Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

This argument really offers as good an example as can be desired of the almost unimaginable ease with which these skilful mathematicians allow themselves to be confused. Their inquiry has ignored the age of the parents at marriage—or, better still, at the births of their respective children—and has assumed that the number of the family was the all-important point: a good example of that idolatry of number as number which is the "freak religion" of the biometrician. Supposing that the conclusion reached by this method be a true one—which it would need more credulity than I possess to assert—we must conclude that, somehow, primogeniture, as such, affects the quality of the offspring, and, on the other hand, that to be born fifth or tenth or fifteenth involves certain personal consequences of a special kind. Evidently we here approach less sophisticated forms of number-worship, as that which attached a superstitious meaning to the seventh son of a seventh son.

It seems, therefore, necessary to point out—surprising though the necessity be—that, if the biometrical conclusion be valid, what it demonstrates must surely be not the occult working of certain changes in the germ-plasm, for instance, of a father, because a certain number of his germ-cells, after separation from his body, have gone to form new individuals (changes which would not have occurred if those germ-cells had perished!), but rather a correlation between the age of the parents and the quality of their offspring. How cleverly the biometricians have involved one muddle within another will be evident not only from considering the evident absurdity of supposing—as their argument, analyzed, necessarily supposes—that a man's body can be affected by the diverse fates of germ-cells that have left it, but also when we observe that one of the commonest and most obvious causes of the reduction in the size of families is the increasing age at marriage of both sexes. Two persons may thus marry and become parents at the age of say thirty, their child ranking as first-born, of course, in the biometricians' tables; but had they married ten years sooner, a child born when the parents were thirty might rank as the tenth child, and would be so reckoned by the biometricians. One does not need to be a biologist to perceive that conclusions based upon assumptions so uncritical are worth nothing at all, and it is tempting to suggest that the biometricians are so called, on a principle long famous, because they measure everything but life.

It is plainly unnecessary, therefore, for us to trouble about collecting the innumerable instances where children late in the family sequence have turned out to be illustrious, or have proved to be idiots. It is unnecessary because the most obvious criticism of the contention before us disposes of the proof upon which it is sought to be based. Nevertheless, of course, though the particular contention about the size of the family must necessarily be meaningless, unless, as is so very improbable, it should be shown some day that the bearing of children affects the maternal organism in some way so as to cause subsequent children to approximate ever nearer to the type of the race; yet it is quite conceivable, though quite unproved, that the age of the parents involves changes in the body which affect, for good or for evil, either the construction or the general vigour of the germ-cells. As to this nothing is known, but a great weight of evidence suggests that little importance, if any, can be attached to this question. Women marrying at forty or more may give birth to splendid specimens of humanity or to indifferent ones, and the same may be said of the girl of seventeen, though as to this more must be said. Similarly, also, it is impossible to make any general contrasts between the offspring of fathers of eighteen or fathers of eighty. Correlations may exist, but we know nothing of them yet.

Our conclusion then is that, with regard to the quality of the children of any given mother, we cannot say that she should marry at any particular age, within limits, rather than another. On the other hand, it is evident that if she be highly worthy of motherhood we shall desire her to have a large family, and therefore must encourage her early marriage, as the late Sir Francis Galton so long maintained.

Physical Fitness for Marriage.—We must carefully distinguish between the question we have just been discussing and that of the marriage age from the mother's point of view. We shall find that the best age for marriage, so far as this question is concerned, is neither puberty, on the one hand, nor the average marriage age amongst civilized women, on the other hand.

