Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

Just after we had succeeded in getting the Notification of Births Act put upon the Statute Book, the present writer occupied himself in various parts of the country in the efforts which were necessary to persuade local authorities to adopt the provisions of that Act. Addressing a meeting of the clergy of Islington, he endeavoured to trace back to the beginning the main cause of infant mortality, and endeavoured to show that that lay in the natural ignorance of the human mother, about which more must later be said. In the discussion which followed, an elderly clergyman insisted that the causes had not been traced far enough back, maternal ignorance being itself permitted in consequence of our national prudery.

Ever since that day one has come to see more and more clearly that the criticism was just. Maternal ignorance, as we shall see later, is a natural fact of human kind, and destroys infant life everywhere, though prudery be or be not a local phenomenon. But where vast organizations exist for the remedying of ignorance, prudery indeed is responsible for the neglect of ignorance on the most important of all subjects. Let it not be supposed for a moment that in this protest one desires, even for the highest ends, to impart such knowledge as would involve sullying the bloom of girlhood. It is not necessary to destroy the charm of innocence in order to remedy certain kinds of ignorance; nor are prudery and modesty identical. Whatever prudery may be when analyzed, it seems perfectly fair to charge it as the substantial cause of the ignorance in which the young generation grows up, as to matters which vitally concern its health and that of future generations. Let us now observe in brief the price of prudery thus arraigned.

There is, first, that large proportion of infant mortality which is due to maternal ignorance, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter. At present we may briefly remind ourselves that the nation has had the young mother at school for many years; much devotion and money have been spent upon her. Yet it is necessary to pass an Act insuring, if possible, that when she is confronted with the great business of her life—which is the care of a baby—within thirty-six hours the fact shall be made known to some one who, racing for life against time, may haply reach her soon enough to remedy the ignorance which would otherwise very likely bury her baby. Prudery has decreed that while at school she should learn nothing of such matters. For the matter of that she may even have attended a three-year course in science or technology, and be a miracle of information on the keeping of accounts, the testing of drains, and the principles of child psychology, but it has not been thought suitable to discuss with her the care of a baby. How could any nice-minded teacher care to put such ideas into a girl's head? Never having noticed a child with a doll, we have somehow failed to realize that Nature, her Ancient Mother and ours, is not above putting into her head, when she can scarcely toddle, the ideas at which we pretend to blush. Prudery on this topic, and with such consequences, is not much less than blasphemy against life and the most splendid purposes towards which the individual, "but a wave of the wild sea," can be consecrated.

This question of the care of babies offers us much less excuse for its neglect than do questions concerned with the circumstances antecedent to the babies' appearance. Yet we are blameworthy, and disastrously so, here also. Prudery here insists that boys and girls shall be left to learn anyhow. That is not what it says, but that is what it does. It feebly supposes not merely that ignorance and innocence are identical, but that, failing the parent, the doctor, the teacher, and the clergyman—and probably all these do fail—ignorance will remain ignorant. There are others, however, who always lie in wait, whether by word of mouth or the printed word, and since youth will in any case learn—except in the case of a few rare and pure souls—we have to ask ourselves whether we prefer that these matters shall be associated in its mind with the cad round the corner or the groom or the chauffeur who instructs the boy, the domestic servant who instructs the girl, and with all those notions of guilty secrecy and of misplaced levity which are entailed; or with the idea that it is right and wise to understand these matters in due measure because their concerns are the greatest in human life.

After puberty, and during early adolescence, when a certain amount of knowledge has been acquired, we leave youth free to learn lies from advertisements, carefully calculated to foster the tendency to hypochondria, which is often associated with such matters. Of this, however, no more need now be said, since it scarcely concerns the girl.

