whether by word of mouth or the printed word, and since youth will in any case learn—except in the case of a few rare and pure souls—we have to ask ourselves whether we prefer that these matters shall be associated in its mind with the cad round the corner or the groom or the chauffeur who instructs the boy, the domestic servant who instructs the girl, and with all those notions of guilty secrecy and of misplaced levity which are entailed; or with the idea that it is right and wise to understand these matters in due measure because their concerns are the greatest in human life.
After puberty, and during early adolescence, when a certain amount of knowledge has been acquired, we leave youth free to learn lies from advertisements, carefully calculated to foster the tendency to hypochondria, which is often associated with such matters. Of this, however, no more need now be said, since it scarcely concerns the girl.
It is the ignorance conditioned by prudery that is responsible later on for many criminal marriages; contracted, it may be, with the blind blessing of Church and State, which, however, the laws of heredity and infection rudely ignore. Parents cannot bring themselves to inquire into matters which profoundly concern the welfare of the daughter for whom they propose to make what appears to be a good marriage. They desire, of course, that her children shall be healthy and whole-minded; they do not desire that marriage should be for her the beginning of disease, from the disastrous effects of which she may never recover. But these are delicate matters, and prudery forbids that they should be inquired into; yet every father who permits his daughter to marry without having satisfied himself on these points is guilty, at the least, of grave delinquency of duty, and may, in effect, be conniving at disasters and desolations of which he will not live to see the end.
Young people often grow fond of each other and become engaged, and then, if the engagement be prolonged—as all engagements ought to be, as a general rule—they may find that, after all, they do not wish to marry. Yet the girl's mother, an imprudent prude, may often in this and other cases do her utmost to bring the marriage about, not because she is convinced that it means her daughter's highest welfare and happiness, but because prudery dictates that her daughter must marry the man with whom she has been so frequently seen; hence very likely lifelong unhappiness, and worse.
Society, from the highest to the lowest of its strata, is afflicted with certain forms of understood and eminently preventable disease, about which not a word has been spoken in Parliament for twenty years, and any public mention of which by mouth or pen involves serious risk of various kinds. Here it is perhaps not necessary for us to consider the case of the outcast, and of the diseases with which, poor creature, she is first infected, and which she then distributes into our homes. Our present concern is simply to point out that prudery, again, is largely responsible for the continuance of these evils at a time when we have so much precise knowledge regarding their nature and the possibility of their prevention. Medical science cannot make distinctions between one disease and another, nor between one sin and another, as prudery does. Prudery says that such and such is vice, that its consequences in the form of disease are the penalties imposed by its abominable god upon the guilty and the innocent, the living and the unborn alike, and that therefore our ordinary attitude towards disease cannot here be maintained. Physiological science, however, knowing what it knows regarding food and alcohol, and air and exercise and diet, can readily demonstrate that the gout from which Mrs. Grundy suffers is also a penalty for sin; none the less because it is not so hideously disproportionate, in its measure and in its incidence, to the gravity of the offence. These moral distinctions between one disease and another have little or no meaning for medical science, and are more often than not immoral.
It would be none too easy to show that the medical profession in any country has yet used its tremendous power in this direction. Professions, of course, do not move as a whole, and we must not expect the universal laws of institutions to find an exception here. But though they do not move, they can be moved. It is when the public has been educated in the elements of these matters, and has been taught to see what the consequences of prudery are, that the necessary forces will be brought into action. Meanwhile, what we call the social evil is almost entirely left to the efforts made in Rescue Homes and the like. Despite the judgment of a popular novelist and playwright, it is much more than doubtful whether Rescue Homes—the only method which Mrs. Grundy will tolerate—are the best way of dealing with this matter, even if the people who worked in them had the right kind of outlook upon the matter, and even if their numbers were indefinitely multiplied. Every one who has devoted a moment's thought to the matter knows perfectly well that this is merely beginning at the end, and therefore all but futile. I mention the matter here to make the point that the one measure which prudery permits—so that indeed it may even be mentioned upon our highly moral stage, and passed by the censor, who would probably be hurried into eternity if M. Brieux's Les Avariés were submitted to him, and who found "Mrs. Warren's Profession" intolerable—is just the most useless, ill-devised, and literally preposterous with which this tremendous problem can be mocked.
