The creative man or the man working objectively must often condemn the emotional side of his personality to a partial development; he must for the sake of his work renounce many family values important for this emotional side of his being. Even if shorter working hours could partially diminish this cultural offering, the inner conflict, for the man or the woman, is not settled thereby.
Even if a man, in the consciousness of his wife’s endowment of talent, assumed a number of domestic duties, especially those pertaining to the children, the inner conflict would still continue. And this conflict is in no way solved by the amaternal theory that the personal life must be placed above the instinct life. For, as has been emphasised, the choice is not between the personal and the instinct life, but between the intellectual and the emotional side of woman’s personality. And the solution of this choice has not been discovered by the amaternals, who would combine commercial work with marriage and maternity. Women who remain unmarried or who give up commercial activity which they cannot carry on in the home, have not settled the conflict either, but have only reduced its difficulties.
The fundamental error of the amaternal solution of the problem is that it characterises motherliness as a non-social instinct, but, on the other hand, defines the “personal” activity of woman as an expression of the social instinct. For all social instincts have been developed by culture out of primitive instincts. All cultural development lies between the sex impulse of the Australian negress and the erotic sentiment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. And when the amaternals assert that motherliness, which “we have in common with beasts and savages,” cannot be an expression of the personality, their argument has the same validity as that which would deny to the Sistine Chapel the quality of an expression of personality because beasts and savages also exhibit the decorative instinct.
The development of the mother instinct into motherliness is one of the greatest achievements in the progress of culture, a development by which the maternal functions have continually become more complex and differentiated. Already in the case of the higher animals maternity involves much more than the mere act of giving birth; an animal not only faces death for her young, she gives them also a training which often indicates power of judgment. A cat, for instance, which sought in vain to prevent her kitten from entering the water and which finally threw the kitten in and then pulled it out, thus obtaining the desired result of her pedagogy, had not, as have so many modern mothers, read Spencer, but could, nevertheless, put many of these mothers to shame. Even the initial maternal functions, nursing and physical care, involve a culture of the spiritual life of the mother, not only through an increase in tenderness, but also in observation, discrimination, judgment, self-control; a woman’s character often develops more in a month during which she is occupied with the care of children, than in years of professional work. Mother love and the reciprocal love which it awakens in the child, not only exercise the first deep influence upon the individual’s life of feeling, but this love is the first form of the law of mutual help—it is the root of altruism, the cotyledon of a now widely ramified tree of “social instincts.”
Although woman through the mere physical functions of motherhood makes a great social contribution, the importance of her contribution is greatly enhanced if one also takes into consideration her spiritual nature. And notwithstanding the fact that fatherhood has also, to a certain degree, developed in man the qualities of tenderness, watchfulness, patience, yet the enormous predominance of woman’s physical share in parenthood, in comparison with man’s, is in itself enough to create, in course of time, the intimate connection which still exists to-day between mother and child, as well as the difference between the personality of woman and man. The physical functions of motherhood were the fundamental reasons for the earliest division of labour. And this division of labour, the aim of which, next to self-preservation, was for both sexes the protection of posterity, augmented and strengthened the qualities which each sex employed for its special functions. All human qualities lie latent in each. But they have been so specialised by this division of labour, or, on the other hand, suppressed by it, that they now appear in varying proportions: in woman, a careful, managing, supervising, lifeguarding, inward-directed sense of love; in man, courage, desire for action, force of will, power of thought, an activity subduing nature and life, became the distinguishing characteristics; and fatherhood became psychologically, as it is physiologically, something different from motherhood. Even if culture continues to efface the sharp lines of demarcation, so that it becomes more and more impossible to generalise about “woman” and “man,” and increasingly more necessary for each and every woman to solve the “woman question” individually, yet from the point of view of the race, the division of labour must on the whole remain the same as that which hitherto existed, if the higher development of mankind shall continue in uninterrupted advance to more perfect forms. It is necessary for these higher ends of culture that woman in an ever more perfect manner shall fulfil what has hitherto been her most exalted task: the bearing and rearing of the new generation.
The amaternal assertion, that motherliness can be no higher than justice and truth, is an infuriating antithesis. It is as if one should assert that “air is better than water, or both better than bread.” Both assertions place the fundamental condition of life counter to other needs of life! Who shall exercise justice and truth when no new men are born? And, moreover, how shall justice and truth increase in mankind if children are not trained to a greater reverence for justice and a deeper love of truth? In order to fulfil this one office of education well, mothers need their universal human culture in its entirety. But even if this were not so, if motherhood did not require the concentration of woman’s personality; even if motherliness remained only “primitive instinct,” yet this instinct, in the women who have guarded it, is more valuable for mankind than the universal human development of power of the women who have lost this instinct. No social nor individual activity of women could compensate for the extinction of this “instinct,” which only recently in Messina drove hundreds of mothers to shield their children with their own bodies; this “instinct,” which recently impelled a mother, who learned before she gave birth to her child that her own life must be the price for the saving of that of the child, to cry: “I have lived, but the life of my child belongs now to mankind—save the child!” So the mother died without even having seen the beautiful being for whom she gave her life. In the world of “personally” developed women, however, after a new Messina catastrophe the mothers would be found with their manuscripts and their pictures in their arms. And confronted with a choice like that related above, the mother would answer: “Let the child die, I will live my personal life to the end.”
The amaternal type must persist for the present. There are in reality in our time many women who with unresponsive eyes can pass by a lovely child, among them even mothers who do not feel the pure sensuousness, the wise madness, the intoxicating delight which such a child awakens in every motherly woman; mothers who have no conception what a fascinating subject for study the soul of a child can offer. Jean Paul, who scourged worthless mothers and tried to awaken the repressed maternal instinct of his time with the charge that a woman who is bored when she has children, is a contemptible creature, would find to-day many mothers who are bored only if they have their children about them.
And these cerebral, amaternal women must obviously be accorded the freedom of finding the domestic life, with its limited but intensive exercise of power meagre, beside the feeling of power which they enjoy as public personalities, as consummate women of the world, as talented professionals. But they have not the right to falsify life values in their own favour so that they themselves shall represent the highest form of life, the “human personality” in comparison with which the “instinctively feminine” signifies a lower stage of development, a poorer type of life.
Women who have produced books and works of art, to be compared, as respects permanence of value, to confetti at a carnival, have, according to this viewpoint, proved themselves human individualities, while a mother who has contributed an endless amount of clear thought, rich understanding, warm feeling, and strong will to the education of a fine group of children, requires a public office in order to prove herself a “human personality”! The brain work which a woman employs in a commercial concern bears witness to her individuality, but the brain work which a large, well-managed household demands, does not. The woman physician who delivers a mother expresses her “personality,” but the mother has put no “personality” into the feelings with which she has borne the child, the dreams with which she has consecrated it, the ideas in accordance with which she has educated it! The girl who has passed her examinations has proved herself a developed human being; but her grandmother, who is now filled with the kindness and wisdom which she has won in a life dedicated to domestic duties, a life in which the restricted sphere of her duties did not prevent the comprehensiveness of her cultural interests, nor her all-embracing sympathy with humanity—such a woman is not a personality!
When men advance as an argument against women’s rights the fear that women will lose their womanliness in public life, the older feminists answer that womanliness, especially motherliness, is rooted too firmly in nature to make it possible for this danger to exist. Nothing has, however, become more clear in this amaternalistic time than that motherliness is not an indestructible instinct. Just as our time produces in increasing numbers sterile women and women incapable of nursing their children, so it produces more and more psychically amaternal women. We can pass in silence the cases of children martyred in families or in children’s homes, for sexual perversity and religious fanaticism often play a rôle in such connections; we can also pass by the millions of mothers who bring about the abortion of their offspring, for the poor are driven to such practices largely by necessity, the rich mostly by love of pleasure. There still remain a sufficient number of women in whom the mother instinct has faded away because of a course of thought like that just described. Our time furnishes manifold proofs of the fact that the mother instinct can easily be weakened, or even entirely disappear, although the erotic impulse continues to live; that motherliness is not a spontaneous natural instinct, but the product of thousands of years not merely of child-bearing, but also of child-rearing; and that it must be strengthened in each new generation by the personal care which mothers bestow upon their children. A woman learns to love the strange child whom she nurses as if it were her own; a father who can devote himself to the care of his little children is possessed by an almost “motherly tenderness” for them, as are also older brothers and sisters for the little ones whom they care for. But while those who advocate the cause of the amaternal women draw from such facts the conclusion that motherliness cannot be used as a criterion of womanliness, yet an entirely different conclusion forces itself upon everyone who sees in the united uplift of the individual and of mankind the criterion of the life-enhancing effect of the woman movement, the conclusion that the amaternal soul not only confirms the worst apprehensions of men in regard to the results of the woman movement, but also constitutes the greatest danger to the woman movement itself. For the amaternal ideas will evoke a violent reaction on the part of men, in case such a reaction does not appear at an early stage on the part of women.