Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

Finally, we come to the central problem of the mother who has a living husband in employment. It is the case of the working classes that really concerns us, not least because the greater part of the birth-rate comes therefrom. It is the contemporary settling-down of the birth-rate in this class, combined with the novel consequences of modern industrialism, especially in the form of married women's labour, that makes the question so important. Before we go any further, the proposition may be laid down that married women's labour, as it commonly exists, is an intolerable evil, condemned already by our first principles. It need scarcely be said that one is not here referring to the labours of the married woman who writes novels or designs fashion-plates. There is no condemnation of any kind of labour, in the home or outside it, if the condition be complied with, that it does not prejudice the inalienable first charge upon the mother's time and energy. Her children are that first charge. It may perfectly well be, and often is, chiefly though not exclusively in the more fortunate classes, that the mother may earn money by other work without prejudice to her motherhood. Such cases do not concern us, but we are urgently concerned with married women's labour in the ordinary sense of the term, which means that the mother goes out to tend some lifeless machine, whilst her children are left at home to be cared far anyhow or not at all. No student of infant mortality or the conditions of child life and child survival in general has any choice but to condemn this whole practice as evil, root and branch. And from the national and economic point of view it may be said that whatever the mother makes in the factory is of less value than the children who consequently die at home. The culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people, and any industry that involves its destruction and needs the conditions which make up that destruction, is one which the country cannot afford, whatever its merely monetary balance-sheet. A complete balance-sheet, with its record of children slain, would only too readily demonstrate this.

Our right attitude toward married women's labour must depend upon a right understanding of the social meaning of marriage. This was a question which had to be dealt with at length in a previous volume and I can only state here in a word, what was the conclusion come to. It was that marriage is a device for supporting and buttressing motherhood by fatherhood. Its mark is that it provides for common parental care of offspring. A more prosaic way of stating the case would be that marriage is a device for making the father responsible. If we go far back in the history of the animal world, we find mating but not marriage. The father's function is purely physiological, transient and wholly irresponsible. The whole burden of caring for offspring, when first there comes to be need for that care, in the history of organic progress, falls upon the mother. But even amongst the fishes we find that sometimes, as in the case of the stickleback, the father helps the mother to build a sort of nest, and does "sentry-go" outside it to keep off marauders. In this common care of the young we see what is in all essentials marriage, though some may prefer to dignify the word by confining it to those human associations which have been blessed by Church and State, even though the father throws the baby at the mother, or sends her into the streets to earn her bread and his beer.

If some of our modern reformers knew any biology, or even happened to visit a music-hall where the biograph was showing scenes of bird-life, they would learn that the human arrangement whereby the father goes out and forages for mother and children has roots in hoary antiquity. The pity is that there is no one to point the moral to the crowd when the father-bird is seen returning with delicacies for the mother, who tends her nest and its occupants.

The reader will already have anticipated the conclusion, to which, as I see it, the study of the fundamental laws of life must lead the sociologist in this case. It is that the duty of the father is to support the mother and children, and that the duty of the State is to see that he does this.

Thus, if asked whether I believe in the endowment of motherhood, I reply, yes, indeed, I believe in the endowment of motherhood by the corresponding fatherhood. If our first principles are sound, we must believe that the mother must be endowed or provided for; there can be no difference of opinion so far. Often, as we have seen, there is no corresponding fatherhood, for the mother may be a widow, or unmarried and unable to find the father. But where the corresponding fatherhood exists, we fly directly in the face of Nature, we deny the consistent teaching of evolution as the study of sub-human life reveals it to us, if we do not turn to the father and say, this is your act, for which you are responsible.

At all times the community has been entitled to say this to the father. It is even more entitled to say so now, when, as everyone knows, parenthood has come so entirely under the sway of human volition. The more knowledge and power the more responsibility. The more important the deed, the more responsible must we hold the doer. The time has come when fatherhood, whether within marriage or without it, must be reckoned a deliberate, provident, foreseen, all-important, responsible act, for which the father must always be held to account.

