THE RIGHTS OF MOTHERS
We reach here a central question which must be approached from the right point of view or we shall certainly fail to solve it. That point of view is the child's. There is a school of thought which approaches the question otherwise—on abstract principles of justice and individual independence. The only objection to them is that, if upheld on modern conditions, these principles would soon leave us without anyone to uphold them. The relation of the mother to the State is central and fundamental, however considered, and the principles on which it must be settled must, above all, be principles which are compatible with the fundamental conditions on which States can endure.
Those principles, surely, are two. The first is that in a State we are members one of another, and that those who need help must be helped. This will be indignantly repudiated by a stern school of thought, but what if it applies, everywhere, always and above all, to children? They are members of the community who need help and they must be helped. The second principle is indeed only a special case of the first. It is that if the State is to continue, it must rear children.
We take it then, first, that the moral and social law is perfectly final as to the right of every child to existence. There are no principles of national welfare which can divorce us from the simple truth that we must regard every human individual as sacred from the moment of its coming into existence—and that is a long time before birth. A familiar medical dogma is, "Keep everything alive." There may be exceptions to it, but it is dangerous to discuss them with the unprepared. The only safe principle is to maintain, as long as possible, the life of all—the centenarian or the embryo conceived since the sun set. At times the State deliberately takes life on behalf of life. The sentence of execution passed upon the murderer may be warrantably passed by the State of the future or its officers upon a monstrous birth, a baby riddled with congenital syphilis or some such horrible fruit of our present carelessness and wickedness in such matters. The State may regard such children or their survival as illegitimate, since the laws of nature as we see them at work throughout the living world do not approve the survival of such. Apart from these cases, all children are legitimate, and all children are natural. Whatever the history of the reader's parents, he or she was assuredly both a legitimate child and a natural child—a paradox which may be left to the solution of the curious. Directly a new human being has been conceived, its right to existence and survival may be conceded. Vast numbers of human beings are conceived every year whose conception is a sin against themselves and the State. That is a question on which the present writer has written and spoken incessantly for years, and which no one can accuse him of neglecting. But here we have to deal with the facts of the world as they are and as they will be for some time to come.
All children are to be cared for. No child should die; there should be no infant mortality; the children that are not fit to live should not be conceived, and those that are fit to live should be allowed to live; all children are legitimate. If the State has any kind of business at all, this is its business.
Our subject here, the reader may say, is not children, but woman and womanhood. The reply is that unless we have our principles rightly formulated, we cannot solve this question of the rights of women as mothers. Failing our principles, we shall be reduced to the prejudices which serve as principles for our political parties. We shall have individualist and socialist at loggerheads, the friends of marriage and its enemies, and many other opposing parties who cannot solve the question for us because they have not waited first to discover its fundamentals. The rights of mothers can be approached only from the point of view of the rights of children. We may happen to believe, as the present writer certainly does, that parents should be responsible for their children. He once lectured for, and published the lectures in association with, a body called the British Constitution Association, which holds the same belief, but when he found as he did that protests were raised against any suggestion to help children whose parents do not do their duty, it became plain that principles which were right in a merely secondary and conditional way were being made absolute and fundamental. The fundamental is that the child shall be cared for; the conditional and secondary principle is that this is best effected through the parents. To say that if the parents will not do it, the child must be left to starve, is immoral and indecent. Worse words than those, if such exist, would be required to describe our neglect of illegitimate infancy; our cruelty toward widows and orphans; our utterly careless maintenance of the conditions which produce these hapless beings in such vast numbers.
If every child is sacred, every mother is sacred. If every child is to be cared for, every mother must be cared for. It is true that we may make experiment with devices for superseding the mother. Man has impudent assurance enough for anything, and if Nature has been working at the perfection of an instrument for her purpose during a few score million years—an instrument such as the mammalian mother, for instance—man is quite prepared to invent social devices, such as the incubator, the crèche, the infant milk dépôt, and so forth; not merely to make the best of a bad case when the mother fails, but to supersede the mother altogether directly the baby is born. Such cases, except in the last resort, are more foolish than words can say. We have to save our children; we can only do so effectively through the naturally appointed means for saving children, which is motherhood. The rights of mothers follow as a necessary consequence from our first principle, which was the rights of children. Because every child must be protected, every mother must be protected, if not in one way, in another.