It is the ignorance conditioned by prudery that is responsible later on for many criminal marriages; contracted, it may be, with the blind blessing of Church and State, which, however, the laws of heredity and infection rudely ignore. Parents cannot bring themselves to inquire into matters which profoundly concern the welfare of the daughter for whom they propose to make what appears to be a good marriage. They desire, of course, that her children shall be healthy and whole-minded; they do not desire that marriage should be for her the beginning of disease, from the disastrous effects of which she may never recover. But these are delicate matters, and prudery forbids that they should be inquired into; yet every father who permits his daughter to marry without having satisfied himself on these points is guilty, at the least, of grave delinquency of duty, and may, in effect, be conniving at disasters and desolations of which he will not live to see the end.

Young people often grow fond of each other and become engaged, and then, if the engagement be prolonged—as all engagements ought to be, as a general rule—they may find that, after all, they do not wish to marry. Yet the girl's mother, an imprudent prude, may often in this and other cases do her utmost to bring the marriage about, not because she is convinced that it means her daughter's highest welfare and happiness, but because prudery dictates that her daughter must marry the man with whom she has been so frequently seen; hence very likely lifelong unhappiness, and worse.

Society, from the highest to the lowest of its strata, is afflicted with certain forms of understood and eminently preventable disease, about which not a word has been spoken in Parliament for twenty years, and any public mention of which by mouth or pen involves serious risk of various kinds. Here it is perhaps not necessary for us to consider the case of the outcast, and of the diseases with which, poor creature, she is first infected, and which she then distributes into our homes. Our present concern is simply to point out that prudery, again, is largely responsible for the continuance of these evils at a time when we have so much precise knowledge regarding their nature and the possibility of their prevention. Medical science cannot make distinctions between one disease and another, nor between one sin and another, as prudery does. Prudery says that such and such is vice, that its consequences in the form of disease are the penalties imposed by its abominable god upon the guilty and the innocent, the living and the unborn alike, and that therefore our ordinary attitude towards disease cannot here be maintained. Physiological science, however, knowing what it knows regarding food and alcohol, and air and exercise and diet, can readily demonstrate that the gout from which Mrs. Grundy suffers is also a penalty for sin; none the less because it is not so hideously disproportionate, in its measure and in its incidence, to the gravity of the offence. These moral distinctions between one disease and another have little or no meaning for medical science, and are more often than not immoral.

It would be none too easy to show that the medical profession in any country has yet used its tremendous power in this direction. Professions, of course, do not move as a whole, and we must not expect the universal laws of institutions to find an exception here. But though they do not move, they can be moved. It is when the public has been educated in the elements of these matters, and has been taught to see what the consequences of prudery are, that the necessary forces will be brought into action. Meanwhile, what we call the social evil is almost entirely left to the efforts made in Rescue Homes and the like. Despite the judgment of a popular novelist and playwright, it is much more than doubtful whether Rescue Homes—the only method which Mrs. Grundy will tolerate—are the best way of dealing with this matter, even if the people who worked in them had the right kind of outlook upon the matter, and even if their numbers were indefinitely multiplied. Every one who has devoted a moment's thought to the matter knows perfectly well that this is merely beginning at the end, and therefore all but futile. I mention the matter here to make the point that the one measure which prudery permits—so that indeed it may even be mentioned upon our highly moral stage, and passed by the censor, who would probably be hurried into eternity if M. Brieux's Les Avariés were submitted to him, and who found "Mrs. Warren's Profession" intolerable—is just the most useless, ill-devised, and literally preposterous with which this tremendous problem can be mocked.

This leads us to another point. It is that the means of our education, other than the schools, are also prejudiced by prudery. Upon the stage there is permitted almost any indecency of word, or innuendo, or gesture, or situation, provided only that the treatment be not serious. Almost anything is tolerable if it be frivolously dealt with, but so soon as these intensely serious matters are dealt with seriously, prudery protests. The consequence is that a great educative influence, like the theatre, where a few playwrights like M. Brieux, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Granville Barker, and Mr. John Galsworthy, might effect the greatest things, is relegated by Mrs. Grundy to the plays produced by Mr. George Edwardes and other earnest upholders of the censorship.