Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

CONCLUSION

The plan of this book has now been satisfied. The reader may be very far from satisfied, but not, it is to be hoped, on the ground that many subjects have been omitted which might quite well have been included under the title of Woman and Womanhood. It was better to confine our search to principles.

For it seems evident that civilization is at the parting of the ways in these fundamental matters. The invention of aeroplanes and submarine and wireless telegraphy and the like is of no more moment than the fly on the chariot wheel, compared with the vital reconstructions which are now proceeding or imminent. The business of the thoughtful at this juncture is to determine principles, for principles there are in these matters, if they can be discovered, as certain, as all-important as those on which any other kind of science proceeds. Just as the physicist must hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic principles which determine the life and continuance of living things. Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a thousand times in the past.

None will dare dispute these assertions, yet what do we see at the present time? On what grounds is the woman question fought, and by what kind of disputants? It is fought, as everyone knows, on the grounds of what women want, or rather, what a particular section of half-instructed women, in some particular time and place, think they want,—or do not want—under the influence of suggestion, imitation and the other influences which determine public opinion. It is fought on the grounds of precedent: women are not to have votes in England because women have never had votes in England, or they are to have votes in England because they have them in New Zealand. It is fought on party political grounds, none the less potent because they are not honestly acknowledged: the Liberal and the Conservative parties favour or disfavour this or that Suffrage Bill, or whatever it may be, according to what they expect to be its effect upon their voting strength. It is fought upon financial grounds, as when we see the entire force of the alcoholic party arrayed against the claims of women, as in the nature of things it always has been and always will be. It is fought on theological grounds by clerics who quote the first chapter of Genesis; and on anti-theological grounds by half-instructed rationalists who attack marriage because they suppose it was invented by the Church.

And whose voices never fail among the disputants? Loudest of all are those of youth of both sexes, who know nothing and want to know nothing and who have no idea that there is anything to know in attempting to decide such questions as this. It is argued in the House of Gramophones and such places, by common politicians of the type the many-headed choose, who would do better to confine themselves to the soiled questions of tariffs and the like, in which they find a native joy. It is argued by vast numbers of men who hate or fear women, and women who hate or fear men, as if any imaginable wisdom on this question or any other could possibly be born of such emotions.

Yet all the while we are dealing with a problem in biology, with living beings, obeying and determined by the laws of life, and with a species exhibiting those fundamental facts of heredity, variation, bi-parental reproduction, sexual selection, instinct and the like, which are mere meaningless names to nine out of ten of the disputants, and yet which determine them and their disputes and the issues thereof.

If these contentions be correct, there is plainly much need for an attempt, however imperfect, to set forth the first principles of woman and womanhood. Evidently the time for discussion of detailed questions has not yet come, since, to take a single instance, there is not yet to be heard on either side of the controversy a single voice asserting the fundamental eugenic necessity that, at whatever cost, the best women must be selected for motherhood, and the contribution of their superiority to the future stock.

Let us briefly sum up the substance of the foregoing pages.

First, we have stated the eugenic postulate, failing to grant which we and our schemes, our votes and our hopes, will assuredly disappear or decay, as must all living races which are not recruited from their best, Secondly, we have proceeded to analyze the nature of womanhood, its capacities and conditions, assuming that we can scarcely discover whither it should go unless we know what it is. To the party politician, hungry for the prizes that suit his soul or stomach, such an assumption is mere foolish pedantry; and the ardent suffragist will have little more to say to it. That, however, cannot be helped. It is to be hoped that all parties, as parties, will unite in banning the views herein expressed, and then one may take heart of grace and dare to hope that there is something in them.

They may be crystallized in the dictum that woman is Nature's supreme organ of the future. This is not a theory, but a statement of evident truth. It is an essential canon of what one might call the philosophy of biology, and applies to the female sex throughout living nature. Birth is of the female alone. No sub-human male, nor even man himself, can directly achieve the future; the greatest statesman or law-giver or founder of nations can only work, if he knew it, through womanhood. The greatest of these, and their name is very far from legion, was evidently Moses, as history shows, and he acted on this principle. On the other hand, those who have sought to achieve the future, as Napoleon did, failed because they defiled and flouted womanhood. The best men died on the battlefield and the worst were left to aid the women in that supreme work of parenthood by which alone, and only through the co-operation of men and women, the future is made.