The State may not be able to afford this. The necessities of existence may be so difficult to obtain, not to mention for a moment such luxuries as alcohol and motor-cars and warships and fine clothes and art, and so forth, that no arrangements for the support of motherhood can be made. If we lay down the proposition that no mother should work because she is already doing the supreme work, it may be replied that this is economically impossible; the thing cannot be done. The only reply to this is that the State which cannot afford to provide rightly for the means of its continuance had better discontinue, and must in any case soon do so. Motherhood is rapidly declining as a numerical fact in civilized communities generally. Not merely does the birth-rate fall persistently and without the slightest regard to the commentators thereon, but it will continue to do so for many years to come. In the light of this fact the great argument of presidents and bishops, politicians and journalists, moralists and social censors generally is that somehow or other this decline must be arrested. To all of which one replies, for the thousand and first time, that, whatever it ought to be, it will not be arrested; that the really moral policy, the really human one, and the only possible one, is to take care of the children that are born. Then when we have abolished our infant and child mortality and have solved the substantial problem of finding room for all new-comers, having ceased to far more than decimate them, we may begin cautiously to suggest that perhaps if the birth-rate were slightly to rise we might be able to cope with the product. At present the disgraceful fact is not the birth-rate, but what we do with the birth-rate; though more disgraceful perhaps are the blindness and ignorance and assurance of the host of commentators in high places who waste their time and ours in animadverting upon a fact—the falling birth-rate—which is a necessary condition and consequence of organic progress, whilst the motherhood we have is so urgently in need of protection and idealization in the minds of the people.
We have reached the conclusion that all motherhood is to be protected. This means that from some source or other the money shall be forthcoming for the maintenance of the mother and her children. For, in the first place, the children are not to work because, if they do, they will not be able to work as they should in the future. The State cannot afford to let them work. Further, the proper care of childhood is so continuous and exacting a task, and of such supreme moment, that it is the highest and foremost work that can be named; and therefore, in the second place, she whose business it is must not be hampered by having to do anything else. If any labourer is worthy of his hire, she is. Her economic security must be absolute. She must be as safe as the Bank of England, because England and its banks stand or fall with her. In the rightly constituted State, if there be any one at all whose provision and maintenance are absolutely secure, it will be the mothers. Whoever else has financial anxiety, they shall have none. Any State that can afford to exist can afford to see to this. No economist can inform me what proportion of the labour and resources of England are at this moment devoted to the means of life, and what proportion to superfluities, luxuries and the means of death. But it is a very simple matter with which the reader, who is doubtless a better arithmetician than I am, may amuse himself, to estimate the number of married women of reproductive age in the community, and allowing anything in reason for illegitimate motherhood and nothing at all for infertile wives, to satisfy himself that the total cost which would be involved in the adequate care of motherhood, is a mere fraction of the national expenditure. Few of us realize how extraordinary and how unprecedented is the margin of security for existence which modern civilization affords. A savage community may have scarcely any margin at all. The same may be true of many primitive communities which cannot be called savage. They maintain life under such conditions, whether in Greenland or in a thousand other parts of the world, that they cannot afford to labour for anything which is not bread. The primary necessities of existence take all their getting. Some transient accident of weather or the balance of Nature in the sea or in the fields imperils the existence of the whole community. They, at any rate, are wise enough to take good care of their women and children. But in civilization we have an enormous margin of security. Not only are we dependent on no local crop or harvest, but the getting of necessities has become so effective and secure that we are able to spend a vast amount of our time and energy on the production of luxuries and evils. How little, then, is our excuse if we fail to provide the first conditions for continuance and progress!
Our first principles of the value of the child and therefore of motherhood are unchallengeable, nor will anyone nowadays be found to question that neither children nor mothers should work in the ordinary sense of that word, since the proper work of children who are to work well when they grow up is play, and since the mother's natural work is the most important that she can perform. It remains, then, for us to determine by whom mothers and children in the modern and future State are to be provided for.
The conditions of mothers are various, and we shall best approach the problem by the consideration of different cases.
The simplest is that of the widowed mother who is without means. It is only too common a case, and we have already seen certain causes which contribute to the enormous number of widows in the community. Men do not live as long as women, and men are older when they marry. These natural causes of widowhood, as they may be called, are greatly aggravated by the destructive influence of alcohol upon fatherhood, as will be shown in the chapter dealing with alcohol and womanhood.
