Woman free

by Ellis Ethelmer

XLVI.

3.—“... impartial range ...”

Preparation in this direction is going steadily forward, not only in the Western hemisphere, but in the Eastern. It is announced (in August, 1892) that

“Lady students at the five Universities in Switzerland number 224. Berne is the most popular, with 78 female undergraduates; Zurich has 70; Geneva 70; the new University of Lausanne has five; and Basle one. The medical faculty is in most favour with the female students, and counts 157 of the whole number; the philosophical faculty follows with 62; five prefer the faculty of jurisprudence; the theological faculty has not yet been invaded by the sex. More than half of the female students, 116, are Russians, 21 Germans, 21 Swiss, 11 Americans, nine Austrians, seven Bulgarians, four English, three Roumanians, and three from the Turkish Empire, all of whom are young Armenian ladies.”

4.—“... wider wisdom ...”

Such wider wisdom—without the preliminary suffering—as the poet had attained to, when he wrote:—

“I have climbed to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the Past,

Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire;

But I hear no yelps of the beast, and the man is quiet at last,

As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height that is higher.”

—Tennyson (“By an Evolutionist”).

Id.—“... juster ethics, teach; ...”

“For we see that it is possible to interpret the ideals of ethical progress, through love and sociality, co-operation and sacrifice, not as mere utopias contradicted by experience, but as the highest expressions of the central evolutionary process of the natural world.... The older biologists have been primarily anatomists, analysing and comparing the form of the organism, separate and dead; however incompletely, we have sought rather to be physiologists, studying and interpreting the highest and intensest activity of things living.... It is much for our pure natural history to recognise that ‘creation’s final law’ is not struggle, but love.”—Geddes and Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” pp. 312, 313).

5; 6.—“Conformed to claims of intellect and need,

The tempered numbers of their high-born breed;”

“There is a problem creeping gradually forward upon us, a problem that will have to be solved in time, and that is the steady increase of population.... I believe that with the emancipation of women we shall solve this problem now. Fewer children will be born, and those that are born will be of a higher and better physique than the present order of men. The ghastly abortions, which in many parts pass muster nowadays, owing to the unnatural physical conditions of society, as men, women, and children, will make room for a nobler and higher order of beings, who will come to look upon the production of mankind in a diseased or degraded state as a wickedness and unpardonable crime, against which all men and women should fight and strive.”—Lady Florence Dixie (“Gloriana,” p. 137).

Id.... And Mrs. Mona Caird says:—“If the new movement had no other effect than to rouse women to rebellion against the madness of large families, it would confer a priceless benefit on humanity.”—(Nineteenth Century, May, 1892.)

Id.... “To bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society.... The fact itself of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility—to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing—unless the being on whom it is bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being. And in a country either over-peopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a very small number, with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their competition, is a serious offence against all who live by the remuneration of their labour.”—J. S. Mill (“Liberty,” Chap. V.).

Id.... A. Dumas fils draws a true and piteous picture in which this element of the unintelligent overproduction of human beings has the largest share:—

“Il y a, et c’est la masse, les femmes du peuple et de la campagne suant du matin au soir pour gagner le pain quotidien, faisant ainsi ce que faisaient leurs mères, et mettant au monde, sans savoir pourquoi ni comment, des filles qui, à leur tour, feront comme elles, à moins que, plus jolies, et par conséquent plus insoumises, elles ne sortent du groupe par le chemin tentant et facile de la prostitution, mais où le labeur est encore plus rude. Le dos courbé sous le travail du jour, regardant la terre quand elles marchent, domptées par la misère, vaincues par l’habitude, asservies aux besoins des autres, ces créatures à forme de femme ne supposent que leur condition puisse être modifiée jamais. Elles n’ont pas le temps, elles n’ont jamais eu la faculté de penser et de réfléchir; à peine un souhait vague et bientôt refoulé de quelque chose de mieux! Quand la charge est trop lourde elles tombent, elles geignent comme des animaux terrassés, elles versent de grosses larmes à l’idée de laisser leurs petits sans ressources, ou elles remercient instinctivement la mort, c’est-à-dire le repos dont elles ont tant besoin.” (“Les Femmes qui Tuent,” etc., p. 101.)

Id.... And again, the advanced biological writers say:—

“The statistician will doubtless long continue his fashion of confidently estimating the importance and predicting the survival of populations from their quantity and rate of reproduction alone; but at all this, as naturalists, we can only scoff. Even the most conventional exponent of the struggle for existence among us knows, with the barbarian conquerors of old, that ‘the thicker the grass, the easier it is mown,’ that ‘the wolf cares not how many the sheep may be.’ It is the most individuated type that prevails in spite, nay, in another sense, positively because of its slower increase; in a word, the survival of a species or family depends not primarily upon quantity, but upon quality. The future is not to the most numerous population, but to the most individuated....

“Apart from the pressure of population, it is time to be learning (1) That the annual child-bearing still so common, is cruelly exhaustive to the maternal life, and this often in actual duration as well as quality; (2) That it is similarly injurious to the standard of offspring; and hence, (3) That an interval of two clear years between births (some gynæcologists even go as far as three) is due alike to mother and offspring.” (It is to be noted that this period of three years is postulated as a necessity for the well-being of the offspring; it is by no means a recommendation to even a triennial maternity on the part of the mother, who is indeed to be, in all fulness, “free mistress of her person’s sacred plan,” with a duty to herself, as well as to her child). “It is time, therefore, as we heard a brave parson tell his flock lately, ‘to have done with that blasphemous whining which constantly tries to look at a motherless’ (ay, or sometimes even fatherless) ‘crowd of puny infants as a dispensation of mysterious providence.’ Let us frankly face the biological facts, and admit that such cases usually illustrate only the extreme organic nemesis of intemperance and improvidence, and these of a kind far more reprehensible than those actions to which common custom applies the names, since they are species-regarding vices, and not merely self-regarding ones, as the others at least primarily are....

