Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

Our subject here, the reader may say, is not children, but woman and womanhood. The reply is that unless we have our principles rightly formulated, we cannot solve this question of the rights of women as mothers. Failing our principles, we shall be reduced to the prejudices which serve as principles for our political parties. We shall have individualist and socialist at loggerheads, the friends of marriage and its enemies, and many other opposing parties who cannot solve the question for us because they have not waited first to discover its fundamentals. The rights of mothers can be approached only from the point of view of the rights of children. We may happen to believe, as the present writer certainly does, that parents should be responsible for their children. He once lectured for, and published the lectures in association with, a body called the British Constitution Association, which holds the same belief, but when he found as he did that protests were raised against any suggestion to help children whose parents do not do their duty, it became plain that principles which were right in a merely secondary and conditional way were being made absolute and fundamental. The fundamental is that the child shall be cared for; the conditional and secondary principle is that this is best effected through the parents. To say that if the parents will not do it, the child must be left to starve, is immoral and indecent. Worse words than those, if such exist, would be required to describe our neglect of illegitimate infancy; our cruelty toward widows and orphans; our utterly careless maintenance of the conditions which produce these hapless beings in such vast numbers.

If every child is sacred, every mother is sacred. If every child is to be cared for, every mother must be cared for. It is true that we may make experiment with devices for superseding the mother. Man has impudent assurance enough for anything, and if Nature has been working at the perfection of an instrument for her purpose during a few score million years—an instrument such as the mammalian mother, for instance—man is quite prepared to invent social devices, such as the incubator, the crèche, the infant milk dépôt, and so forth; not merely to make the best of a bad case when the mother fails, but to supersede the mother altogether directly the baby is born. Such cases, except in the last resort, are more foolish than words can say. We have to save our children; we can only do so effectively through the naturally appointed means for saving children, which is motherhood. The rights of mothers follow as a necessary consequence from our first principle, which was the rights of children. Because every child must be protected, every mother must be protected, if not in one way, in another.

The State may not be able to afford this. The necessities of existence may be so difficult to obtain, not to mention for a moment such luxuries as alcohol and motor-cars and warships and fine clothes and art, and so forth, that no arrangements for the support of motherhood can be made. If we lay down the proposition that no mother should work because she is already doing the supreme work, it may be replied that this is economically impossible; the thing cannot be done. The only reply to this is that the State which cannot afford to provide rightly for the means of its continuance had better discontinue, and must in any case soon do so. Motherhood is rapidly declining as a numerical fact in civilized communities generally. Not merely does the birth-rate fall persistently and without the slightest regard to the commentators thereon, but it will continue to do so for many years to come. In the light of this fact the great argument of presidents and bishops, politicians and journalists, moralists and social censors generally is that somehow or other this decline must be arrested. To all of which one replies, for the thousand and first time, that, whatever it ought to be, it will not be arrested; that the really moral policy, the really human one, and the only possible one, is to take care of the children that are born. Then when we have abolished our infant and child mortality and have solved the substantial problem of finding room for all new-comers, having ceased to far more than decimate them, we may begin cautiously to suggest that perhaps if the birth-rate were slightly to rise we might be able to cope with the product. At present the disgraceful fact is not the birth-rate, but what we do with the birth-rate; though more disgraceful perhaps are the blindness and ignorance and assurance of the host of commentators in high places who waste their time and ours in animadverting upon a fact—the falling birth-rate—which is a necessary condition and consequence of organic progress, whilst the motherhood we have is so urgently in need of protection and idealization in the minds of the people.