On the individualistic theory of the State, a theory so brutal and so impracticable that no one consistently upholds it, the widow's misfortune is her private affair, but does not really concern us. Her husband should have provided for her. Indeed she should, and indeed we should have seen that he did. But if he and we failed in our duty to her, the consequences must be met. The hour is at hand when the State will discover that children are its most precious possessions, more precious as they grow scarcer, and efficient support will then be forthcoming, as a matter of course, for the widowed mother and her children. The feature which will distinguish this support from any past or present provision will be that it recognizes the natural sanctity and the natural economy of the relation between mother and children. It will be agreed not merely that the children must be provided for, but that they must be provided for through her. The current device is to divorce mother and children. "Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder," is quoted by many against the divorce of a married pair whom, as is plain, not God but the devil has joined together; but the principle of that quotation verily applies to the natural and divine association of mother and children.
If, then, the State is to provide in future for all widowed mothers and their children, husbands need no longer trouble to insure or make provision for them. Such is the proper criticism. The reply to it is that the State will have to see to it that, in future, husbands do take this trouble. To this we shall return.
Next we may consider the case of the unmarried mother and her "illegitimate" child or children. Here, again, the child must be cared for, and the care of the child is the work which has been imposed upon the mother. We must enable her to do it, nor must we countenance the monstrous and unnatural folly, injurious to both and therefore to us, of separating them. Napoleon, desirous of food for powder, forbade the search for the father in such a case, though the French are now seeking to abrogate that abominable decree. Our law recognizes that the father is responsible, and under it he may be made to pay toward the upkeep of the child. Some contemporary writers on the endowment of motherhood are advocating changes which would make this law absurd, for they are seeking to free the married father from any responsibility for his children, and could scarcely impose it upon the unmarried father. Such proposals, however, are palpable reversions to something much lower and æons older in the history of life than mere barbarism, and I have no fear of their success. Assuredly the unmarried father must be held responsible; and no less certainly must we see to it that, with or without his help, the unmarried mother and her children are adequately provided for. The present death-rate amongst illegitimate children is a scandal of the first order and must be ended. If we are wise, our provision will involve protecting ourselves against the need for new provision, especially where the mother is feeble-minded or otherwise defective, as is so often the case: but provision there must be.
Finally, we come to the central problem of the mother who has a living husband in employment. It is the case of the working classes that really concerns us, not least because the greater part of the birth-rate comes therefrom. It is the contemporary settling-down of the birth-rate in this class, combined with the novel consequences of modern industrialism, especially in the form of married women's labour, that makes the question so important. Before we go any further, the proposition may be laid down that married women's labour, as it commonly exists, is an intolerable evil, condemned already by our first principles. It need scarcely be said that one is not here referring to the labours of the married woman who writes novels or designs fashion-plates. There is no condemnation of any kind of labour, in the home or outside it, if the condition be complied with, that it does not prejudice the inalienable first charge upon the mother's time and energy. Her children are that first charge. It may perfectly well be, and often is, chiefly though not exclusively in the more fortunate classes, that the mother may earn money by other work without prejudice to her motherhood. Such cases do not concern us, but we are urgently concerned with married women's labour in the ordinary sense of the term, which means that the mother goes out to tend some lifeless machine, whilst her children are left at home to be cared far anyhow or not at all. No student of infant mortality or the conditions of child life and child survival in general has any choice but to condemn this whole practice as evil, root and branch. And from the national and economic point of view it may be said that whatever the mother makes in the factory is of less value than the children who consequently die at home. The culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people, and any industry that involves its destruction and needs the conditions which make up that destruction, is one which the country cannot afford, whatever its merely monetary balance-sheet. A complete balance-sheet, with its record of children slain, would only too readily demonstrate this.
Our right attitude toward married women's labour must depend upon a right understanding of the social meaning of marriage. This was a question which had to be dealt with at length in a previous volume and I can only state here in a word, what was the conclusion come to. It was that marriage is a device for supporting and buttressing motherhood by fatherhood. Its mark is that it provides for common parental care of offspring. A more prosaic way of stating the case would be that marriage is a device for making the father responsible. If we go far back in the history of the animal world, we find mating but not marriage. The father's function is purely physiological, transient and wholly irresponsible. The whole burden of caring for offspring, when first there comes to be need for that care, in the history of organic progress, falls upon the mother. But even amongst the fishes we find that sometimes, as in the case of the stickleback, the father helps the mother to build a sort of nest, and does "sentry-go" outside it to keep off marauders. In this common care of the young we see what is in all essentials marriage, though some may prefer to dignify the word by confining it to those human associations which have been blessed by Church and State, even though the father throws the baby at the mother, or sends her into the streets to earn her bread and his beer.