“It seems to us, however, essential to recognise that the ideal to be sought after is not merely a controlled rate of increase, but regulated married lives.... We would urge, in fact, the necessity of an ethical rather than of a mechanical ‘prudence after marriage,’ of a temperance recognised to be as binding on husband and wife as chastity on the unmarried.... Just as we would protest against the dictum of false physicians who preach indulgence rather than restraint, so we must protest against regarding artificial means of preventing fertilisation as adequate solutions of sexual responsibility. After all, the solution is primarily one of temperance. It is no new nor unattainable ideal to retain, throughout married life, a large measure of that self-control which must always form the organic basis of the enthusiasm and idealism of lovers.”—Geddes and Thomson (“The Evolution of Sex,” Chap. XX.).

As a fitting exemplification of the words of the “parson” above narrated, compare the following verbatim extract from a conversation in this year of grace 1892. The —— referred to is a man about 35, middle-class, and of “good ‘education’” (!) The same description would also apply to the speaker, who said, “Poor —— is a brave fellow, and keeps up his head in the worst of luck. He has a lot of home troubles; he has lost three children, and his wife always has a bad time at the birth of each baby.”

No word of sympathy for the wife and mother, or even of recognition that it was really she who bore the pain at each “bad time.” As the children left alive still numbered two at the time of the speech, the whole incident can but imply—on the part of both actor and speaker—the hideous, even if unconscious, inhumanity so widely prevalent. Never will “high-born breed” be attained till such action of low-bred intellect is reprobated and amended; in accordance with the enunciated truth, that:—

“Especially in higher organisms, a distinction must obviously be drawn between the period at which it is possible for males and females to unite in fertile sexual union, and the period at which such union will naturally occur or will result in the fittest offspring.”—Geddes and Thomson (op. cit., p. 243).

7, 8.—“Not overworn with childward pain and care,

The mother—and the race—robuster health shall share.”

“It is not the true purpose of any intellectual organism to live solely to give birth to succeeding organisms; its duty is also to live for its own happiness and well-being. Indeed, in so doing, it will be acting in one of the most certain ways to ensure that faculty and possession of happiness that it aims to secure for its progeny.”—Ben Elmy (“Studies in Materialism,” Chap. III.).

Id.... Even the placid and precisian American poet bears strong, if involuntary, testimony to the evil and wrong of the non-cultured and untempered begetting of children:—

“She wedded a man unlearned and poor,

And many children played round her door;

But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain

Left their traces on heart and brain.”

—Whittier (“Maud Müller”).

Id.... Mr. Andrew Lang also promises us “a world that is glad and clean, and not overthronged and not overdriven.”—(Introduction to “Elizabethan Songs.”)

Id.... “Justice never loses sight of self.... The language of Justice is ‘to Me and to You; or to You and to Me.’ ... We have to learn, for the action and spirit worthy of the coming time, that woman is never to sacrifice herself to a man, but, when needful, to the Manhood she hopes or desires to develop in him. In this she will also attain her own development. But after the hour when her faith in the hope of worthy results fails her (reason instructing her nobler affections by holding candidly in view all the premises, past, present, and future), she is bound by all her higher obligations to bring that career, whether it be of the daughter, sister, mother, wife, or friend, to a close. For the inferior cannot possibly be worth the sacrifice of the superior. True self-sacrifice, which necessarily involves the temporary descent of the nobler to the less noble—the higher to the lower—is made only when the lower is elevated, improved, carried forward in its career, thereby.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 149).

Id.... “I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another; but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.... Woman, self-controlled, would never be absorbed by any relations; it would be only an experience to her as to man. It is a vulgar error that love, a love to woman, is her whole existence; she is also born for truth and love in their universal energy.”—Margaret Fuller Ossoli (“The Woman of the Nineteenth Century”).

Id.... Professor Alfred Russell Wallace has written an article, concerning part of which Mr. W. T. Stead rightly says: “It is a scientific reinforcement of the cause of the emancipation of women, and shows that progress of the cause of female enfranchisement is identified with the progress of humanity.”—(Review of Reviews, Vol. V., p. 177.)

Professor Wallace says:—

“When such social changes have been effected that no woman will be compelled, either by hunger, isolation, or social compulsion, to sell herself, whether in or out of wedlock, and when all women alike shall feel the refining influence of a true humanising education, of beautiful and elevating surroundings, and of a public opinion which shall be founded on the highest aspirations of their age and country, the result will be a form of human selection which will bring about a continuous advance in the average status of the race. Under such conditions, all who are deformed either in body or mind, though they may be able to lead happy and contented lives, will, as a rule, leave no children to inherit their deformity. Even now we find many women who never marry because they have never found the man of their ideal. When no woman will be compelled to marry for a bare living or for a comfortable home, those who remain unmarried from their own free choice will certainly increase, while many others, having no inducement to an early marriage, will wait till they meet with a partner who is really congenial to them.

“In such a reformed society the vicious man, the man of degraded taste or feeble intellect, will have little chance of finding a wife, and his bad qualities will die out with himself. The most perfect and beautiful in body and mind will, on the other hand, be most sought, and, therefore, be most likely to marry early, the less highly endowed later, and the least gifted in any way the latest of all, and this will be the case with both sexes.

“From this varying age of marriage, as Mr. Galton has shown, there will result a more rapid increase of the former than of the latter, and this cause continuing at work for successive generations will, at length, bring the average man to be the equal of those who are now among the more advanced of the race.”—“Human Progress, Past and Present” (Arena, Jan., 1892).