Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

The ideal condition for a child that is to be well-constituted and flourishing in body and mind, is, in the first place, that its mother should be left in peace during gestation, and certainly that she should be left scrupulously alone during the period of suckling. From the standpoint of the race it is of such supreme importance that a child should be reared on mother’s milk, that everything should be done, no stone should be left unturned, to secure if possible the certainty of this condition.

With regard to cohabitation during gestation it is only fair to say that opinions are sadly divided, some doctors maintaining one thing, and others the reverse. If we require a standard, however, we have only to study the lower animals, among which the female is not even accessible during pregnancy. Whereas some doctors will declare, however, that any cohabitation whatsoever during gestation is most pernicious, all are unanimous in pronouncing against normal indulgence at such times. But apart from everything that changeable and uncertain science may periodically proclaim regarding this question, it would seem obvious that cohabitation at a time when fertilization is impossible cannot in any case have been Nature’s design; and if, therefore, there remain the smallest doubt about the matter—as the division of opinion among medical men reveals—surely the benefit of the doubt ought, in all humanity, to be given to the expected offspring!

With regard to cohabitation after the confinement and during the seven to nine months of suckling that should follow, there can, however, be no doubt whatsoever. This must be bad; for, seeing that it is of primary importance that the child during these months should be able to obtain mother’s milk, no risks should be run which can in any way jeopardize the happy fulfilment of this condition.

At such times the mother should be left severely alone. She is happy, exquisitely happy.[65] Her nervous system is concentrated on the one important and essential object—that of providing for her infant child. Any action or diversion that tends to disturb the attention of the nervous system, or to shake this precious concentration upon the mammæ, cannot therefore be too strongly deprecated.

What is the alternative? The mammæ find the nervous energy of the body divided. The woman’s system is no longer that of a mother alone; it has been recalled to its rôle as a wife. There may be conception or there may not—at any rate, the frequent occurrence of children only a year or thirteen months older than a brother or sister, shows how often conception does take place in such circumstances—and the consequence is that the suckling has to be removed from the breast, in order to become the experimental victim of every kind of abomination in the form of substitutes for mother’s milk.

To the ignorance of the young mother concerning artificial foods are now added the ignorance of neighbours, the audacious and criminal lies of commercial baby-food manufacturers, and frequently the ineptitude of the local doctor. Against such a conspiracy of error—irrespective of the fact that no substitute, however good, can possibly compensate for the loss of mother’s milk—it is not surprising that the infant’s body should rebel; and the result is a child who cannot by any conceivable chance be saved from digestive trouble, whom nothing can cure of digestive trouble, and who, by having alimentary disorders started so early in life, reaches maturity not only with a strong bias in favour of gastric and intestinal vices, but also—if indeed his teeth survive so long—with every imaginable kind of dental disease, from caries to pyorrhœa.

From mothers congenitally and constitutionally unfit either to have babies or to nurse them, there will surely always come a sufficiently vast contribution of unhealthy and undesirable babies to each generation; but these, at least, no ordinary precaution can save, and if their early upbringing only tends to promote a condition of degeneracy already inherent in them, so that they find it difficult to survive, we can only applaud this confirmation of a thoroughly moribund tendency.

But in the case of healthy, positive women, admirably fitted to fulfil all the functions of motherhood efficiently and pleasurably, anything that interferes with this healthy functioning amounts to a national and racial calamity, and it is to these I refer when I emphasize the immense danger of cohabitation during the nursing period.

Now the monogamic marriage makes this sort of plague almost a natural necessity, a sort of ineluctable scourge. It is impossible to ask a normal, positive, healthy man to exercise sexual abstinence for sixteen or eighteen months—that is to say, the nine months of his wife’s pregnancy and the seven or nine months of lactation. Only Manicheans, Puritans, or people thoroughly below par and quite devoid of virility, could possibly think of recommending such a course. Psycho-analysis has at last shown what all decent and clean-minded people knew about prolonged sexual abstinence—that it is both wrongful and harmful. It can only be thought of and practised by people who have either used religious and alcoholic methods of sublimating their passions, or else by people who are utterly and conspicuously undesirable; but in the case of the latter it should be remembered that it is not abstinence or so-called “self-control,” but semi-impotence. Where it is attempted by exuberant, positive young men, who are neither geniuses in art, philosophy or religion, it can only mean disease—possibly physical, but certainly nervous.

The husband, therefore, in a monogamic marriage consisting of the union of two positive, healthy people, finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. If he be sound and normal he cannot dream of abstaining for the number of months that would be necessary for his child’s welfare (for even if he indulges in cohabitation during gestation, he still has to face the seven or nine months of suckling, during which he must at all costs leave his wife in peace); and yet society (modern society) and convention generally bid him rather ruin his child than practise even the most innocuous form of virtual polygamy.