Decay and pain belong to nature. To arrest the one and mitigate the other has been the task which the sciences that deal in physiology have set themselves. Remedial at first, they pass on to the stage of prevention. Already the principle of intelligent medicine is to strengthen what is weak in the body by nourishment and exercise rather than provide artificial substitutes. Paralysed limbs return to life; women retain their teeth white and strong through several pregnancies. This is not done by a return to nature, but by an increase in civilization and knowledge. In that way our very landscapes have been formed. We prune, we nourish the soil, we cross-breed our plants. The vegetables upon which the enthusiast for nature urges us to live are the product of science and artifice: thousands of years of cultivation, nitrates from Chile, skill of the experimenter, skill of the gardener’s hand. The same is true of the animals we breed for meat, eggs, or milk supply. Agriculture and stock-breeding seem natural to us—they were not natural in the distant past. As regards the human body, to me at least it seems that we are now beginning to approach the right attitude. There was more dosing and doctoring of petty ailments among intelligent people in the last century. To-day we try to learn how best to live in order that such ailments may not occur, and substitute a well-balanced diet for aids to digestion and the normal functioning of our bodies. We do the same in rearing our children. And this attitude would become more general if those who rule us, Press, Church, rich men and politicians, would consider it really important that every man, woman, and child in the State should have health and happiness, and therefore supply broadcast the necessary rules of life and sufficient of healthy and staple foods for all, in place of advertisement of quack remedies and patent substitutes prepared by profiteers.
To return to the application of science and nature to maternity. A special sentimentality and superstition inherited from the completely savage periods of history cling about this, as about sex. The avoidance of suffering in childbirth is taboo in the Japanese moral code, as it was until recently in Christian morals. Religion has persisted in regarding the female body as unclean when engaged in its most important functions, and purifying it afterwards by special prayers to the Deity.[8] We find this savagery current in Judaism[9] as in Christianity, together with an exhortation to be fruitful and multiply, and therefore to pass through shame and uncleanness as often as we can. It was thought a horror and an outrage when chloroform was used to help us. It is a still greater horror when means are discovered of not having children at all. To this day most doctors and dentists refuse to give an anæsthetic and draw a rotten tooth which is wearing down a pregnant mother’s strength by sleepless nights and days of agony. Yet this can be done with reasonable care and skill. Behind all this there is the mystic belief that somehow or other nature does the work best unaided and unhindered; and this mysticism is rooted in a savage taboo. Life is, indeed, so pertinacious that somehow some of us will survive whatever we do, but this does not seem to me an adequate attitude for the rational mother.
[8] See the service for the Churching of Women in the Prayer Book.
[9] Leviticus, xii, 1–8.
The truth is that it is not desired or expected that mothers should be rational. Maternal instinct is so wonderful, maternal devotion so sublime, cry our sentimental brutes. Whatever we may have known of life and the outside world, it is still expected in modern times that, once married, we shall descend into a morass of instinct and ignorance from which we shall never, if the male and the vindictively-minded spinster can prevent it, emerge again. We are privileged, so we are told, in that we may bear each year a child for the State, rock the cradle, wash, mend, and make, pass on the lore of housekeeping and infant-care to our daughters just as we received it from our mothers. It is such a beautiful picture: a pity it is entirely false. The old-fashioned mother had no lore, and her instinct was inadequate. She succeeded by luck rather than by knowledge. She adored, or disciplined; she killed by kindness or by severity and neglect. She would coddle when she should have hardened, harden when she should have coddled; she would over-feed and under-feed, or give the wrong kind of food. Since it has been the fashion for women to have minds, the books for mothers have become more scientific and our intelligent inquiries have been met by research and more adequate replies. Every mother with any intelligence who has reared one or more children through the first year of life and up to five years of age would admit nowadays that scientific knowledge was of more service to her than all the instinct and adoration at her command. Indeed, I believe the so-called maternal instinct in handling and understanding babies consists of habit almost imperceptibly learnt in tending the first, blossoming into a smooth instinctive unity with the coming of the second. The fashionable mother, said to be devoid of maternal instinct because she neglects her child, has simply not learnt it, because necessity does not compel her to practical duties. This is even true, though less so, of well-to-do mothers who feed their babies at the breast.
