It is for modern women and for men who can understand the problem to make an end to secrecy, shame, and starvation where sex is concerned. There has been a good deal of freedom in action, but less boldness in speech, because of the heavy penalties involved. For some women speech is impossible; those who are secure must fight their battle. How old and proper people love a vigorous and god-like young male! How they look askance upon, brow-beat, and bully his equivalent in the opposite sex! Here is a community for ever starving and choking its finest women, stifling their voices in education and public life; then turning and rending the submissive residue for being what years of intimidation have made them. Let them marry, you say, and make a success of that and their children. That would be well enough but for the taboos and disabilities with which marriage is surrounded. Feminism led women away from the home that they might return armed and unsubdued to make marriage tolerable. Women who have been free remember the horror of the approach to marriage: a barrier for most of us to free public activity; a life-long contract only to be broken in disgrace and public disgust; aunts, uncles, social duties that exasperate and are totally unnecessary; the common view that henceforward husband and wife are one and indivisible, and the wife for ever to be burdened with her husband’s duties and affairs; looks of surprise and reproach if we enjoy other male society; constraint in the manner of men formerly our friends; income, if we have any or can still earn, taxed as a part of our husband’s; children, which, had we had them illegitimate, would have been our own but now are our husband’s; worst of all, the looks and smiles from silly women broken in to slavery, congratulating us on having done well and made ourselves secure for life.
Let no one think this is petulant abuse. It is the accumulation of these details, and the pressure of public opinion which gradually destroy the nerve and independent judgment of married women who, in their free state, have been brilliant and remarkable. It is the fact that, by marriage, we conform and place ourselves in a line with millions of others whose view of what we have done is entirely foreign to our own. As a Labour Minister is corrupted by Court dress, so is a free woman by the marriage-contract. Nothing but our desire for children would make us endure it. We, to whom the mutual nature of sex-love is sacred, to whom a partnership involving children is of equal dignity on both sides, to whom the surrender of our whole being in love is a free gift—the highest we can bestow; who would neither bind ourselves nor others where love is non-existent; we must submit to a contract based on rights of property and possession, buying and selling of our bodies; a law whose conception of conjugal wrongs is sin, punishment, and just revenge; and a Church whose utmost concession is to bid us “serve” instead of “obey” our husbands. Build, O Aspasia, a trade union of lovers to conquer the world, and cry aloud that feminism is nowhere so much needed as in the home.
IV
Hecuba
Feminist Mothers
So far I have refrained from any detailed discussion of modern women and maternity because it is still necessary to make it clear that a full life of activity for women is perfectly possible and permissible without it. I am quite aware that certain religious people assert as a moral principle that the purpose of sex-love is not mutual enjoyment but the perpetuation of the race. I am also aware that militarists enjoin on women the necessity of marriage and large families as a patriotic duty. Further, certain doctors have gone out of their way to try to prove that the use of contraceptives is contrary to health and nature. These same people, we may note, have no aversion from the wearing by women of internal remedial rubber supports for months on end nor to patching up with silver, papier mâché, and other foreign materials, the insides and outsides of human beings mutilated in the natural and healthy pursuit called war. I am not concerned with the morals of convention or superstition, but with the morals of experience. It is the experience of modern women that sex is an instinctive need to them as it is to men, and further that the prevention of conception brings to them no loss of poise, health, or happiness. On the contrary, when once they embark on the task of maternity, contraception is a blessed safeguard to health and recovery in the periods of rest between pregnancies. I am not going to deny that the most perfect delight known to human beings is the completely reckless, mutually adoring union of two people of vitality and intelligence who hope to create another human being as a constant reminder of the beauty of that moment. But many considerations, which we shall discuss, forbid a yearly child. I read recently in an article by G. K. Chesterton, that sex without gestation and parturition is like blowing the trumpets and waving the flags without doing any of the fighting. From a woman such words, though displaying inexperience, might come with dignity; from a man they are an unforgivable, intolerable insult. What is man’s part in sex but a perpetual waving of flags and blowing of trumpets and avoidance of the fighting? The vast majority of men are not even tender or kindly to their pregnant or nursing wives, nor will they give help or consideration to the care of their young children.
A revolt against motherhood under present conditions is not surprising, nor is it entirely regrettable. There are quite a number of women whose minds and bodies are not fitted or have not been fitted by their upbringing and education to produce and care for children. This is a source of distress to many people, who, as was suggested earlier, did not think of it at the right moment, when the education of women in public and private schools was being developed. Even now these same people stand in the way of the surest remedy: which is to teach science, physiology, and the beauty of sex and maternity to boys and girls at an early age. The London County Council, many of whom are certainly distressed beyond measure at the falling birth-rate and the discontent and irresponsibility of modern young people, have just, in consultation with suitably selected moral headmasters and mistresses, turned down the suggestion of sex-teaching in elementary and secondary schools. We are always told that boys and girls of all classes nowadays acquire this knowledge easily for themselves, but the mere knowledge is not the only thing to the adolescent mind. Things not spoken of by parents or teachers, things dealt with in hushed voices by moral and spiritual leaders, surrounded by cant and humbug and false sentiment, are bound to be thought nasty by mild young people and to provide ribald laughter for the obstreperous.