If some of our modern reformers knew any biology, or even happened to visit a music-hall where the biograph was showing scenes of bird-life, they would learn that the human arrangement whereby the father goes out and forages for mother and children has roots in hoary antiquity. The pity is that there is no one to point the moral to the crowd when the father-bird is seen returning with delicacies for the mother, who tends her nest and its occupants.
The reader will already have anticipated the conclusion, to which, as I see it, the study of the fundamental laws of life must lead the sociologist in this case. It is that the duty of the father is to support the mother and children, and that the duty of the State is to see that he does this.
Thus, if asked whether I believe in the endowment of motherhood, I reply, yes, indeed, I believe in the endowment of motherhood by the corresponding fatherhood. If our first principles are sound, we must believe that the mother must be endowed or provided for; there can be no difference of opinion so far. Often, as we have seen, there is no corresponding fatherhood, for the mother may be a widow, or unmarried and unable to find the father. But where the corresponding fatherhood exists, we fly directly in the face of Nature, we deny the consistent teaching of evolution as the study of sub-human life reveals it to us, if we do not turn to the father and say, this is your act, for which you are responsible.
At all times the community has been entitled to say this to the father. It is even more entitled to say so now, when, as everyone knows, parenthood has come so entirely under the sway of human volition. The more knowledge and power the more responsibility. The more important the deed, the more responsible must we hold the doer. The time has come when fatherhood, whether within marriage or without it, must be reckoned a deliberate, provident, foreseen, all-important, responsible act, for which the father must always be held to account.
On a recent public occasion, having endeavoured to show that the history of animal evolution teaches us the increasing importance and dignity of fatherhood, I was asked whether I had any argument in favour of parental responsibility. To this the fitting reply seemed to be that, primarily, I believe in parental responsibility because I believe in human responsibility. It need hardly be said that the questioner belonged to that important political party which loathes the idea of paternal responsibility and styles it a "fetish." Without it none of us would be here. Yet the Socialists are less likely than any other party to abandon the idea of human responsibility. They propose to hold men responsible for the remoter effects of their acts—upon the present—as no other party does. The maker of money is held to account for his deeds and their effect upon the life around him. I agree with the principle: but I maintain that the maker of men is also to be held to account for his deeds and their effect upon the future and the life of this world to come. No Socialist can afford to question the practical political principle that men are to be held responsible for their deeds: and no Socialist can explain the sudden and unexplained abandonment of this principle when we come to the most important of all a man's deeds. To be consistent, the Socialist should uphold the doctrine of a man's responsibility for the remoter consequences of his acts in this supreme sphere, more earnestly and thoughtfully and providently than any of his opponents.
The position of those who would free the father from responsibility is even less defensible when, as we commonly find, they are prepared to make the mother's responsibility more extensive and less avoidable than ever. Why this distinction? And if parental responsibility is a "fetish" when it refers to a father, why is it not the same when it refers to a mother? In the schemes of Mr. H. G. Wells, kaleidoscopic in their glitter and inconsistency, there remains from year to year this one permanent element, that while the mother must attend to her business, it is no business of the father. This is the essential feature, the one novelty of his scheme. Already the married mother—he proposes nothing for the unmarried mother—is legally entitled to some measure of support. His endowment of motherhood is essentially a discharge of fatherhood, and should be so called. There can be no compromise, nothing but a fight to the finish, between the principle of endowing motherhood by making fatherhood less responsible, and the principle here fought for, of endowing motherhood by making fatherhood more responsible. As Nature has been doing so, in the main line of progress for many millions of years,—a statement not of interpretation or theory but of observed fact—I have no fear of the ultimate issue. But it might well be that any portion of mankind, perhaps a portion ill to be spared, should destroy itself by an attempt to run counter to the great principle of progress here stated. There is an abundance of men who will be very happy to side with Mr. Wells. Men have never been wanting, in any time or place, who were happy to gratify their instincts without having to answer for the consequences; and it has always been the first issue of any society that was to endure, to see that they did not have their way: hence human marriage. The "endowment of motherhood" sounds as if it were a scheme greatly for the benefit of women. Let them beware. Let them begin to think of, not the remoter, but the immediate and obvious consequences of any such schemes as are proffered by the overt or covert enemies of marriage, and they will quickly perceive that the last way in which to secure the rights of women is to abrogate the duties of men. The support allotted to such schemes as these is not feminine but masculine. That is the impression I derive from discussions following lectures on the subject; and that is what I should expect, judging from the natural tendencies of men, and the profound intuition of women in such matters. And, conversely, the opposition to such principles as are expressed here, and embodied in the "Women's Charter," will be masculine. But woman has been civilizing man from the beginning, and she will have her way here also—for, in the last resort, not merely youth, but the Unborn must be served.
