Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

For, in the first place, this priceless possession, this parental instinct and tenderness, is inheritable. We know by observation amongst ourselves that hardness and tenderness are to be found running through families—are things which are transmissible. Let us, then, make parenthood the most responsible, the most deliberate, the most self-conscious thing in life, so that there shall be children born to those who love children, and only to those who love children, to those who have the parental instinct naturally strong, and who will, on the average, transmit a high measure of it to their offspring. In a generation bred on these principles—a generation consisting only of babies who were loved before they were born—there would be a proportion of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract, world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such as no age hitherto has seen.

It was necessary to insert this eugenic paragraph because it expresses the central principle of all real reform, as fundamental and all-important as it is unknown to all political parties, and I fear to nearly all philanthropists as well. But, for the present, our immediate concern is the application, if such be possible, of our knowledge of the parental instinct to the education of girls. Being indeed an instinct it can be neither made nor acquired, but, like every other factor of humanity that is given by inheritance, it depends upon the conditions in which it finds itself. Education being the provision of an environment, there is no higher task for the educator than to provide the right environment for the maternal instinct in adolescence. We are to look upon it as at once delicate and ineradicable. These are adjectives which may seem incompatible, yet they may both be verified. Any one will testify that, in a given environment, say that of high school or university or that of the worst types of what is called society, the maternal instinct may then and there, and for that period, become a nonentity in many a girl. Hence we are entitled to say that it is delicate; much more delicate, for instance, than what we have agreed to call the racial instinct, which is far more imperious and by no means so easily to be suppressed.

But, on the other hand, just because this is an instinct, part of the fundamental constitution, and not a something planted from without, it is ineradicable. I doubt whether even in the most abandoned female drunkard it would not be possible to find, when the right environment was provided, that the maternal instinct was still undestroyed. One is, of course, not speaking of that rare and aberrant variety of women in whom the instinct is naturally weak—naturally weak as distinguished from the atrophy induced by improper nurture.

Our business, then, having recognized, so to speak, the natural history of this instinct, and further, having come to realize its stupendous importance for the individual and the race, is to tend it assiduously as the very highest and most precious thing in the girls for whom we care. As educators we must seek to provide the environment in which this instinct can flourish. It is a good thing to be an elder sister, not merely because the girl has opportunities of learning the ways of babies and the details of their needs, but for a far deeper reason. Babies do have very detailed and urgent needs, but these can be learnt without much difficulty, and, if necessary, at very short notice. More important is it for the whole development of the character and for the making of the worthiest womanhood that an elder sister is provided with an environment in which her maternal instinct can grow and grow in grace.

Much might be said on this head as to some of our present educational practices. The kind of educationist with whom no one would trust a poodle for half an hour may and does constantly assume, on a scale involving millions of children, from year to year, that all is well if the girl be taken from home and put into a school and made to learn by heart, or at any rate by rote, the rubbish with which our youth is fed even yet in the great name of education: though perchance whilst she is thus being injured in body and mind and character, she might at home be playing the little mother, helping to make the home a home, serving the highest interests of her parents, her younger brothers and sisters and herself at the same time—not to mention the unborn. Such a protest as this, however, will be little heeded. There is no political party which cares about education or even wants to know in what it consists. The most persistent and clever and resourceful of those parties—of which, I fear, the Fabian Society is far too good to be representative—only half believes in the family, and is daily, and ever with more lamentable success, seeking to substitute for the home some collective device or other precisely as rational as that scheme of Plato's whereby the babies were to be shuffled so that no mother should recognize her own baby, while the fathers, need it be said, were to be as gloriously irresponsible as under the schemes for the endowment of motherhood. "Socialism intervenes between the children and the parents.... Socialism in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it, just as the old waterworks of private enterprise, or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it." Thus Mr. H. G. Wells.

Whilst this sort of thing passes for thinking, it is a task that has little promise in it to demand a return to the study of human nature, and insist that only by obeying it can we command it, as Bacon said of Nature at large. Meanwhile the madness proceeds apace; nursery-schools, wretched parody of the nursery, are advocated at length in even Fabian tracts, and the writer who suggests that an elder sister may be receiving the highest kind of education in staying at home and helping her mother, would sound almost to himself like an echo from the dead past did he not know that neither a Plato nor a million tons of moderns can walk through human nature or any other fact as if it were not there.

Whatever be our duty to the girl of the working-classes, no man can deny the importance of performing it aright. She will become the wife of the working-man. From her thus flows most of the birth-rate. If our education of her is wrong, it is a very great wrong for millions of individuals and for the whole of society. But let us look at the case of her more fortunate sister.

The girl of the more fortunate classes is certain to be well cared for in the matter of air and food and light and exercise. We have already seen how this matter of exercise requires to be qualified and determined as for motherhood—that is, unless we desire most suicidally to educate all the most promising stocks of the nation out of existence. But now what do we owe to her in the matter of providing the right kind of intellectual, moral, spiritual, psychical environment? It is a pity to flounder with so many adjectives, but nearly all the available ones are forsworn and fail to express my meaning. Let us, however, speak of the spiritual environment, seeking to free that word from all its lamentable associations of superstition and cant, and to associate it rather with a humanized kind of religion that deals with humanity as made by, living upon, and destined for, this earth, whatever unseen worlds there may or may not be to conquer.

It is our business, then, to provide the spiritual environment in which the maternal instinct is favoured and seen to be supremely honourable. If in the "best" girls' schools ideas of marriage and babies are ridiculed, the sooner these schools be rubbed down again into the soil, the better. There is no need to substitute one form of cant for another, but it is possible—possible even though the head-mistress should be a spinster, for whom physical motherhood has not been and never will be—to incorporate in the very spirit of the school, as part of its public opinion, no less potent though its power be not consciously felt, the ideals of real and complete womanhood, which mean nothing less than the consecration of the individual to the future, and the belief that such consecration serves not only the future but also the highest satisfaction of her best self.

If it were our present task to define and specify the details of a school in which girls should be educated for womanhood, for motherhood, and the future, it would not be difficult, I think, to show how the services of painting and sculpture, of poetry and prose, should be enlisted. A word or two of outline may be permitted.