This leads us to another point. It is that the means of our education, other than the schools, are also prejudiced by prudery. Upon the stage there is permitted almost any indecency of word, or innuendo, or gesture, or situation, provided only that the treatment be not serious. Almost anything is tolerable if it be frivolously dealt with, but so soon as these intensely serious matters are dealt with seriously, prudery protests. The consequence is that a great educative influence, like the theatre, where a few playwrights like M. Brieux, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Granville Barker, and Mr. John Galsworthy, might effect the greatest things, is relegated by Mrs. Grundy to the plays produced by Mr. George Edwardes and other earnest upholders of the censorship.
Publishers also, while accepting novels which would have staggered the Restoration Dramatists, can scarcely be found, even with great labour, for the publication of books dealing with the sex question from the most responsible medical or social standpoints.
It is just because public opinion is so potent, and, like all other powers, so potent either for good or for evil, that its present disastrous workings are the more deplorable. It is not unimaginable that prudery might undergo a sort of transmutation. As I have said before, we might make a eugenist of Mrs. Grundy, so that she might be as much affronted by a criminal marriage as she is now by the spectacle of a healthy and well-developed baby appearing unduly soon after its parents' marriage. The power is there, and it means well, though it does disastrously ill. Public opinion ought to be decided upon these matters; it ought to be powerful and effective. We shall never come out into the daylight until it is; we shall not be saved by laws, nor by medical knowledge, nor by the admonitions of the Churches. Our salvation lies only in a healthy public opinion, not less effective and not more well-meaning than public opinion is at present, but informed where it is now ignorant, and profoundly impressed with the importance of realities as it now is with the importance of appearances.
So much having been said, what can one suggest in the direction of remedy? First, surely it is something that we merely recognize the price of prudery. Personally, I find that it has made all the difference to my calculations to have had the thing pointed out by the clerical critic whose eye these words may possibly meet. It is something to recognize in prudery an enemy that must be attacked, and to realize the measure of its enmity. In the light of some little experience, perhaps a few suggestions may be made to those who would in any way join in the campaign for the education and transmutation of public opinion on these matters.
First, we must compose ourselves with fundamental seriousness—with that absolute gravity which imperils the publication of a book and entirely prohibits the production of a play on such matters. There is something in human nature beyond my explaining which leads towards jesting in these directions. An instinct, I know, is an instinct; of which a main character is that its exercise shall be independent of any knowledge as to its purpose. We eat because we like eating, rather than because we have reckoned that so many calories are required for a body of such and such a weight, in such and such conditions of temperature and pressure. It is not natural, so to say, just because man is in a sense rather more than natural, that we should be provident and serious, self-conscious, and philosophic, in dealing with our fundamental instincts. But it is necessary, if we are to be human: and only in so far as, "looking before and after," we transcend the usual conditions of instinct, are we human at all.
The special risk run by those who would deal with these matters seriously—or rather one of the risks—is that they will be suspected, and may indeed be guilty, of a tendency to priggishness and cant. Youth is very likely not far wrong in suspecting those who would discuss these matters, for youth has too often been told that they are of the earth earthy, that these are the low parts of our nature which we must learn to despise and trample on, and youth knows in its heart that whatever else may or may not be cant, this certainly is. So any one who proposes to speak gravely on the subject is a suspect.
Meetings confined to persons of one sex offer excellent opportunities. Much can be done, if the suspicion of cant be avoided, by men addressing the meetings of men only which gather in many churches on Sunday afternoons, and which have a healthy interest in the life of this world and of this world to come, as well as in matters less immediate. It seems to me that women doctors ought to be able to do excellent work in addressing meetings of girls and women, provided always that the speaker be genuinely a woman, rightly aware of the supremacy of motherhood.
