Women who fence or play hockey and other rough games during girlhood, become, owing to such degenerative atrophy, incapacitated for lactation.
The following is an interesting example of the manner in which cruder and lower-grade power may be increased at the cost of higher faculties. A patient told me that, having been naturally a poor walker—two miles having been her limit—she had determined to train herself out of this which she regarded as an infirmity. Accordingly, by persistent practice, she succeeded in raising her walking-power to ten miles daily. She mentioned incidentally—seeing no relation of cause and effect—that, for several years (the years during which her walking-powers had been increasing) she had become progressively deaf.
That she had been, in point of fact, sapping the potential of the complex, invaluable faculty of hearing, in order to equip her leg-muscles, was confirmed for me a few weeks later, when I read of a number of cyclists, who, after one of those deplorable pacing-exhibitions common to-day, came in, one and all, stone deaf: a consequence of nervous strain. The deafness in these cases passed off with rest. But it is easy to understand that from such temporary functional depletions frequently recurring, permanent structural deterioration must result inevitably. Thus it is that over-use, in sports and games, of the muscles of shoulder and chest, occasions atrophy of mammary glands.
By no other way than by artificially inducing in them a premature (partial) climacteric, by perverting their young organisations to the quasi-masculine type of the middle-aged woman, and thereby releasing, for available output, power which should have remained conserved for many years in organisation, can women be fitted for masculine pursuits. And such sterilisation, where it is not producing actually diseased and degenerate offspring, is producing a pitiful race of pallid and enfeebled babes and children; dyspeptic and spectacled, adenoid-afflicted, unchildlike and generally deteriorate.
That other factors contribute to the wave of Racial decline now menacing our modern civilisations, great and small, is true. Yet mothers of fine vital potential are able to counteract and to minimise the effects of constitutional disease in the other parent to degrees but little realised. Because such mothers are so lamentably rare.
IV
It is the natural release of vital forces, consequent upon the normal wane of mother-power at middle-age, that has been mainly responsible for the errors of the Woman's Movement.
In all its aims and methods it has been essentially a Middle-aged Woman's movement. There are no young ideals in it; no concessions to youth, to love, to graciousness or sentiment; none to wifehood or to motherhood. It has been, for the most part, a grim, dour striving after neuter standards, neuter models, neuter efficiencies, neuter lives and neuter recompenses.
Identity of brain and muscle, of aims and claims, of games and avocations; equal rights and equal work and equal pay have been the watchwords of its propaganda. "Fair play and no privileges!" its promoters rigorously demand for these poor weedy girl-neurotics who, beyond all else, require industrial concessions and the human clemency of adequate rest and leisure, to allow of normal and healthful development of their growing brains and bodies.