This is not to say that sex-information should be given in a spirit of evangelical solemnity and exhortation, nor even of soft sentimentality. All that is needed is lessons in physiology, taught as a matter of course, as botany or nature-study are often taught; and then explanations to boys of the working of their bodies, how to keep them in health, how not to dissipate and destroy their energies too soon. Further, they should be told that woman is neither a chattel nor a servant, nor even an inferior, but a partner in joy as in the business of life; that there is no question or difficulty, public or private, which cannot be brought to her for discussion and judgment; and that she has a right to share in all decisions affecting a joint life, children, money, and the conduct of affairs of State. To girls in the same way could be explained the physical changes of puberty, marriage, and maternity, how the child grows, what food and care the mother, and afterwards the baby, will need. There is nothing in this too difficult or shocking to young or adolescent minds. So many of us can remember the secret conclaves with our friends when we puzzled out and pieced together what scraps of information we could glean, awakening instinct darkly supplementing this knowledge. Some of us can remember, perhaps, having noticed obscene writing on school-walls, instantly reported by shocked prefects, instantly effaced by school-mistresses with an awful and portentous gravity which made us feel we had stumbled on the brink of a secret of incredible wickedness and horror. One straightforward lecture of concise information could have dispelled the lurking mystery once and for all and imparted a sense of magic and wonder and ambition. Some of the more fortunate of us, through study in libraries and dreaming over poems, created for ourselves a finer attitude. With no teaching other than that we might find someone who would marry us some day, and that marriage was an excellent destiny even for educated women, and with no belief in any of the moral taboos current around us, some of us can none the less remember the pride of caring for the body, safeguarding health and looks, avoiding excess, severe strain, and overwork, because we cherished our dreams of the children that our bodies were to make—not ordinary children, of course not: Promethean creatures, endowed with every gift that mortal man could steal from the jealous gods, strong, beautiful, intelligent and bold—kings and conquerors, not of their fellow-creatures but of nature and the mystery of the world. There is not a woman, unless completely warped by early training, in whom such dreams and visions will not stir if we try to wake them. If not, then let her pass: we do not need her to perpetuate the race. And do not trick her into motherhood by false sentiment and information, or by withholding from her the means to protect herself if she is not fully resolved upon bearing a child.
We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them. Nor should we represent motherhood as something so common and easy that everyone can go through it without harm or suffering and rear her children competently and well. Without arousing dread or horror, we should tell young women frankly the pain and agony of childbirth, and the anxiety and griefs which are the fate of every woman who is a mother by choice and therefore loves her children. Nothing whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and responsibility which they will evade. Everything is to be gained by training a woman in knowledge, courage, and physical strength, and leaving it then to her own instinct and her mind to tell her that to create new human beings is worth the discomfort and the suffering which she must necessarily undergo. Those in whom the courage to create survives when choice is free and all the facts are known are those best fitted to bring children into the world, and breed in them eagerness and intrepidity. The others will only pass on fear and distaste for life from which individuals and the community suffer far too much already.[7]
[7] The anti-feminists who see in emancipated women nothing but persecuting spinsters should take comfort from the fact that voluntary motherhood will ultimately destroy feminism, if they are right. The children of women passionately desirous of maternity will inherit strong parental and survival instincts, the occasional feminist “sport” not reproducing herself!
I do not mean by this that we should, scorning the aid of science, return to natural childbirth, and let its pangs scare off the weaklings and the cowards. In this matter the charges of our critics are conflicting. They condemn us for having sought the aid of science to mitigate our suffering, and in the same breath tell us that a return to natural child-bed will bring back a primitive exhilaration and freedom from pain lost for thousands of years. I do not believe that for any comparatively civilized race, any race really worthy the name of man, childbirth has ever been painless. The upright position, held by eighteenth-century divines to be a source of pride in man, was the first injustice to women. Nor do I believe that the sufferings of modern women are any worse or their confinements any more difficult than those of women in the past. They are more closely observed and the difficulties known, and, where skill is available, the dangerous ones are less likely to be fatal. In the past the fragile woman died, or continued ailing, unobserved by a doctor and afraid to complain. People who live and breed in a state of nature are by no means so healthy and vigorous as our modern Rousseaus would have us believe: more children die than survive, and those who are left have physical defects and deformities which could have been remedied by knowledge and care. These and the ravages of smallpox and other diseases, and the deformities due to the natural accidents of life unmitigated by medical care, produce far more ugliness than the mark of an obstetric instrument on temple or forehead. Then, again, youth passes more quickly. The men and women we see in modern life, still reasonably young and fresh with rounded faces and teeth stopped or supplemented by art, would in a more primitive community be dead, or else crouching useless and despised, toothless and with sunken cheeks by the fireside of their sons and daughters.