Most of us know that it is possible to read a medical work on sex, say in French, without any offence to the æsthetic sense, though a translation into one's native tongue is scarcely tolerable. This contrasted influence of different names for the same thing is another of those problems in the psychology of prudery which I do not undertake to analyze, but which must be recognized by the practical enemy of prudery. It is unquestionably possible to address a mixed audience, large or small, of any social status, on these matters without offence and to good purpose. But certain terms must be avoided and synonyms used instead. There are at least three special cases, the recognition of which may make the practical difference between shocking an audience and producing the effect one desires.
Reproduction is a good word from every point of view, but its associations are purely physiological, and it is better to employ a word which renders the use of the other superfluous and which has a special virtue of its own. This is the term parenthood, a hybrid no doubt, but not perhaps much the worse for that. One may notice a teacher of zoology, say, accustomed to address medical students, offend an audience by the use of the word reproduction, where parenthood would have served his turn. It has a more human sound—though there is some sub-human parenthood which puts much of ours to shame—and the fact that it is less obviously physiological is a virtue, for human parenthood is only half physiological, being made of two complementary and equally essential factors for its perfection—the one physical and the other psychical. Thus it is possible to speak of physical parenthood and of psychical parenthood, and thus not only to avoid the term reproduction, but to get better value out of its substitutes. One may be able to show, perhaps, that in the case of other synonyms also a hunt for a term that shall save the face of prudery may be more than justified by the recovery of one which has a richer content. Terms are really very good servants, if they are good terms and we retain our mastery of them. Let any one without any previous practice start to write or speak on "human reproduction," and on "human parenthood, physical and psychical," and he will find that, though naming often saves a lot of thinking, as George Meredith said, wise naming may be of great service to thought.
In these matters there is to be faced the fact of pregnancy. Here, again, is a good word, as every one knows who has felt its force or that of the corresponding adjective when judiciously used in the metaphorical sense. The present writer's rule, when speaking, is to use these terms only in their metaphorical sense, and to employ another term for the literal sense. I should be personally indebted to any reader who can inform me as to the first employment of the admirable phrase, "the expectant mother." The name of its inventor should be remembered. In any audience whatever—perhaps almost including an audience of children, but certainly in any adult audience, whether mixed or not, medical or fashionable, serious or sham serious—it is possible to speak with perfect freedom on many aspects of pregnancy, as for instance the use of alcohol, exposure to lead poisoning, the due protection at such a period, by simply using the phrase "the expectant mother," with all its pregnancy of beautiful suggestion. Here, again, our success depends upon recognizing the psychical factor in that which to the vulgar eye is purely physiological—not that there is anything vulgar about physiology except to the vulgar eye.
For myself, the phrase "the expectant mother" is much more than useful, though in speaking it has made all the difference scores of times. It is beautiful because it suggests the ideal of every pregnancy—that the expectant mother shall indeed expect, look forward to the life which is to be. Her motto in the ideal world or even in the world at the foundations of which we are painfully working, will be those words of the Nicene creed which the very term must recall to the mind—Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi sæculi.
Let any one who fancies that these pre-occupations with mere language are trivial or misplaced here take the opportunity of addressing two drawing-rooms under similar conditions, on some such subject as the care of pregnancy from the national point of view. Let him in the one case speak of the pregnant woman, and so forth, and in the other of the expectant mother. He will be singularly insensitive to his audience if he does not discover that sometimes a rose by any other name is somehow the less a rose. The more fools we perhaps, but there it is, and in the most important of all contemporary propaganda, which is that of the re-establishment of parenthood in that place of supreme honour which is its due, even such "literary" debates as these are not out of place.
