Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

That the modern development of infant feeding will serve to replace natural lactation, must be denied, and this without prejudice to the magnificent work of the late Professor Budin of Paris and Professor Morgan Rotch of Harvard. These pioneers and their followers have devised some admirable second bests—admirable, that is, relatively to some of the pitiable methods which they have superseded, but relatively to the mother's breast not admirable at all. At the beginning of the campaign against infant mortality, the crèche and the sterilized milk dépôt and the fractional analysis of cow's milk and its recomposition in suitable proportions of proteid, fat, etc., as devised by Rotch, were rightly acclaimed and admitted to save vast numbers of infant lives. All this is mere stop-gap, wonderfully effective, no doubt, but only stop-gap nevertheless. In France they are going ahead, and public opinion in London is being slowly persuaded to follow along the more recent French lines. The modern principle upon which we should act is Nature's principle—saving the children through their mothers. Expectant motherhood must be taken care of; we must feed, not the child, but the nursing mother, and the child through her. If we rightly take care of her, she will construct a perfect food for the child. There is no other path of racial safety. It is not our present concern to deal with the problems of infancy and childhood as they require, and surely we need not wait to prove that nursing motherhood cannot safely be superseded, but must be retained and safeguarded.

If this postulate be granted, we have to determine how it comes about that the German figures, for instance, are showing this extraordinarily rapid decline in maternal lactation. As has already been noted in passing, we must reject the suggestion that the natural type of women is changing. Such a change of natural type in any living race can occur only through selection for parenthood, and such selection in the case in question can scarcely be imagined to occur in the direction of choosing women who are naturally less capable of nursing. On the contrary, the tendency of the selective principle must always be toward the greater survival of infants whose mothers can nurse them, and who in their turn, if they are to be women, will be more likely to be able to nurse their children. Further, the action of selection cannot demonstrate itself more quickly than is permitted by the length of human generations. It must therefore be rejected as any interpretation of this case. If women are ceasing to be able to nurse their babies, and if this change is occurring with such extraordinary rapidity as the German figures indicate, plainly the explanation must be found in the action of some recent and novel condition or conditions upon womanhood.

Perhaps it need scarcely be insisted that the distinction here sought to be made is of the utmost importance. If the natural type of womanhood were actually changing, we could scarcely do more than observe and despair, but if it be merely that the capacities of this generation of women are being modified by the particular conditions to which they are subjected, plainly we who have made those conditions can modify them—"What man has made, man can destroy."

If we come to ask ourselves what these recent and novel conditions are, the answer is only too ready at hand. The principles which will guide us toward discovering it have been set forth at length in the earlier chapters of this book. Let us recur to our Geddes and Thomson, and at once we have the key. The production of milk is an act of anabolism or building-up, such as we have seen to be characteristic of the female sex, involving the accumulation and storage of quantities of energy so large that if they were stated in the units of the physicist they would astonish us. If we consider what the child achieves in the way of movement and development and growth, and if we realize that at the most rapid period of development and growth, all the energy therefor has been gathered, prepared, and is dispensed by the nursing mother, we shall begin to realize what an astonishing feat that is which she performs. It is in reality, of course, the same feat which is performed by the expectant mother, only that it is slightly less arduous, since after birth the child can breathe and digest for itself.

Perhaps the reader will begin to realize what Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her are asking us to believe when they say that the primal physical functions of maternity will be best fulfilled by the mother who "mingles in the natural industries of a human creature." This statement is either ridiculously false or can be rendered true by rendering it as a truism. The primal physical functions of maternity are the natural industries of the particular human creature we call a mother; and the better she fulfils them, the better she fulfils them, certainly. But the so-called natural industries in which the modern mother is desired to be engaged whilst she is bearing or nursing her children are as unnatural as anything can be. As at present practised, they are morbid products of civilization which it will require to cast off if it is to survive.

It is the student of life and its laws who must have the last word in these matters. If he utters it wrongly or is unheeded, Nature is not mocked, but will be avenged. The writer who can lay down a new principle on which our life is to be based, without paying any more attention to lactation than is to be found in the argument we have been considering, has left out the beginning, has omitted the foundations. No measure of earnestness or literary skill can save her case.

Of course the reply will be that the biological criticism is simply the ancient and oriental idea of woman as a helpless dependent, reasserted for male advantage in our own day. One cannot believe that it is necessary to rebut that accusation. It is necessary, however, to examine somewhat the words "economic dependence" and "economic independence" which are employed with such naïve antithesis in this controversy.

When we examine Mrs. Gilman's proposal for the salvation of woman, we find it to mean that in future mothers are to do double work. The glorious consummation is to be that woman is no longer "parasitic on the male," which is Mrs. Gilman's way of expressing the great truth that the mother for whom the father works, represents the future supported by the present.

But the future is always supported by the present. Woman, we began by saying, is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and the present must live for her and die for her. When we say the future, we mean childhood. If childhood is to appear and to survive, womanhood must be dedicated to it, and manhood, which stands for the present, must supply its own link in the chain. The following paragraph from an unsigned article which appeared some years ago in the Morning Post states the case in a form which may convince the reader. It was headed "Repairs and Renewals of the People," and ran as follows:—

"It is, indeed, seldom sufficiently realized how much a nation, so to speak, lives always in and for the future. Broadly speaking, of every ten persons living in the United Kingdom now, four are less than twenty years of age, while three of the rest are women (two of them married women)—that is to say, people also mainly concerned, through the care of children, with the future rather than with the present. Upon the remaining three men, one of whom be it noted is over fifty-five, falls the bulk of the work of providing for immediate needs and so releasing the others to provide for the continuance of the race. A definite large share of all the present activities of a people is required and, as it were, pledged to provide for its renewal. If it fails to allow sufficient, it may, just like a company or a municipal concern with an inadequate depreciation fund, show large profits and great prosperity for a time; it cannot be regarded as a sound concern."