Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

Publishers also, while accepting novels which would have staggered the Restoration Dramatists, can scarcely be found, even with great labour, for the publication of books dealing with the sex question from the most responsible medical or social standpoints.

It is just because public opinion is so potent, and, like all other powers, so potent either for good or for evil, that its present disastrous workings are the more deplorable. It is not unimaginable that prudery might undergo a sort of transmutation. As I have said before, we might make a eugenist of Mrs. Grundy, so that she might be as much affronted by a criminal marriage as she is now by the spectacle of a healthy and well-developed baby appearing unduly soon after its parents' marriage. The power is there, and it means well, though it does disastrously ill. Public opinion ought to be decided upon these matters; it ought to be powerful and effective. We shall never come out into the daylight until it is; we shall not be saved by laws, nor by medical knowledge, nor by the admonitions of the Churches. Our salvation lies only in a healthy public opinion, not less effective and not more well-meaning than public opinion is at present, but informed where it is now ignorant, and profoundly impressed with the importance of realities as it now is with the importance of appearances.

So much having been said, what can one suggest in the direction of remedy? First, surely it is something that we merely recognize the price of prudery. Personally, I find that it has made all the difference to my calculations to have had the thing pointed out by the clerical critic whose eye these words may possibly meet. It is something to recognize in prudery an enemy that must be attacked, and to realize the measure of its enmity. In the light of some little experience, perhaps a few suggestions may be made to those who would in any way join in the campaign for the education and transmutation of public opinion on these matters.

First, we must compose ourselves with fundamental seriousness—with that absolute gravity which imperils the publication of a book and entirely prohibits the production of a play on such matters. There is something in human nature beyond my explaining which leads towards jesting in these directions. An instinct, I know, is an instinct; of which a main character is that its exercise shall be independent of any knowledge as to its purpose. We eat because we like eating, rather than because we have reckoned that so many calories are required for a body of such and such a weight, in such and such conditions of temperature and pressure. It is not natural, so to say, just because man is in a sense rather more than natural, that we should be provident and serious, self-conscious, and philosophic, in dealing with our fundamental instincts. But it is necessary, if we are to be human: and only in so far as, "looking before and after," we transcend the usual conditions of instinct, are we human at all.

The special risk run by those who would deal with these matters seriously—or rather one of the risks—is that they will be suspected, and may indeed be guilty, of a tendency to priggishness and cant. Youth is very likely not far wrong in suspecting those who would discuss these matters, for youth has too often been told that they are of the earth earthy, that these are the low parts of our nature which we must learn to despise and trample on, and youth knows in its heart that whatever else may or may not be cant, this certainly is. So any one who proposes to speak gravely on the subject is a suspect.

Meetings confined to persons of one sex offer excellent opportunities. Much can be done, if the suspicion of cant be avoided, by men addressing the meetings of men only which gather in many churches on Sunday afternoons, and which have a healthy interest in the life of this world and of this world to come, as well as in matters less immediate. It seems to me that women doctors ought to be able to do excellent work in addressing meetings of girls and women, provided always that the speaker be genuinely a woman, rightly aware of the supremacy of motherhood.

Most of us know that it is possible to read a medical work on sex, say in French, without any offence to the æsthetic sense, though a translation into one's native tongue is scarcely tolerable. This contrasted influence of different names for the same thing is another of those problems in the psychology of prudery which I do not undertake to analyze, but which must be recognized by the practical enemy of prudery. It is unquestionably possible to address a mixed audience, large or small, of any social status, on these matters without offence and to good purpose. But certain terms must be avoided and synonyms used instead. There are at least three special cases, the recognition of which may make the practical difference between shocking an audience and producing the effect one desires.

Reproduction is a good word from every point of view, but its associations are purely physiological, and it is better to employ a word which renders the use of the other superfluous and which has a special virtue of its own. This is the term parenthood, a hybrid no doubt, but not perhaps much the worse for that. One may notice a teacher of zoology, say, accustomed to address medical students, offend an audience by the use of the word reproduction, where parenthood would have served his turn. It has a more human sound—though there is some sub-human parenthood which puts much of ours to shame—and the fact that it is less obviously physiological is a virtue, for human parenthood is only half physiological, being made of two complementary and equally essential factors for its perfection—the one physical and the other psychical. Thus it is possible to speak of physical parenthood and of psychical parenthood, and thus not only to avoid the term reproduction, but to get better value out of its substitutes. One may be able to show, perhaps, that in the case of other synonyms also a hunt for a term that shall save the face of prudery may be more than justified by the recovery of one which has a richer content. Terms are really very good servants, if they are good terms and we retain our mastery of them. Let any one without any previous practice start to write or speak on "human reproduction," and on "human parenthood, physical and psychical," and he will find that, though naming often saves a lot of thinking, as George Meredith said, wise naming may be of great service to thought.

In these matters there is to be faced the fact of pregnancy. Here, again, is a good word, as every one knows who has felt its force or that of the corresponding adjective when judiciously used in the metaphorical sense. The present writer's rule, when speaking, is to use these terms only in their metaphorical sense, and to employ another term for the literal sense. I should be personally indebted to any reader who can inform me as to the first employment of the admirable phrase, "the expectant mother." The name of its inventor should be remembered. In any audience whatever—perhaps almost including an audience of children, but certainly in any adult audience, whether mixed or not, medical or fashionable, serious or sham serious—it is possible to speak with perfect freedom on many aspects of pregnancy, as for instance the use of alcohol, exposure to lead poisoning, the due protection at such a period, by simply using the phrase "the expectant mother," with all its pregnancy of beautiful suggestion. Here, again, our success depends upon recognizing the psychical factor in that which to the vulgar eye is purely physiological—not that there is anything vulgar about physiology except to the vulgar eye.

For myself, the phrase "the expectant mother" is much more than useful, though in speaking it has made all the difference scores of times. It is beautiful because it suggests the ideal of every pregnancy—that the expectant mother shall indeed expect, look forward to the life which is to be. Her motto in the ideal world or even in the world at the foundations of which we are painfully working, will be those words of the Nicene creed which the very term must recall to the mind—Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi sæculi.