Sex is a great and wonderful thing. The further down we go in the scale of life, whether animal or vegetable, the more do we perceive the importance of the evolution of sex. The correctly formed adjective from this word is sexual, but the term is practically taboo with Mrs. Grundy. Only with caution and anxiety, indeed, may one venture before a lay audience to use Darwin's phrase, "sexual selection." The fact is utterly absurd, but there it is. One of the devices for avoiding its consequences is the use of sex itself as an adjective, as when we speak of sex problems; but the special importance of this case is in regard to the sexual instinct, or, if the term offends the reader, let us say the sex instinct. Here prudery is greatly concerned, and our silence here involves much of the price of prudery. Now since the word sexual has become sinister, we cannot speak to the growing boy or girl about the sexual instinct, but we may do much better.
For what is this sexual instinct? True, it manifests itself in connection with the fact of sex, but essentially that is only because sex is a condition of human reproduction or parenthood. It is this with which the sexual instinct is really concerned, and perhaps we shall never learn to look upon it rightly or deal with it rightly until we indeed perceive what the business of this instinct is, and regard as somewhat less than worthy of mankind any other attitude towards it. Of course there are men who live to eat, yet the instincts concerned with eating exist not for the titillation of the palate but for the sustenance of life; and, likewise, though there are those who live to gratify this instinct, it exists not for sensory gratification, but for the life of this world to come. Can we not find a term which shall express this truth, shall be inoffensive and so doubly suitable for the purposes of our cause?
The term reproductive instinct is often employed. It is vastly superior to sexual instinct, because it does refer to that for which the instinct exists; but it hints at reproduction, and though Mrs. Grundy can tolerate the idea of parenthood, reproduction she cannot away with. We cannot speak of it as the parental instinct, because that term is already in employment to express the best thing and the source of all other good things in us. Further, the sexual instinct and the parental instinct are quite distinct, and it would be disastrous to run the possibility of confusing them—one the source of all the good, and the other the source of much of the evil, though the necessary condition of all the good and evil, in the world.
For some years past, in writing and speaking, I have employed and counselled the employment of the term "the racial instinct." This seems to meet all the needs. It avoids the tabooed adjective, and if it fails to allude at all to the fact of sex, who needs reminding thereof? It is formed from the term race, which prudery permits, and it expresses once and for all that for which the instinct exists—not the individual at all, but the race which is to come after him. Doubtless its satisfaction may be satisfactory for him or her, but that does not testify to Nature's interest in individuals, but rather to her skill in insuring that her supreme concern shall not be ignored, even by those who least consciously concern themselves with it.
These are perhaps the three most important instances of the verbal, or perhaps more than verbal, issues that arise in the fight with prudery. One has tried to show that they are not really in the nature of concessions to Mrs. Grundy, but that the terms commended are in point of fact of more intrinsic worth than those to which she objects. Other instances will occur to the reader, especially if he or she becomes in any way a soldier in this war, whether publicly or as a parent instructing children, or on any other of the many fields where the fight rages.
It is not the purpose of the present chapter to deal with that which must be said, notwithstanding prudery, and in order that the price of prudery shall no longer be paid. But one final principle may be laid down which is indeed perhaps merely an expression of the spirit underlying the foregoing remarks upon our terminology. It is that we are to fly our flag high. We may consult Mrs. Grundy's prejudices if we find that in doing so we may directly serve our own thinking, and therefore our cause. This is very different from any kind of apologizing to her. All such I utterly deplore. We must not begin by granting Mrs. Grundy's case in any degree. Somewhere in that chaos of prejudices which she calls her mind, she nourishes the notion, common to all the false forms of religion, ancient or modern, that there is something about sex and parenthood which is inherently base and unclean. The origin of this notion is of interest, and the anthropologists have devoted much attention to it. It is to be found intermingled with a by no means contemptible hygiene in the Mosaic legislation, is to be traced in the beliefs and customs of extant primitive peoples, and has formed and forms an element in most religions. But it is not really pertinent to our present discussion to weigh the good and evil consequences of this belief. Without following the modern fashion, prevalent in some surprising quarters, of ecstatically exaggerating the practical value of false beliefs in past and present times, we may admit that the cause of morality in the humblest sense of that term may sometimes have been served by the religious condemnation of all these matters as unclean, and of parenthood as, at the best, a second best.
