Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

Let any one who fancies that these pre-occupations with mere language are trivial or misplaced here take the opportunity of addressing two drawing-rooms under similar conditions, on some such subject as the care of pregnancy from the national point of view. Let him in the one case speak of the pregnant woman, and so forth, and in the other of the expectant mother. He will be singularly insensitive to his audience if he does not discover that sometimes a rose by any other name is somehow the less a rose. The more fools we perhaps, but there it is, and in the most important of all contemporary propaganda, which is that of the re-establishment of parenthood in that place of supreme honour which is its due, even such "literary" debates as these are not out of place.

Sex is a great and wonderful thing. The further down we go in the scale of life, whether animal or vegetable, the more do we perceive the importance of the evolution of sex. The correctly formed adjective from this word is sexual, but the term is practically taboo with Mrs. Grundy. Only with caution and anxiety, indeed, may one venture before a lay audience to use Darwin's phrase, "sexual selection." The fact is utterly absurd, but there it is. One of the devices for avoiding its consequences is the use of sex itself as an adjective, as when we speak of sex problems; but the special importance of this case is in regard to the sexual instinct, or, if the term offends the reader, let us say the sex instinct. Here prudery is greatly concerned, and our silence here involves much of the price of prudery. Now since the word sexual has become sinister, we cannot speak to the growing boy or girl about the sexual instinct, but we may do much better.

For what is this sexual instinct? True, it manifests itself in connection with the fact of sex, but essentially that is only because sex is a condition of human reproduction or parenthood. It is this with which the sexual instinct is really concerned, and perhaps we shall never learn to look upon it rightly or deal with it rightly until we indeed perceive what the business of this instinct is, and regard as somewhat less than worthy of mankind any other attitude towards it. Of course there are men who live to eat, yet the instincts concerned with eating exist not for the titillation of the palate but for the sustenance of life; and, likewise, though there are those who live to gratify this instinct, it exists not for sensory gratification, but for the life of this world to come. Can we not find a term which shall express this truth, shall be inoffensive and so doubly suitable for the purposes of our cause?

The term reproductive instinct is often employed. It is vastly superior to sexual instinct, because it does refer to that for which the instinct exists; but it hints at reproduction, and though Mrs. Grundy can tolerate the idea of parenthood, reproduction she cannot away with. We cannot speak of it as the parental instinct, because that term is already in employment to express the best thing and the source of all other good things in us. Further, the sexual instinct and the parental instinct are quite distinct, and it would be disastrous to run the possibility of confusing them—one the source of all the good, and the other the source of much of the evil, though the necessary condition of all the good and evil, in the world.

For some years past, in writing and speaking, I have employed and counselled the employment of the term "the racial instinct." This seems to meet all the needs. It avoids the tabooed adjective, and if it fails to allude at all to the fact of sex, who needs reminding thereof? It is formed from the term race, which prudery permits, and it expresses once and for all that for which the instinct exists—not the individual at all, but the race which is to come after him. Doubtless its satisfaction may be satisfactory for him or her, but that does not testify to Nature's interest in individuals, but rather to her skill in insuring that her supreme concern shall not be ignored, even by those who least consciously concern themselves with it.

These are perhaps the three most important instances of the verbal, or perhaps more than verbal, issues that arise in the fight with prudery. One has tried to show that they are not really in the nature of concessions to Mrs. Grundy, but that the terms commended are in point of fact of more intrinsic worth than those to which she objects. Other instances will occur to the reader, especially if he or she becomes in any way a soldier in this war, whether publicly or as a parent instructing children, or on any other of the many fields where the fight rages.

It is not the purpose of the present chapter to deal with that which must be said, notwithstanding prudery, and in order that the price of prudery shall no longer be paid. But one final principle may be laid down which is indeed perhaps merely an expression of the spirit underlying the foregoing remarks upon our terminology. It is that we are to fly our flag high. We may consult Mrs. Grundy's prejudices if we find that in doing so we may directly serve our own thinking, and therefore our cause. This is very different from any kind of apologizing to her. All such I utterly deplore. We must not begin by granting Mrs. Grundy's case in any degree. Somewhere in that chaos of prejudices which she calls her mind, she nourishes the notion, common to all the false forms of religion, ancient or modern, that there is something about sex and parenthood which is inherently base and unclean. The origin of this notion is of interest, and the anthropologists have devoted much attention to it. It is to be found intermingled with a by no means contemptible hygiene in the Mosaic legislation, is to be traced in the beliefs and customs of extant primitive peoples, and has formed and forms an element in most religions. But it is not really pertinent to our present discussion to weigh the good and evil consequences of this belief. Without following the modern fashion, prevalent in some surprising quarters, of ecstatically exaggerating the practical value of false beliefs in past and present times, we may admit that the cause of morality in the humblest sense of that term may sometimes have been served by the religious condemnation of all these matters as unclean, and of parenthood as, at the best, a second best.

But for our own day and days yet unborn this notion of sex and its consequences as unclean or the worser part is to be condemned as not merely a lie and a palpably blasphemous one, grossly irreligious on the face of it, but as a pernicious lie, and to be so recognized even by those who most joyfully cherish evidence of the practical value of lies. Whatever may have been the case in the past or among present peoples in other states of culture than our own, no impartial person can question that during the Christian Era what may be called the Pauline or ascetic attitude on this matter has been disastrous; and that if the present forms of religion are not completely to outlive their usefulness, it is high time to restore mother and child worship to the honour which it held in the religion of Ancient Egypt and in many another. If the mother and child worship which is to be found in the more modern religions, such as Christianity, is to be worth anything to the coming world it must cease to have reference to one mother and one child only; it must hail every mother everywhere as a Madonna, and every child as in some measure deity incarnate. By no Church will such teaching be questioned to-day; but if it be granted the Churches must cease to uphold those conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the Churches must and shall now be made to return.

All this will involve many a shock to prudery; to take only the instance of what we call illegitimate motherhood, our eyes askance must learn that there are other legitimacies and illegitimacies than those which depend upon the little laws of men, and that if our doctrine of the worth of parenthood be a right one it is our business in every such case to say, "Here also, then, in so far as it lies in our power, we must make motherhood as good and perfect as may be."

These principles also will lead us to understand how differently, were we wise, we should look upon the outward appearances of expectant motherhood. In his masterpiece, Forel—of all living thinkers the most valuable—has a passage with which Mrs. Grundy may here be challenged. It is too simple to need translating from the author's own French:[9]—