Before we consider the alternative suggestions that some are making, and proceed to indicate how the paternal endowment of motherhood can be enforced in every class, as public opinion practically enforces it in the upper and middle classes, let us meet the objection that, if fatherhood is to be made so serious an act, and if so much self-sacrifice is to be exacted from those who undertake it, the marriage-rate and the birth-rate will fall more rapidly. And as regards the marriage-rate, the answer is that marriage and parenthood are not inseparable, a proposition which might be much amplified if a writer who wishes to be heard could afford to have the courage of everybody's convictions. But already, in the middle classes, men limit their families to the number they can support. They simply practise responsible fatherhood, and the mothers and children are protected. On what moral grounds this is to be condemned, no one has yet told us.
And as regards the effect of more stringent responsibility for fatherhood upon the birth-rate, it must be replied, for the thousandth time in this connection, that the question for a nation is not how many babies are born, but how many survive. The idea of a baby is that it shall grow up and become a citizen; if babies remained babies people would soon cease to complain about the fall in the birth-rate. But, in point of fact, a vast number of babies and children are unnecessarily slain, and if we could suddenly arrest the whole of this slaughter, the increase of population would become so formidable that everyone would deplore the unmanageable height of the birth-rate. Its present fall is quite incapable of arrest, and is perfectly compatible with as rapid an increase of population as any one could desire. We must arrest the destruction of so much of the present birth-rate, so that it means nought for the future. By nothing else will this arrest be so accelerated as by those very measures for making fatherhood more responsible for the care of motherhood, which are here advocated. Let it be freely granted that these measures will lower the birth-rate. Much more will they lower the infant mortality and child death-rate, and diminish the permanent damaging of vast multitudes of children who escape actual destruction.
And now we can turn to those proposals which have lately been revived by one or two popular writers in England, for the endowment of motherhood by the State, leaving the fathers in peace to spend their earnings as they please, whilst others support their children. Detailed criticism is not needed, for the details to criticize are not forthcoming, and the opinions on principles and on details of these imaginative writers are never twice the same. It suffices that proposals such as these, apart from their vagueness and their obvious impracticability in any form, are directly condemned by the fundamental principle that a man shall be responsible for his acts. The endowment of motherhood, as Mr. Wells means it, is simply a phrase for making men responsible for their neighbours' acts and for striking hard and true at the root principle of all marriage, human or sub-human, which is the common parental care of offspring. Reference is made to this proposal here, not that it really needs criticism, but in order that one may be clearly excluded from any participation in such proposals.
The difference between such schemes for the endowment of motherhood and the proposal here advocated is that those seek to endow the mother by making the father less responsible—or, rather, wholly irresponsible—while this seeks to endow her by making the father more responsible. The whole verdict of the ages is, as we have seen, on the side of this principle. It has been practised for æons, and it is the aim of sound legislation and practice everywhere to-day.
As has been admitted, the more we express this principle, the lower will fall, not necessarily the marriage-rate, but the parent-rate; fewer men will become fathers, but they will be fitter. There will be fewer children born, but they will be children planned, desired and loved in anticipation, as every child should be, and will be in the golden future. These children will not die, but survive; nor will their development be injured by early malnutrition and neglect. The believer in births as births will not be gratified, but there will be abundance of gratification for the believer in births as means to ends.
The practical working-out of our principle is no more difficult than might be expected if it be remembered that we are counselling nothing revolutionary nor even novel. The demand simply is that the practice which obtains among the more fortunate classes shall be made universal, and that the State shall see that all fathers who can, do their duty. The State will be quite busy and well employed in this task, which may legitimately be allotted to it even on the strictly individualist and Spencerian principles, that the maintenance of justice is alone the State's province. We allot a great function to the State, but deny that it can rightly or safely set the father aside and perform his duty for him.