People will persist in imagining that uncivilized women were always able to feed their children in natural fashion. Very often they were obliged to seek the help of another mother, and, when that was not forthcoming, the baby died. It is quite true that our adaptation to modern conditions of life, nerve-stress, combined with overwork for women in towns and industrial districts, has caused breast-feeding to be less common than it was in the past. But here again the way of life is not back to nature, which is impossible because we cannot at a blow destroy industrialism and the towns—but onwards, to greater knowledge. Instead of bullying the mothers and telling them it is wicked not to feed their babies at the breast, let them know how, by pre-natal care of health and strength, by diet, by deliberate nerve-control, they can feed their babies with comfort and delight and without detriment to their health and the work which they must necessarily do—or even to their beauty. Here again, if choice is free and the child therefore ardently desired, there is more chance of success with breast-feeding. And knowledge of the chemical constituents of cow’s milk and patent foods as compared with human milk is more likely to induce the modern mother to suckle her child than volumes of abuse or sentimental twaddle.
Then as to the hygiene of pregnancy. Could our mothers have taught us about the different food-values, about protein, nitrogenous foods, calcium from the green foods for teeth and bones, avoidance of too many albuminous foods? Knowledge of what diet can do to help us in pregnancy and our children in early youth is in its infancy, but it is there, none the less. Shall we fling it aside and return to pure instinct? What massage and remedial exercises have taught can be applied to our bodies during pregnancy and after childbirth. It is probable that closer study of the functions of the muscles of the back and the abdomen would enable us to teach women to exercise and control them in a way that would make childbirth almost painless, and the recovery of poise and activity afterwards more rapid and more thorough. Under present conditions, muscles that are often too rigid or too feeble expand and never recover their tone; others—the back muscles, it may be—go out of use temporarily and similarly do not recover. In the middle-class woman laziness is often the cause of difficult confinements and poor recovery of the figure; in the working mother a too speedy return to work which is too hard and does not exercise the body harmoniously; in both the ignorance which leads to wrong kinds of nourishment during pregnancy, and fear of doing harm to the child which leads to rigid and over-careful movement, are responsible for a good many troubles. Psychological effects may be serious. Most women develop during pregnancy sensitiveness and a timidity protective to the child. From this the very fertile mother has no opportunity to recover. Hence many of the silly old ladies who cannot cross roads unaided by a policeman. With birth-control, in two years a determined mother can completely restore her nerve, her joy in life, and her full muscular powers.
The author of Lysistrata suggests that by diet we may produce thin babies and therefore have easier confinements. This may be true, but it is a curious fact that the experience of some mothers and doctors goes to show that much protein (which Mr. Ludovici suggests we should avoid) produces a thin baby and a corpulent mother; that, on the other hand, light and nitrogenous foods, while keeping the mother slim and supple, yield a plump 8 to 9 lbs. baby. I think the size of our babies is perhaps not so much under our control as many might wish to suggest. Heredity enters in. Children sometimes have large fathers. The sheep-breeder knows that he dare not mate certain larger types of rams with small-made ewes.
In all these problems, however, it is the frankness and intelligence which feminism has made possible for women which will bring solution and progress, rather than a return to the unguided instincts of our forefathers. The lore of motherhood is a science which is now beginning, but it is not following the lines which convention and the moralists expect. It defies sentiment, ridicules unnecessary and unintelligent sacrifice, is not content to suffer, but makes demands. It begins with birth control, which to many seems the negation of motherhood, but which to the creative mother is the key-stone of her work.
Suppose we have educated our young women sanely about physical matters, as suggested earlier in this chapter. As they reach the age of maturity and activity, what will they find? If they are middle- or upper-class, an existence that is not too intolerable. Feminism has won for them the right of entry to most professions and, provided they are fairly able, they can get work. None the less, it must be admitted that the years since the War have borne hardly upon wage-earning women of all classes. The lack of sexual freedom is a terrible burden, but the remedy ultimately lies in their own hands. Life in marriage still offers reasonable comfort and good food for man and wife and two or three children. But late marriages, from the lack of opportunity for men and the expense of living, cause girls’ young bodies to be worn with longing unless they are bold enough to follow our modern Aspasias. This waiting to marry is a real danger to young women’s health which conventional, unimaginative people refuse to face. It produces nervous disorders bordering at times on insanity.