"La fausse honte qu'out les femmes de laisser voir leur grossesse et tout ce qui a rapport à l'accouchement, les plaisanteries dont on use souvent à l'égard des femmes enceintes, sont un triste signe de la dégénérescence et même de la corruption de notre civilization raffinée. Les femmes enceintes ne devraient pas ce cacher, ni jamais avoir honte de porter un enfant dans leur ventre; elles devraient au contraire en être fières. Pareille fierté serait certes bien plus justifiée que celle des beaux officiers paradant sous leur uniforme. Les signes extérieurs de la formation de l'humanité font plus d'honneur à leurs porteurs que les symboles de sa destruction. Que les femmes s'imprègnent de plus en plus de cette profonde vérité! Elles cesseront alors de cacher leur grossesse et d'en avoir honte. Conscientes de la grandeur de leur tâche sexuelle et sociale, elles tiendront haut l'étendard de notre descendance, qui est celui de la véritable vie à venir de l'homme, tout en combattant pour l'émancipation de leur sexe."
This passage recalls one of Ruskin's, which is to be found in "Unto This Last":—
"Nearly all labour may be shortly divided into positive and negative labour—positive, that which produces life; negative, that which produces death; the most directly negative labour being murder, and the most directly positive the bearing and rearing of children; so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree child-rearing is admirable, on the positive side of idleness."
Here is the right comment upon the swaggering display of the means of death and the hiding as if shameful of the signs of life to come. What has Mrs. Grundy to say to this? Will she consider the propriety of urging in future that it is murder and the means of murder, and the organized forces of capital and politics making for murder, that must not be mentioned before children, and must be hidden as shameful from the eyes of men; and while a woman may still glory in her hair, according to that spiritual precept of St. Paul: "But if a woman have long hair it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering," perhaps she may be permitted even to glory in her motherhood, contemptible as such a notion would doubtless have seemed to the Apostle of the Gentiles.
XI
EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD
It is our first principle in this discussion that the individual exists for parenthood, being a natural invention for that purpose and no other. It has been shown further that this is more pre-eminently true of woman than of man, she being the more essential—if such a phrase can be used—for the continuance of the race. If these principles are valid they must indeed determine our course in the education of girls. Some incidental reference has already been made to this subject, but the matter must be more carefully gone into here. We have seen that there are right and wrong ways of conducting the physical training of girls, according as whether we are aiming at muscularity or motherhood. We have seen also that there is a thing called the higher education of women, apparently laudable and desirable in itself, which may yet have disastrous consequences for the individual and the race.
In a book devoted to womanhood, and written at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the reader might well expect that what we call the higher education of women would be a subject treated at great length and with great respect. Such a reader, turning to the chapter that professedly deals with the subject, might well be offended by its brevity. It might be asked whether the writer was really aware of the importance of the subject—of its remarkable history, its extremely rapid growth, and its conspicuous success (in proving that women can be men if they please—but this is my comment, not the reader's). Nor can any one question that the so-called higher education of women is a very large and increasingly large fact in the history of womanhood during the last half century in the countries which lead the world—whither it were perhaps not too curious to consider. Further, this kind of education does in fact achieve what it aims at. Women are capable of profiting by the opportunities which it offers, as we say. This is itself a deeply interesting fact in natural history, refuting as it does the assertions of those who declared and still declare that women are incapable of "higher education," except in rare instances. It is important to know that women can become very good equivalents of men, if they please.