Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

It has been shown that the effect of alcohol upon the brain persists for not less than thirty hours after the last dose. But more than two years have now passed since the foregoing was printed, leaving ample time for any member of the alcoholic party to "pull himself together" and demolish it. One is therefore entitled to assume that it cannot be demolished; on the contrary, it could easily be shown that the foregoing figures very considerably underrate the actual number of widows and orphans who must be made by alcohol in this country every year.

All students of modern life, however greatly they differ in their methods and objects, are agreed that the question of the economic position of women is one of the gravest of our time. While this is so, it may be added that only the Eugenist can adequately realize the importance of this question, since he knows that with it is involved the all-important matter of the selection amongst present women for the motherhood of the future. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the modern trend is quite definitely in the direction of those of our guides, whom most of us follow, knowingly or unknowingly, because they have the brains and we have not, in favouring the economic position of women at the expense of male responsibility. Meanwhile we have the economic basis of society as it is, and there is no more serious indictment against alcohol than this which I have attempted to formulate against it on the ground of its destruction of fatherhood. Whatever the rest of the community may incline to, it assuredly seems that the wives, from palace to hovel, ought to be enemies of this great enemy of theirs. The time will certainly come when the woman who is bringing up children will be placed in a position of economic security, and when indeed all other persons will be less secure than she because the sane State of the future will guarantee, and regard as the first charge upon itself, the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the production of the next generation. But in the chaos in which we welter, widows and orphans have to take their chance. Who will say a good word for the substance which makes them by tens of thousands in England and Wales alone every year?

At least one economic aspect of this question may, however, be dealt with here. In a rightly constituted society people are held responsible for their deeds. Parenthood is a deed; in a very true sense it is a more deliberate, a more active, more self-determined deed, on the part of the father than on the part of the mother. At present the only act for which men are held irresponsible—for our practice amounts to that—is the act for which, above all others, they should be held responsible. A large amount of the money now spent by men on alcohol and tobacco, and other things which shorten their lives, and are needed only because they create a need for themselves, is really required for the interests of the race. Such is the double destruction worked by the alcoholic form of this waste that if the average sum, say six shillings a week, expended in the working-class family on alcohol, were invested on behalf of the possible widows and orphans, not only would they be provided for, but the fathers would be saved, and they would not become widows and orphans. In days to come it will be discovered that such matters as these are the real political economy, the absence or presence of tariffs, the incidence of taxation and the like, being matters of no consequence or significance whatever compared with the question, fundamental in all times and places for every nation and for every individual: For what are you spending: for bread or a stone, for life or for death?

The foregoing has been chosen for the forefront of this chapter because of its bearing on a central economic problem of the time, and also because, for some reason or other, this alcoholic destruction of fatherhood, though it is of the utmost importance, has hitherto escaped the attention of sociological students. We pass now to a second point, of a wholly different character, which particularly well illustrates certain of the general principles with which we began. The supreme importance of alcohol or of anything else for human happiness is attained only through its influence on the selves of men and women. It is upon these that our happiness depends—upon the nature and the nurture, from hour to hour, of our selves and the selves with which we have to deal. Above all, do women as individuals depend for their happiness upon the selves of men, as we have suggested.

Now if there be anything certain about the action of alcohol upon the brain, it is that it degrades the quality of the self. Much of the cruder pathology of alcohol is open to doubt. A great many of the supposed degenerative changes in nerve-cells, which were attributed to it and thought to be irrevocable, are now interpreted otherwise. Chronic alcoholism is looked upon by such foremost students as Dr. F. W. Mott, less as a disease due to organic changes produced in the brain than as a chronic functional derangement due to the continued action of a poison. This newer interpretation of chronic alcoholism has the very important practical corollary of encouraging us to the belief, which is frequently justifiable, that if the chronic intoxication ceases, the individual may completely or all but completely recover, as would not be the case if the fine structure of his brain had been actually destroyed. The recent modification of our views on this subject has, however, only served to render clearer our understanding of the mental symptoms of alcoholism. Here is a drug which poisons the organ of the mind. The action of a single dose persists for a far longer period than used to be supposed, and thus we now know that in the great majority of civilized men everywhere, the nervous system, which is the home of the self, is continuously under the influence of alcohol.

That influence, as we have said, consistently shows itself in a degradation of the quality of the self. The poison deranges first the latest and highest products of evolution; it beheads a man, as we may say, in thin slices from above downwards. Beginning as it does with the most human, and only at the very last attacking the most animal part of our nervous constitution, it is essentially the bestializer, save only that the alcoholized human being is much lower than the beast, on the general principle, Corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst.

Now wherever alcohol is consumed women have to pay the penalty for its daily deterioration in the human scale of the men with whom they live; nor need any reader of even the smallest experience require any writer's assurance that in vast numbers of such cases the woman suffers more than the man. He has its moments of compensation, inadequate though they be; she has none.

Whilst women suffer in every respect from the influence of alcohol as a degrader of their men, most of all do they and the race suffer through the action of alcohol upon the racial instinct. In my book on personal hygiene was sought an interpretation of the difference between low and high types of mankind largely in terms of their success or failure in achieving what may be called the "transmutation" of the racial instinct. In less metaphorical language this transmutation depends upon the measure of self-control and deference of present desire to future purpose. These are supremely human characteristics, and there are none which alcohol more surely and early attacks. Men are not so constituted that they are at all likely to profit by any substance which keeps their racial instinct on its original and less than human plane, and certainly women suffer in many ways, and with them necessarily the future suffers, just because of this action of alcohol upon men.

The argument need not be elaborated, but it may be added that the disastrous action upon young womanhood of the consumption of alcohol by young manhood is greatly increased when we find, as we do, that the young women start drinking too. In these modern days, when the controlling influence of religion and especially of religious fear is steadily relaxing, the young woman's best protection is to be found in her own judgment and self-control and prevision of the future. But these are the very defences which alcohol in her nervous system saps. Every social worker is familiar with the daily truth that young womanhood connives at its own ruin under the influence of alcohol, where otherwise it need not have fallen.

This last consideration leads us to the study of a phenomenon which in many respects is new and unprecedented, while none could be of worse omen.