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Shall woman leave to man no field at all of natural supremacy? Shall she not be content with her beautiful part as generatrix of Faculty, but must seek to be exponent too?
That all women do not marry—cannot marry, indeed, because of their preponderance in number over the other sex—is no reason for dissembling the truth that in wifehood and motherhood lie woman's most vital and valuable rôles.
Nor is it warrant for training the whole sex as though none were destined to fulfil this, their natural and noblest—if not always, their happiest vocation.
XIII
Feminism repudiates, from time to time, the charge against it of belittling Motherhood. Yet how can it profess to credit the maternal function with due values or significance when it denies the obligations and responsibilities thereof, asks no economic concessions for it? And when, in place of demanding privileges indispensable to its exercise and complete fulfilment, it makes no distinction, in respect of work and the worker, between childless and unmarried women and mothers and expectant mothers? And this despite the fact that, for a period of eighteen months at very least, the mother's best vital resources belong by rights, biological and moral, to each babe she produces—nine for the pre-natal building of its body and brain, and nine for lactation.
Her moral obligation to nurse, and the criminality of her omission when able to do so, have been emphasised as follows by Sir J. Crichton-Browne:
"Dr. Robertson, Medical Officer of Health for Birmingham has shown that while the infant-mortality of breast-fed infants is 7·8 per 1000 births, that of infants receiving no breast-milk is 232 per 1000. And Sir Arthur Newsholme, Medical Adviser to the Local Government Board, has shown that the probability of death from epidemic diarrhœa is 54 times greater among infants fed on cow's milk than among those fed on breast-milk, and 150 times greater amongst infants fed on condensed milk.
"But it is not merely in a high infant death-rate that the evil effects of the want of breast-milk stand confessed. Where it does not kill it often maims, and is responsible for malnutrition, rickets, tuberculosis, and a multiplicity of ailments. Every doctor is familiar with the alabaster babies, flabby, limp, languid, and painfully pallid, who have never tasted their natural nutriment."
Dr. Truby King records the interesting fact that the finest calf-skin, known as Paris Calf, is obtained from calves reared by their mothers, in order to provide the finest veal for Paris. So supple and smooth-haired and superior is the skin of these mother-suckled creatures that dealers are able to distinguish it at once from the skin of calves that have been artificially fed.
About this, Mr. Horace G. Regnart kindly supplies me with the following significant data: