The evil is so great in its effects, not only upon the health and constitution of the rising generation, but, as well, upon the physical and mental development thereof, that such maternal depletion is, I am assured, a cause of widespread disease among children; of infantile paralysis, degeneracy and mortality. It is reason enough, in all conscience, to call for the legalised prohibition of all mothers with young families from engaging in professional or industrial employment.
Because although such depletion of her children's health is graver in degree during a mother's pregnancy, at all times over-worked, sickly, or strenuous women recruit their powers from the constitutional resources of others. Only, indeed, by such depletion of their neighbours can many of our present-day neurotic, overactive women (some of them with ill-nourished bodies and feeble assimilation, but with, nevertheless, indefatigable energies) contrive to keep going.
Strong-willed, self-centred women, keen in pursuit of business, athletics or pleasure, will, by sapping the nervous forces of these, keep all the members of their households—husband, children, servants—more or less de-vitalised, neurasthenic and characterless; one or more actually invalided, perhaps.
If nervous energy is, indeed, a complex form of electrical energy, this nervous interchange is intelligible; obeying the law that bodies under-charged with electricity charge themselves from bodies more highly charged, until equilibrium is established.
Who among doctors does not know the wan and listless, semi-paralytic babes that working-mothers—and most particularly pregnant working-mothers—bring to the consulting-room? The hapless victims lie limply, or sit hunched upon the woman's lap, nerveless, wasted, apathetic; faces white and hopeless, abdomen lax and tumid; the blenched limbs soft as butter, weak and dangling. They are suffering, perhaps, from some specific ailment, bronchitis, paralysis, gastric or intestinal troubles; perhaps only from mysterious wasting and inanition. Not seldom there is an elder child too, white and weak and fretful, and the subject of "infantilism"; growth stunted, development arrested. Such children, in their mental hebetude and physical degeneracy, suggest a degree of cretinism. And in the suggestion, a possible cause appears for the cretinous offspring of the hard-living, over-worked mothers of Swiss cantons.
IX
Drummond says of Motherhood:
"Even on its physical side ... this was the most stupendous task Evolution ever undertook."
While on the physical side, we see that Nature has made infancy and childhood increasingly helpless as species advances in evolutionary values, in order to call forth increasingly intelligent, and sympathetic response and resource in the mother. Feminism in unmaking the mother, is undoing the labours of countless ages of evolutionary advance. The intensifying mentality of woman, destined for the more subtly intelligent and sympathetic nurture of the Race's increasingly valuable and complex offspring, is being diverted, more and more, by Feminist counsel and practice from human and vital into merely economic channels.