The kind of means whereby the rights of mothers may be granted them is indicated in the Women's Charter which has lately been formulated and advocated by Lady Maclaren. The principle there recognized is that the husband's wages are not solely his own earnings, but are in part handed to him to be passed on to his wife. Directly children are concerned, the State should be.
Whatever the answer to the crudely-stated question, "Should Wives have Wages?" it is certain that mothers should and must have wages or their equivalent.
To many of the well-wishers of women it is disappointing that the Women's Charter is not more keenly supported by women themselves. Unfortunately the suffrage has become a fetish, the mere means has become an end, preferred even to the offer of the real ends, such as would be attained in very large measure by this Charter. We see here, it is to be feared, the same spirit which protests against the wisest and most humane legislation in the interests of women and children because "men have no business to lay down the law for women."
In general terms, one would argue that the principle of insurance must be applied to this case, as it is now voluntarily applied by thousands of provident fathers. Here the State may guarantee and help, even by the expenditure of money. It should help those who help themselves. This is a principle which may apply to many forms of insurance or provision, whether for old age or against invalidity; just as non-contributory old-age provisions are fundamentally wrong in principle, and have never been defended on any but party-political grounds of expedience, even by their advocates, so the "endowment of motherhood" which meant the complete liberation of fatherhood from its responsibilities would be wrong in principle. But in both of these cases the State might rightly undertake to help those who help themselves.
Fatherhood of the new order will not be so wholly irksome and unrewarded as might at first appear to the critic who does not reckon children as rewards themselves. It may involve some momentary sacrifices, but it needs very little critical study of the ordinary man's expenditure to discover that, on the whole, these sacrifices will be more apparent than real. It is, for instance, a very great sacrifice indeed for the smoker to give up tobacco; but once he has done so, he is as happy as he was, and suffers nothing at all for the gain of his pocket. Both as regards alcohol and tobacco, the common expenditure which would so amply provide milk and the rest for children, is necessitated by an acquired habit which, like all acquired habits, can be discarded. The non-smoker and non-drinker does not suffer the discomfort of the smoker and drinker who is deprived of his need. These things cease to be needs at all, soon after they are dispensed with, or if the habit of taking them is never begun. They are luxuries only to those who use them. To those who do not they are nothing, and the lack of them is nothing. The sheer waste they entail is gigantic, and the expenditure on them in such a country as England would endow all its motherhood and provide good conditions for all its children. The father who, in the future, is compelled to yield the rights of mothers and children, may sometimes be compelled to practise what at first looks like great self-restraint in these respects. The point I wish to make is that the sacrifice and the need for restraint are transient, and that thereafter there is simply more liberty and the promise of longer life for the wise.
The working-out will be that the legislation of the future will benefit the right kind of husband and father, but will restrain and irk the wrong kind. But that is precisely what good legislation should do. Thus the right kind of father, who in any case will do his best to care for his wife and children, will be helped in the future by the State. It will insist that he does the duty which in any case he means to do, but it will make the doing easier. We see admirably working parallels to this in the German insurance laws and their provision for death, disease and old age. They benefit those whom they appear to harass. Insurance against fatherhood will work in the same way. The State will not be antagonistic to the father, but will be his best friend, knowing that its best friends are good fathers and mothers. There will be far less worry and anxiety for well-meaning parents, especially for mothers, but also for fathers. Nor do I, for one, much mind how substantial may be the State's contribution to the father's efforts, provided only that those efforts are demanded and obtained.
Nothing is more certain than that we are about to free ourselves from the crass blindness of the nineteenth century in its great delusion that the wealth of a nation consists in the number of things it makes and possesses. Parenthood and childhood will shortly come to be recognized as the first concern of the State that is to continue, and whilst the birth-rate continues to fall, the honour paid to fathers and mothers will continue to rise. We shall become as wise in time as the Jews have been ever since we have record of them. We shall estimate the relative value of these things as well as if we were the kinds of people we call "Savages." Fatherhood will not be such an uncompensated sacrifice in those days, even apart from its inherent rewards.
