CHAPTER XII
THE UNMARRIED MOTHER
“The British Empire has invested thousands of its best lives to purchase future immunity for civilisation. This investment is too great to be thrown away.”—Right Hon. D. Lloyd George.
One of the most pressing questions that we shall have to face in the near future is the attitude and practical action which, as a people, we are going to adopt towards the unmarried mother and her child. I have so far said almost nothing upon this problem of illegitimacy, though the whole difficult question is connected with, and is, in fact, closely dependent for its solution on, the conclusions we arrived at in the preceding chapter on Sexual Relationships outside of Marriage; we then realised the moral advantage that would result from an open avowal and the regulation of all sexual partnerships, with the fixing, as far as this is possible, of a standard of conduct to be expected and claimed from those who enter into them. I have left over this question of the child on purpose that we may give it special consideration. No other matter is of greater significance to my book on Motherhood than is this, and none is deeper in my own interest or, in my opinion, of more urgent importance.
It is really impossible to evade it much longer. There is obviously something ridiculous, at a time when the fateful importance of child-life is being forced more and more upon our attention, to repeat our conventional, unimaginative and inconsistent judgments.
We are learning new and sharp lessons. Terrific war losses are teaching governments to consider the necessity of preserving the new generation even to its last and meanest members. At last the movements to improve the condition of illegitimate children, for which many of us have for long struggled in vain, have received new impetus. What humanity has been powerless to do, the most ancient of all inhumanities—war—has suddenly accomplished.
And it is well. We cannot go on as we have done before. We call motherhood holy, and yet we have sanctioned the sacrifice of mothers, driving them to crimes, to abortion, to child-murders and to death; we have sent them into sweated industries; we have turned them out onto the streets, forcing them to choose between starvation and prostitution. We have permitted the yearly destruction of tens of thousands of little children, born into a hard and barren world without the slightest provision for their physical and mental needs. At the same time, the fact has been hammered into us of the declining birth-rate. This has gone on and on, but we have done nothing that the evils may be stopped and life take the place of unnecessary death.
I cannot understand an attitude which simultaneously condemns the non-maternal woman, who does not wish to be a mother, accusing her of sin in shirking the duty of bearing children, and then brands the unmarried mother to infamy. By the cruelty of our law and the short-sightedness of our “moral” attitude we have worked to make life a martyrdom for the unmarried mother, and for the children born out of wedlock, who are smirched by us with the shame of their illegitimate birth, and thus are forced downward in the hard struggle of life.