Not only for the pitiful respite of a month before and a month after the birth of her child, should the mother be prohibited from industrial labour. By that time all the damage will have been done. The power that should have been put into the evolution of her infant will have been put into the revolutions of a lathe. The life-potential that should have gone to build its living bone and brain and muscle will have gone to feed the life of a machine. The breath she will have drawn for it will have been contaminated by the dust and fumes of toil. Its poor nascent brain and faculties will have been dulled and depleted, stupefied and vitiated by the stress and turmoil of its mother's labours. Only the dregs of the maternal powers will have been invested in the Race. The finest and most valuable will have gone to swell the balance-sheets of Capital.
The trumpet-cry of The Woman's Movement should be, indeed, The Absolute Prohibition of young Wives and Mothers from all Industrial and Professional employment!
Such a prohibition, by lessening the competition of the labour-market, and by thus increasing the value of labour (which the flood of female industry inevitably cheapens) would automatically so increase the wage of men as to make of these true living wage, sufficient for the maintenance of home and family. Such a prohibition would, moreover, so diminish the competitive pressure among women as to make it possible for unmarried women, the future wives and mothers, as well as for the older spinsters and widows, to select in every fitting trade and industry, work suited to the lesser strength and endurance of the female brain and body.
VII
Nothing has characterised the Feminist Movement throughout so much as lack of knowledge of human nature (both masculine and feminine), lack of prevision to foresee the trend of new developments, lack of intuitive apprehension to gauge the issues of such trend. Its leaders have never suspected, accordingly, that, in propaganda and in practice, they have been tampering with a great biological ordinance; and that, in obliterating women's Sex-characteristics, they have been destroying that counterpoise of human powers and faculties whereon progress and permanence rest, and that morale which is the inspiration of advance.
Regarding their own masculine Rationalism as the ideal and standard for all women, they have believed it possible to shape all women successfully thereto. Nature is not to be thwarted, however. And when we destroy the balance of the Normal, abnormal developments—gravely mischievous and singularly difficult to deal with—crop up and require to be dealt with. One may raise the familiar cry that some modern developments are due to our being in "a transition stage." But from that remote day when Nature first evolved us as a race of amœbæ, further to evolve into the human species, we have been always in "transition stages." Normal transition upwards is so slow an impulse as to be well-nigh imperceptible, however. Rapid change invariably betokens regression—descent being vastly easier and swifter in movement than ascent is.
Deplorably mistaken has been a doctrine of Emancipation which, by disparaging the arts domestic, has sent out young girls and women, indiscriminately, from the sphere domestic, to de-sexing and demoralising work in factories and businesses; and has engendered the race of stunted, precocious, bold-eyed, cigarette-smoking, free-living working-girls who fill our streets; many tricked out like cocottes, eyes roving after men, impudence upon their tongues, their poor brains vitiated by vulgar rag-times and cinema-scenes of vice and suggestiveness.
Some of our working-girls are charming-looking, pretty-mannered, pure of thought and life, of course. A small minority—alas, how small!—are normal of development and sound of constitution. But these are not the average. And it is the average with which a nation has to reckon.
Emphatically, men are not as women. In body and in mind they are by nature rougher, tougher, and vastly less impressionable. A regime that makes a boy will wreck a girl. Of more sensitive calibre, she requires more kindly, protective conditions, moral and industrial, than does he. Notwithstanding which, little girls now run the streets and take their chances as they may—in capacities of over-burdened errand-girl, telegraph-messenger, and otherwise—at ages when their developing womanhood requires due care of nurture, moral supervision, and freedom from physical strain. Sedentary occupations are a natural need of their sex, moreover, as is indicated by the breadth and weight of the female pelvis and hips, as too by the delicate adjustments of those important reproductive organs, the future products whereof are of inestimably higher national values than are the industrial assets of these poor children's labour. As Girl-guides and so forth, young girls parade our towns in meretricious (albeit hideous) uniform; developing thereby that love of publicity and of unwholesome excitement to which the sex is prone. Small girls just fresh from school are even now employed in barbers' shops to shave men; destroying thus in them, at the outset of life, that natural diffidence and reserve toward the other sex which are the first defences of womanly honour.