But for our own day and days yet unborn this notion of sex and its consequences as unclean or the worser part is to be condemned as not merely a lie and a palpably blasphemous one, grossly irreligious on the face of it, but as a pernicious lie, and to be so recognized even by those who most joyfully cherish evidence of the practical value of lies. Whatever may have been the case in the past or among present peoples in other states of culture than our own, no impartial person can question that during the Christian Era what may be called the Pauline or ascetic attitude on this matter has been disastrous; and that if the present forms of religion are not completely to outlive their usefulness, it is high time to restore mother and child worship to the honour which it held in the religion of Ancient Egypt and in many another. If the mother and child worship which is to be found in the more modern religions, such as Christianity, is to be worth anything to the coming world it must cease to have reference to one mother and one child only; it must hail every mother everywhere as a Madonna, and every child as in some measure deity incarnate. By no Church will such teaching be questioned to-day; but if it be granted the Churches must cease to uphold those conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the Churches must and shall now be made to return.
All this will involve many a shock to prudery; to take only the instance of what we call illegitimate motherhood, our eyes askance must learn that there are other legitimacies and illegitimacies than those which depend upon the little laws of men, and that if our doctrine of the worth of parenthood be a right one it is our business in every such case to say, "Here also, then, in so far as it lies in our power, we must make motherhood as good and perfect as may be."
These principles also will lead us to understand how differently, were we wise, we should look upon the outward appearances of expectant motherhood. In his masterpiece, Forel—of all living thinkers the most valuable—has a passage with which Mrs. Grundy may here be challenged. It is too simple to need translating from the author's own French:[9]—
"La fausse honte qu'out les femmes de laisser voir leur grossesse et tout ce qui a rapport à l'accouchement, les plaisanteries dont on use souvent à l'égard des femmes enceintes, sont un triste signe de la dégénérescence et même de la corruption de notre civilization raffinée. Les femmes enceintes ne devraient pas ce cacher, ni jamais avoir honte de porter un enfant dans leur ventre; elles devraient au contraire en être fières. Pareille fierté serait certes bien plus justifiée que celle des beaux officiers paradant sous leur uniforme. Les signes extérieurs de la formation de l'humanité font plus d'honneur à leurs porteurs que les symboles de sa destruction. Que les femmes s'imprègnent de plus en plus de cette profonde vérité! Elles cesseront alors de cacher leur grossesse et d'en avoir honte. Conscientes de la grandeur de leur tâche sexuelle et sociale, elles tiendront haut l'étendard de notre descendance, qui est celui de la véritable vie à venir de l'homme, tout en combattant pour l'émancipation de leur sexe."
This passage recalls one of Ruskin's, which is to be found in "Unto This Last":—
"Nearly all labour may be shortly divided into positive and negative labour—positive, that which produces life; negative, that which produces death; the most directly negative labour being murder, and the most directly positive the bearing and rearing of children; so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree child-rearing is admirable, on the positive side of idleness."
Here is the right comment upon the swaggering display of the means of death and the hiding as if shameful of the signs of life to come. What has Mrs. Grundy to say to this? Will she consider the propriety of urging in future that it is murder and the means of murder, and the organized forces of capital and politics making for murder, that must not be mentioned before children, and must be hidden as shameful from the eyes of men; and while a woman may still glory in her hair, according to that spiritual precept of St. Paul: "But if a woman have long hair it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering," perhaps she may be permitted even to glory in her motherhood, contemptible as such a notion would doubtless have seemed to the Apostle of the Gentiles.