Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

Let us now note some popular misconceptions which cumber our minds and often interfere with the work of the reformer.

To begin with what is perhaps the oldest of these, though indeed scarcely entitled to the appellation of popular, let us assure ourselves once and for all that we are talking about a fact natural, innate, not acquired. The modern criticism of ancient notions of human nature, such as those expressed in the theologians' conception of "conscience," has inclined some to the view that our best feelings are indeed not at all innate. No one can for a moment analyze conscience without observing the immense disparity between the facts and the theologians' theory. And thus we are apt to fall into the opposite error of supposing that our impulses towards good action are entirely the products of education, training, public opinion, and so forth. Let the reader refer, for instance, to such a celebrated work as John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism," and it will be seen how wide of the mark it was possible for even a great thinker to go, when his ideas of mind were unguided by the light of evolution. Even in the greatest writer of that time not a syllable do we find as to the parental instinct. "As is my own belief," says Mill, "the moral feelings are not innate but acquired." Yet we have seen convincing evidence which teaches us that the moral feelings spring essentially from the root of the parental instinct, without which mankind could not continue for another generation, and than which there is nothing more fundamental and essential in any type of human nature that can persist.

The importance of noting this can be clearly stated. We are here dealing with something which is not for us to implant, but which is already part of the plant, so to speak, and which it is for us to tend. Like other innate features of mankind, its transmission from generation to generation is notably independent of the effects of education, the effects of use and disuse. This is a difficult thing of which to persuade people, but it is the fact. Education, environment, training, opportunity, habit, public opinion, social prejudice—all these and such other influences may and do affect the maternal instinct in the individual for good or for evil. No fact is more certain or important, and that is precisely why we must study this instinct. But the effect upon the individual does not involve any effect upon the native constitution of the individual's children. From age to age the general facts and features of the human backbone persist. We do not expect to find notable differences between the generations in such a radical feature of our constitution, no matter what particular habits of posture, play, and the like we adopt. The maternal instinct is scarcely less fundamental; it is certainly no whit less essential for the species. It is the very backbone of our psychological constitution. Thus it is nonsense to assert that, for instance, women are becoming less motherly, if by this is meant that the maternal instinct is failing. That bad education may affect it for evil no one can question, but we must distinguish between nature and nurture. We may be perfectly confident that so far as the natural material of girl-childhood and girlhood is concerned, there is no falling off; there will not, for there cannot, be any falling off either in the quality or in the quantity of the maternal instinct. On the contrary, it can, and will later be shown that through the action of heredity this instinct will be strengthened in the future, just in so far as motherhood becomes more and more a special privilege of those women in whom this instinct is strong, and who become mothers for the only good reason—that they love to have children of their own.

I protest, then, against many critics, especially those who used to raise their now silent voices in opposition to the beginnings of the infant mortality campaign a few years ago, that we who criticize modern motherhood and find in its defects the causes of many and great evils, as we do, are asserting nothing whatever against the women of this day as compared with the women of former days, so far as their natural constitution is concerned; and if we criticize the results of bad education, that is mainly criticism of the blindness, the stupidity, and the carelessness of men, who are responsible for the parodies of education and the misdirection of ideals which have so grossly afflicted, and still afflict, childhood and girlhood in all civilized communities.

Yet, again, there is another misconception of the maternal instinct as it exists in our own species, which is still more serious in its results. The argument is that, not only does the maternal instinct exist, but it is a sure guide to its possessor, who therefore requires no instruction—least of all at the hands of men. A woman being a woman knows all about babies, a man being a man knows nothing. Against this error the present writer has endeavoured to inveigh for many years past, and it is always retorted that insistence upon the ignorance of mothers is a very unwarrantable piece of discourtesy. It is nothing of the sort. Native ignorance is the mark of intelligence. It is just because instinct in us has not the perfection of detail which it has in, say, the insects, that it is capable of that limitless modification which shows itself in educated intelligence, and all that educated intelligence has achieved and will yet achieve. It may be permitted to quote from a former statement of this point:—[12]

"The mother has only the maternal instinct in its essence. That could not be permitted to lapse by natural selection, since humanity could never have been evolved at all if women did not love babies. But of all details she is bereft. She has instead an immeasurably greater thing, intelligence, but whilst intelligence can learn everything it has everything to learn. Subhuman instinct can learn nothing, but is perfect from the first within its impassable limits. It is this lapse of instinctive aptitude that constitutes the cardinal difficulty against which we are assembled. The mother cat not merely has a far less helpless young creature to succour, but she has a far superior inherent or instinctive equipment; she knows the best food for her kitten, she does not give it 'the same as we had ourselves'—as the human mother tells the coroner—but her own breast invariably. None of us can teach her anything as to washing her kitten, or keeping it warm. She can even play with it and so educate it, in so far as it needs education. There are mothers in all classes of the community who should be ashamed to look a tabby cat in the face."

The human mother has instinctive love and the uninstructed intelligence which is the form, at once weak and incalculably strong, that instinct so largely assumes in mankind. This cardinal distinction between the human and all sub-human mothers is habitually ignored, it being assumed that the mother, as a mother, knows what is best for her child. But experience concurs with comparative psychology in showing that the human mother, just because she is human, intelligent, which means more than instinctive, does not know. This is the theory upon which all our practice is to be based, and upon which the need for it mainly depends. We must never forget the cardinal peculiarity of human motherhood, its absolute dependence upon education, needless for the cat, needed by the human mother in every particular, small and great, since she relies upon intelligence alone, which is only a potentiality and a possibility until it be educated. Educate it, and the product transcends the cat, and not only the cat, but all other living things. As Coleridge said—

"A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive."

Perhaps the foregoing will make it clear that to insist upon the natural ignorance of the human mother and upon the necessity for adding instruction to the maternal instinct, and even to make comparisons with the cat (which are, in point of fact, quite worth making, even though some women resent them) is in no way to depreciate or decry womanhood, but simply to demonstrate that it is human and not animal, suffering from the disabilities or necessities which are involved in the possession of the limitless possibilities of mankind.

What, then, is it in our power to do; and how are we to do it? It may be argued that if the maternal instinct is a thing which cannot be made or acquired, our study of it has little relation to practice. But indeed it is eminently practical.