We have reached the conclusion that all motherhood is to be protected. This means that from some source or other the money shall be forthcoming for the maintenance of the mother and her children. For, in the first place, the children are not to work because, if they do, they will not be able to work as they should in the future. The State cannot afford to let them work. Further, the proper care of childhood is so continuous and exacting a task, and of such supreme moment, that it is the highest and foremost work that can be named; and therefore, in the second place, she whose business it is must not be hampered by having to do anything else. If any labourer is worthy of his hire, she is. Her economic security must be absolute. She must be as safe as the Bank of England, because England and its banks stand or fall with her. In the rightly constituted State, if there be any one at all whose provision and maintenance are absolutely secure, it will be the mothers. Whoever else has financial anxiety, they shall have none. Any State that can afford to exist can afford to see to this. No economist can inform me what proportion of the labour and resources of England are at this moment devoted to the means of life, and what proportion to superfluities, luxuries and the means of death. But it is a very simple matter with which the reader, who is doubtless a better arithmetician than I am, may amuse himself, to estimate the number of married women of reproductive age in the community, and allowing anything in reason for illegitimate motherhood and nothing at all for infertile wives, to satisfy himself that the total cost which would be involved in the adequate care of motherhood, is a mere fraction of the national expenditure. Few of us realize how extraordinary and how unprecedented is the margin of security for existence which modern civilization affords. A savage community may have scarcely any margin at all. The same may be true of many primitive communities which cannot be called savage. They maintain life under such conditions, whether in Greenland or in a thousand other parts of the world, that they cannot afford to labour for anything which is not bread. The primary necessities of existence take all their getting. Some transient accident of weather or the balance of Nature in the sea or in the fields imperils the existence of the whole community. They, at any rate, are wise enough to take good care of their women and children. But in civilization we have an enormous margin of security. Not only are we dependent on no local crop or harvest, but the getting of necessities has become so effective and secure that we are able to spend a vast amount of our time and energy on the production of luxuries and evils. How little, then, is our excuse if we fail to provide the first conditions for continuance and progress!

Our first principles of the value of the child and therefore of motherhood are unchallengeable, nor will anyone nowadays be found to question that neither children nor mothers should work in the ordinary sense of that word, since the proper work of children who are to work well when they grow up is play, and since the mother's natural work is the most important that she can perform. It remains, then, for us to determine by whom mothers and children in the modern and future State are to be provided for.

The conditions of mothers are various, and we shall best approach the problem by the consideration of different cases.

The simplest is that of the widowed mother who is without means. It is only too common a case, and we have already seen certain causes which contribute to the enormous number of widows in the community. Men do not live as long as women, and men are older when they marry. These natural causes of widowhood, as they may be called, are greatly aggravated by the destructive influence of alcohol upon fatherhood, as will be shown in the chapter dealing with alcohol and womanhood.

On the individualistic theory of the State, a theory so brutal and so impracticable that no one consistently upholds it, the widow's misfortune is her private affair, but does not really concern us. Her husband should have provided for her. Indeed she should, and indeed we should have seen that he did. But if he and we failed in our duty to her, the consequences must be met. The hour is at hand when the State will discover that children are its most precious possessions, more precious as they grow scarcer, and efficient support will then be forthcoming, as a matter of course, for the widowed mother and her children. The feature which will distinguish this support from any past or present provision will be that it recognizes the natural sanctity and the natural economy of the relation between mother and children. It will be agreed not merely that the children must be provided for, but that they must be provided for through her. The current device is to divorce mother and children. "Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder," is quoted by many against the divorce of a married pair whom, as is plain, not God but the devil has joined together; but the principle of that quotation verily applies to the natural and divine association of mother and children.

If, then, the State is to provide in future for all widowed mothers and their children, husbands need no longer trouble to insure or make provision for them. Such is the proper criticism. The reply to it is that the State will have to see to it that, in future, husbands do take this trouble. To this we shall return.

Next we may consider the case of the unmarried mother and her "illegitimate" child or children. Here, again, the child must be cared for, and the care of the child is the work which has been imposed upon the mother. We must enable her to do it, nor must we countenance the monstrous and unnatural folly, injurious to both and therefore to us, of separating them. Napoleon, desirous of food for powder, forbade the search for the father in such a case, though the French are now seeking to abrogate that abominable decree. Our law recognizes that the father is responsible, and under it he may be made to pay toward the upkeep of the child. Some contemporary writers on the endowment of motherhood are advocating changes which would make this law absurd, for they are seeking to free the married father from any responsibility for his children, and could scarcely impose it upon the unmarried father. Such proposals, however, are palpable reversions to something much lower and æons older in the history of life than mere barbarism, and I have no fear of their success. Assuredly the unmarried father must be held responsible; and no less certainly must we see to it that, with or without his help, the unmarried mother and her children are adequately provided for. The present death-rate amongst illegitimate children is a scandal of the first order and must be ended. If we are wise, our provision will involve protecting ourselves against the need for new provision, especially where the mother is feeble-minded or otherwise defective, as is so often the case: but provision there must be.