The point I am trying to make is that the legislation and the social changes here advocated as necessary in the interests of women, and indeed asserted to be their rights, do not involve any injury to men. This common delusion is a mere instance of the poisonous principle of politicians, notably fiscal politicians, and of many business men. Their belief is that what benefits Germany must hurt England, that what hurts Germany must benefit England, that all trade is a question of somebody scoring off another or being scored off. The idea that there are great games in which both sides stand to win, if they "play the game," is meaningless to them. That German prosperity can favour English prosperity, that true commerce is a mutual exchange for mutual benefit—these are notions obviously absurd to people who think on this horrible assumption which reigns unchallenged in a thousand columns of fiscal controversy every morning. And when these people turn to the question of legislation as between the sexes, they naturally assume that anything which promises to benefit women will injure men. The vote is thus regarded as a means of injuring men—necessarily, because it advantages women—and assuredly such people will suppose that any measures in the direction of granting what I here prefer to call the "rights of mothers" (leaving to one side the "rights of women"), necessarily involve a proportionate disadvantage to men. I deny it utterly:
The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or God-like, bond or free.
The rights of mothers, we have seen, are fundamental for any society, and to satisfy them is to meet the most clearly primary of social needs. But there will be some readers of this book, perhaps, who miss any discussion of the "rights of women." I do not care for the phrase, because I do not think that we often see it usefully employed. For me the propositions are self-evident that men and women, being human beings, have the rights of human beings. Each of us has the right to the conditions of the most complete self-development and expression that is compatible with the granting of the same right to others. It is true that women have been largely debarred from these conditions as a sex, and in so far there is some meaning in the phrase "Women's rights." But otherwise we all agree that men and women alike have the right which has just been stated in terms that are a paraphrase of Herbert Spencer's definition of liberty. Men's rights and women's rights are the rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." If any one disputes the application of this principle to women as unreservedly as to men, I will not argue with him. I write for decent people.
At this stage in the development of civilization, our business is to see, first, that our social proceedings and reconstructions of enterprises are compatible with the nature of the human individual, male and female. It is always necessary for us to be reminded of the facts of the individual, for in the last resort they will determine the failure or the success of all our schemes. And then we must see where our existing social structure fails to satisfy the needs of individual development and of individual duty. In seeking to rectify what may here be wrong, of course we must take first things first—we must set the case right for the most important people before we go on to the others.
Now it is the simple, obvious truth,—so obvious and unchallengeable that somehow it has never been stated—that in any human society the parents are the most important people. The division is not between education and the lack of it, or wealth and the lack of it, or breeding and the lack of it. It is not the aristocracy that matters supremely; nor the "great middle-class"; nor the masses; nor the teachers; nor the doctors; nor the servants of modern industrialism. The classification is a biological one—into parents and non-parents. The non-parents may be invaluable in their way, if only they beget something that is valuable. Heaven forbid that I should undervalue the children of the mind. But if we are to classify any nation, the first and last classification of any moment is none of those in which we always indulge and which all our customs and traditions and prejudices are ever seeking to perpetuate; but the classification into those who will die childless and those who create the future race. That is why, for me at any rate, the subject of women's rights is jejune and sterile compared with the subject of this chapter. First let us ascertain the rights of mothers and grant them, to the very uttermost; then let us do the same for the fathers. Let us exact of each the corresponding duties; and the next generation, brought into being under such conditions, will solve all our problems. But whilst we neglect the first things we shall permanently solve no problem at all. We may seem to do so, but if we dishonour parenthood, if we leave the inferior women to mother the future, the degenerate race that must ensue will find itself in difficulties compared with which ours are trivial, and our solutions of them impotent.
That is why I seek to draw attention to the rights not of women as women,—for neither men nor women have any peculiar rights as men or women—nor yet to the rights of wives as wives, but to the rights of mothers as mothers, whether married or unmarried, whether husbanded or widowed. The rights of women are the rights of human beings, and no special concern of a writer on woman and womanhood, paradoxical as the assertion may be. The rights of wives are often discussed, but I question whether the discussion ever helped a wife yet, except solely in the matter of her monetary claims upon her husband. Discussion and public opinion and consequent legislation can effect, and have effected, something for wives as wives in this matter. In other matters, much more vital to their happiness, each case is unique because all individuals are unique; and the discussion of the questions can amount to no more than futile and obvious platitude.
But when motherhood is concerned the monetary question becomes worthy of the adjective economic, so often prostituted, for the making of future life depends upon the provision of adequate means. The whole essence of motherhood is that it is a dedication of the present to the future. Every mother is in the position of the inventor or the poet or the musician for whose work the present makes no demand and no payment. The future is being served, but the future is not there to pay. The rights of mothers are the rights of the future, and its claims upon the present.