On a recent public occasion, having endeavoured to show that the history of animal evolution teaches us the increasing importance and dignity of fatherhood, I was asked whether I had any argument in favour of parental responsibility. To this the fitting reply seemed to be that, primarily, I believe in parental responsibility because I believe in human responsibility. It need hardly be said that the questioner belonged to that important political party which loathes the idea of paternal responsibility and styles it a "fetish." Without it none of us would be here. Yet the Socialists are less likely than any other party to abandon the idea of human responsibility. They propose to hold men responsible for the remoter effects of their acts—upon the present—as no other party does. The maker of money is held to account for his deeds and their effect upon the life around him. I agree with the principle: but I maintain that the maker of men is also to be held to account for his deeds and their effect upon the future and the life of this world to come. No Socialist can afford to question the practical political principle that men are to be held responsible for their deeds: and no Socialist can explain the sudden and unexplained abandonment of this principle when we come to the most important of all a man's deeds. To be consistent, the Socialist should uphold the doctrine of a man's responsibility for the remoter consequences of his acts in this supreme sphere, more earnestly and thoughtfully and providently than any of his opponents.

The position of those who would free the father from responsibility is even less defensible when, as we commonly find, they are prepared to make the mother's responsibility more extensive and less avoidable than ever. Why this distinction? And if parental responsibility is a "fetish" when it refers to a father, why is it not the same when it refers to a mother? In the schemes of Mr. H. G. Wells, kaleidoscopic in their glitter and inconsistency, there remains from year to year this one permanent element, that while the mother must attend to her business, it is no business of the father. This is the essential feature, the one novelty of his scheme. Already the married mother—he proposes nothing for the unmarried mother—is legally entitled to some measure of support. His endowment of motherhood is essentially a discharge of fatherhood, and should be so called. There can be no compromise, nothing but a fight to the finish, between the principle of endowing motherhood by making fatherhood less responsible, and the principle here fought for, of endowing motherhood by making fatherhood more responsible. As Nature has been doing so, in the main line of progress for many millions of years,—a statement not of interpretation or theory but of observed fact—I have no fear of the ultimate issue. But it might well be that any portion of mankind, perhaps a portion ill to be spared, should destroy itself by an attempt to run counter to the great principle of progress here stated. There is an abundance of men who will be very happy to side with Mr. Wells. Men have never been wanting, in any time or place, who were happy to gratify their instincts without having to answer for the consequences; and it has always been the first issue of any society that was to endure, to see that they did not have their way: hence human marriage. The "endowment of motherhood" sounds as if it were a scheme greatly for the benefit of women. Let them beware. Let them begin to think of, not the remoter, but the immediate and obvious consequences of any such schemes as are proffered by the overt or covert enemies of marriage, and they will quickly perceive that the last way in which to secure the rights of women is to abrogate the duties of men. The support allotted to such schemes as these is not feminine but masculine. That is the impression I derive from discussions following lectures on the subject; and that is what I should expect, judging from the natural tendencies of men, and the profound intuition of women in such matters. And, conversely, the opposition to such principles as are expressed here, and embodied in the "Women's Charter," will be masculine. But woman has been civilizing man from the beginning, and she will have her way here also—for, in the last resort, not merely youth, but the Unborn must be served.

Before we consider the alternative suggestions that some are making, and proceed to indicate how the paternal endowment of motherhood can be enforced in every class, as public opinion practically enforces it in the upper and middle classes, let us meet the objection that, if fatherhood is to be made so serious an act, and if so much self-sacrifice is to be exacted from those who undertake it, the marriage-rate and the birth-rate will fall more rapidly. And as regards the marriage-rate, the answer is that marriage and parenthood are not inseparable, a proposition which might be much amplified if a writer who wishes to be heard could afford to have the courage of everybody's convictions. But already, in the middle classes, men limit their families to the number they can support. They simply practise responsible fatherhood, and the mothers and children are protected. On what moral grounds this is to be condemned, no one has yet told us.

And as regards the effect of more stringent responsibility for fatherhood upon the birth-rate, it must be replied, for the thousandth time in this connection, that the question for a nation is not how many babies are born, but how many survive. The idea of a baby is that it shall grow up and become a citizen; if babies remained babies people would soon cease to complain about the fall in the birth-rate. But, in point of fact, a vast number of babies and children are unnecessarily slain, and if we could suddenly arrest the whole of this slaughter, the increase of population would become so formidable that everyone would deplore the unmanageable height of the birth-rate. Its present fall is quite incapable of arrest, and is perfectly compatible with as rapid an increase of population as any one could desire. We must arrest the destruction of so much of the present birth-rate, so that it means nought for the future. By nothing else will this arrest be so accelerated as by those very measures for making fatherhood more responsible for the care of motherhood, which are here advocated. Let it be freely granted that these measures will lower the birth-rate. Much more will they lower the infant mortality and child death-rate, and diminish the permanent damaging of vast multitudes of children who escape actual destruction.