As has been already hinted, discourses on how to wash a baby are less in place here; and in the following chapter the argument will be set forth in detail that the sequence of the common schemes for the education of girlhood and womanhood is, in one essential respect, logically and practically erroneous.
XIII
CHOOSING THE FATHERS OF THE FUTURE
We live in a social chaos of which the evolution into anything like a cosmos is scarcely more than incipient. In such a case the reformer has to do the best he may; in the only possible sense in which that phrase can be defended, he has to take the world as he finds it. Heartless heads will of course be found to comment upon the logical error of his ways, to which his only reply is that, while they stand and comment, what can be done he now will do.
In this whole matter of the care and culture of motherhood—which is, verily, the prime condition, too often forgotten, of the care and culture of childhood—we have to do what we can, when and as we can. We live in a society where mankind, held individually responsible for all other acts whatsoever, is held entirely irresponsible for the act of parenthood which, being more momentous than any other, ought to be held more responsible than any other. Marriage, the precedent condition of most parenthood, is thus regarded as the concern of the individuals and the present. Individuals and the present therefore decide what marriages shall occur; but by some obscure fatality which no one had thought of, the future appears upon the scene: and when it is actually present, or rather not only present but visible, the responsibility for it is recognized. We have not yet gone so far as to see that a girl may be a good mother, in the highest sense, in her choice of a mate. But as things are, it is agreed that we are to act like blind automata, as improvident and irresponsible as the lower fishes, until the actual birth of the future. The philosophic truth that the future is nascent in the present—a truth so genuinely philosophic that it is also practical—is still hidden from us, and thus we are faced, in town and country alike, with ignorant motherhood, set to the most difficult, responsible, and expert of tasks—the right nurture of babyhood; babyhood, a ridiculous subject for grown men, yet somehow the condition of them and all their doings.
In this state of affairs, those who began the modern campaign against infant mortality, or rather that small section of them who were not to be beguiled by secondaries, such as poverty, alcoholism, and the like, set to work to remedy maternal ignorance. Having been engaged in this campaign for many years, one is not likely to decry it now, nor is there any occasion to do so. The movement for the instruction of motherhood and for the instruction even of girls in the duties of actual motherhood, is now not only started but making real progress, and will assuredly prosper.
But here our business is to think a little in front of action done and doing, and we shall very soon discover that there is more for public opinion yet to learn, while we may be very certain that this last lesson will be less easily learnt than the former was, for it is based upon evidence much less obvious. I have long maintained that the movement against infant mortality must precede in logic and in practice movements for the physical training of boys and girls, for the medical inspection and treatment of school children, and so forth. Relatively to these I have always asserted that the right care of babies has the immense superiority that it means beginning at the beginning, but I have always denied that it means beginning at the absolute beginning, if such a phrase be permitted.
Given the world as it is, the conditions of marriage as they are, the economic position of woman, the power of prudery, and the conventional supposition that babies occur by providential dispensation, we must act as if we really made the assumption that human parenthood, until the moment of birth, is as irresponsible as any sequence of events in the atmosphere or the world of electrons. But we who are thinking in front for humanity must make no such assumption. We must look forward to and hasten the time when we can act upon the true assumption, which is that the more the knowledge the greater the responsibility, and more especially that our knowledge of heredity, so far from abolishing human responsibility—as the enemies of knowledge declare—immeasurably extends and deepens it. In the present volume we are proceeding upon the true assumption, and therefore in the study of womanhood we must now proceed, in defiance of conventional assumptions, to study the responsibility and duties of motherhood as they exist for maidenhood. To this end, it will be necessary that we remind ourselves of certain great biological facts which are of immense significance for mankind, and are doubtless indeed more important in their bearing upon ourselves than upon any other living species.