It can be abundantly shown that increasing prevision or provision marks the ascent of organic Nature; that as life ascends the present is more and more dedicated to the future. The completeness of this dedication is the most exemplary fact of the many which the bee-hive provides for our instruction and following. Consider the dedication of the hive to the queen. Realize that she is not in any way the ruler of the hive, but she is the only mother in it. She is the parent, and, on our principles, she is therefore the most important person in the hive. No one else has any rights but to serve her, for the future absolutely depends upon her. So does the future of our society depend upon its mothers. In our species there are many and not one, as in the bee-hive. If there were just one individual who was to be the mother of the next generation, even our politicians would perceive that she was the most important person in the community, and that her rights were supreme. But the principle stands, though, as it happens, human mothers are not one in each generation, but many. They are in our society what the queen bee is in the hive, and the future will transcend the present and the past just in so far as they are well-chosen, and well cared for.
To the best of my belief this principle has not yet been recognized by any one. The rights of women and the rights of wives are often discussed, but the rights of mothers is a term expressing a principle which is not to be called new, only because in the bee-hive, for instance, we see it expressed and inerrably served.
Perhaps it may be permitted to close with a personal reminiscence which, at any rate, bears on the genesis of this chapter. Some nine years ago when I was resident-surgeon to the Edinburgh Maternity Hospital, I proposed to get up a concert for the patients on Boxing Day, and on asking permission of the distinguished obstetrician who was in supreme charge, was met with the question, "Do they deserve it?" After several seconds there slowly dawned the fact which I knew but had long forgotten, that the mothers in the large ward where the music was proposed, were all unmarried, and finally I answered, "I don't know." Nor do I know to this day, and though the answer was given in weakness and in a disconcerted voice, I doubt whether any wiser one could be framed. We all know what desert means, and merit and credit, until we begin to think and study: and we end by discovering that we do not know what, in the last analysis, these terms mean. But, at any rate, these women,—one of them, I remember, was a child of fourteen—were mothers, and whatever favoured their convalescence unquestionably made for the survival of their babies. It might have been argued that if the patients did not deserve music, they did not deserve the air and light and food and skill and kindness with which they were being restored to health. But it is not a question of deserts. These women were mothers. If they should not have been, they should not have been, and if the blame was theirs, they were blameworthy. But mothers they were, with the duties of mothers to perform, and therefore with the rights of mothers. They got their concert and were all the better for the remarkably indifferent music of which it consisted, as such concerts commonly do; and I am only very sorry if any of them argued therefrom that she had nothing in the past to regret.
But the spiritual attitude revealed in the question, "Do they deserve it?" is one which must speedily go to its own place. Let us strive to dignify marriage, to educate the young of both sexes for parenthood, to reduce illegitimacy, to reward virtue. But where there is motherhood in being, whether expectant or achieved, we have a duty which is the highest and most sacred of all because it is the Future that we are called upon to serve, and upon us it wholly depends.
As Mr. John Burns said to our first Infant Mortality Conference in Great Britain in 1907, "Let us dignify, purify and glorify motherhood by every means in our power." Evidently this can only be done through marriage, which is in its very essence an institution for the dignifying of motherhood. But a biological writer cannot distinguish as a theologian can between legal and extra-legal motherhood. He may declare that motherhood is hideously illegitimate when it is forced upon a wife married to an inebriate degenerate. He may accept marriage with all his heart as an institution which for him has natural sanctions millions of years older than any Church or State or mankind itself. But for him as a student of life all motherhood must be guarded as such—even if it be guarded in such a fashion that it can never recur, which is our duty to the feeble-minded mother.
If there be any reader who is unacquainted with M. Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," let him or her study that instructive book. Let him ask why the queen is the End of the hive, why all is for her. Let him ask whether the natural law upon which this depends—the law that all individuals are mortal—does not apply to all races, even our own, and perhaps he will come to agree that the rights of mothers are the oldest and deepest and most necessary of any rights that can be named.
And the recognition and granting of them—as they must necessarily be recognized and granted in every living race that depends upon motherhood—is even more imperative in our case than in any other, since human motherhood makes more demands upon the individual than any other. By our constitution we human beings must devote more of our energies to the Future than any other race. But it is a Future better worth working for than any of theirs.