If things were as we should like them to be, there would be a harmony between the occurrence of puberty and fitness for marriage. But there can be no question that the goal of evolution, which is perfect adaptation, has not yet been attained by mankind, and indeed reason can be given to show that the goal recedes as we advance towards it. The practice of lower races, amongst whom the girls often marry at puberty or before it, is much less injurious to the individual and the race than we might suppose; but the harmony between the maternal body and the maternal function is much less imperfect in lower races of mankind than it is among ourselves. Just as we find that, among the lower animals, the phenomena of motherhood are simple, easy, and almost painless, so we find that, though owing to the erect attitude, as much cannot be said for human beings anywhere, yet these phenomena are far less severe among the lower races of mankind than among ourselves. The reason is to be found in the astonishing progressive increase in the size of the human head in the higher races. The large size of the head in adult life is foreshadowed in its size at birth, and this it is which constitutes the crux of motherhood among the higher races. It is undoubtedly true that the maternal body, by a process of natural selection, has been evolved in the direction of better correspondence with, and capacity for, that enlarged head of which civilization is the product. But at the present stage in evolution the great function of giving birth to a human being of high race—more especially to a boy of such a race—is graver, more prolonged, and more hazardous than the maternal function has ever been before. The gravity of the process has increased proportionately with the worth of the product.

There are yet further consequences of the development which will convince us how important it is that we should come to right conclusions regarding the physical fitness of girls for marriage. Even to-day, when the work of Lord Lister has been done, and when maternity hospitals—far more dangerous than a battlefield less than two generations ago—can show records from year to year without the loss of a single mother, the fact remains that several thousands of women in Great Britain alone lose their lives every year in the discharge of their supreme duty. It is also the case that large numbers of infants lose their lives during, or shortly after, birth, owing to causes inherent in the conditions of birth, and practically beyond any but the most expert control. In many cases no skill will save the child. A considerable preponderance of the victims are of the male sex, so that there is thus early begun that process of higher male mortality, which is the chief cause of the female preponderance that is so injurious to womanhood and to society. There are thus many and weighty reasons, individual and social—reasons in the present generation and in the next—which conduce to the importance of discovering the best age for marriage from the physical point of view.

We may probably accept the long-standing figures of Dr. Matthews Duncan, one of Edinburgh's many famous obstetricians, who found that the mortality rate in childbirth, or as a consequence of it, was lowest among women from twenty to twenty-four years of age. Therefore it may safely be said that, on the average, and looking at the question, for the present, solely from this point of view, a girl of twenty-one to twenty-two is by no means too young to marry. Of course it would be monstrously absurd to take such a statement as this and regard it as conclusive, even had it been communicated from on high, for any particular case; but as an average statement it may be confidently put forward. At this age, the all-important bones of the pelvis have reached all the development of which they are capable. This may be accepted, notwithstanding the fact that, especially in men, the growth of the long bones of the limbs continues to a considerably later age. Women reach maturity sooner than men, and the pelvis reaches its full capacity at the age stated. Obstetricians know further that if motherhood be begun at a considerably later date, there is less local adaptability than when the bones and ligaments are younger. The point lies in the date of the beginning of motherhood, for this is in general a conspicuous instance of the adage that the first step is the most costly.[13]

Psychical Fitness for Marriage.—At the beginning of this chapter it was insisted that we must carefully distinguish between physical or physiological fitness for mating and complete fitness for marriage—which, though it includes mating, is vastly more. Few will question the proposition that physical fitness for marriage is reached only some years after puberty; so complete psychical fitness for marriage may well be later still. We should thus have a second disharmony superposed upon the first. But, instead, when we look round us, we may often be inclined to ask whether, for many girls and women, the age of psychical fitness for marriage is ever reached at all; and we have to ask ourselves how far this delay or indefinite postponement of such fitness is due to natural conditions, or how far it is due to the fact that we bring up our girls to be, for instance, sideboard ornaments, as Ruskin said a generation ago.

I believe that this disparity between the age of physical fitness for marriage and the attainment of that outlook upon life and its duties, without which marriage must be so perilous, is one of the most important practical problems of our time, and that its solution is to be found in the principle of education for parenthood, which we have already considered at such length. It is a most serious matter that marriage should be delayed as it is beyond the best age for the commencement of motherhood; it is injurious to the individual and her motherhood, and whether delay occurs, as it does, disproportionately in different cases, or disproportionately within a nation, in the different classes of which it is composed, the consequences, as we have seen, are of the most stupendous possible kind.