The Future of the Women's Movement

by Helena M. Swanwick

Reactionary men of science try to frighten us, however, by maintaining that the energetic use of any of woman’s strength is contrary to healthy and efficient motherhood. They go on making these assertions, in spite of the fact that women who live a laborious life, provided they are not starved or neglected when they bring forth children, do it with far greater ease than women who live in luxury and idleness. They talk of metabolism and the necessity of a young girl storing up nourishment during the years of her adolescence, as if a human creature were nothing but a chemical factory and warehouse rolled into one. By the persistent and wilful neglect of the mind, they are able to arrive at the most astounding conclusions, and one wishes one could send them back half a century to the nursery of those days, and make them learn that “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” It is not only idle hands, but idle hearts and minds that are a danger. If a girl’s mind is caged and her education concentrated upon sex, it is not mothers you are rearing, but lunatics, deficients, hystericals, and anæmics. The people who talk as if a girl should be trained from childhood up for motherhood, quite overlook the very real possibility of tiring out the instinct before its time of fruition. There are very many girls who would have had quite a healthy and natural fondness for babies, but who have had the feeling literally worn out by premature exercise or by sentimental pawing. A girl-child is not a small woman, and just as we should all disapprove any attempt to make “little fathers” of the boys, so we should disapprove the unhealthy endeavour to make “little mothers” of the girls. If there is something pathetic about the small girl drudge, stunted with carrying about heavy babies, there is something peculiarly offensive about the prim little girl who rebukes her brothers for tearing their clothes or dirtying their hands, when she ought herself to be likewise engaged.

From the Census reports it appears that in England and Wales there are nearly three and a half million spinsters over twenty years of age; many of these will never marry, and the cruelty of bringing them up to a vocation, which they will never be called upon to fulfil, should be repugnant to all decent feeling, even if it would not in itself constitute a danger. Such considerations do not trouble the sciolist with a theory to run, for he calls the maidens a “superfluous portion of the population,” or “waste products of our female population,”[5] and proceeds to talk as if they could be set aside. But this piece of Podsnappery would bring its own punishment, if it were widely adopted, for undoubtedly the parasitic woman would be, in the future, as she has been in the past, the most deadly enemy of man. The only sex-antagonism that really exists is that arising from the attempts of one sex to repress or to get the better of the other. There is, in fact, absolutely no practicable issue for this way of thinking except the simple plan of the lethal chamber for the “waste products.”

The training of women as breeders only, would involve the complete subjection of women to men, and consequently their complete dependence on men; it would involve the return to pre-factory days (in itself, perhaps, no bad thing, only no one knows how to do it), and to a state of things which has been partly remedied by the Married Women’s Property and Custody of Children Acts; a state in which it was possible to pass and to administer the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts. It would mean that women would no longer have university education and would be compelled, as they used to be, to accept the assertions of men with regard to the state of the law and the construction of their own bodies. It means the withdrawal of women from the work of local councils and poor law administration, from inspection, and from teaching. It means a state of things which has never existed anywhere on this earth, and to avoid which most women would prefer a thousand deaths. All this for the purpose of producing finer children; but since the girl children would be of use only for further breeding purposes, one may say that women would make all these tremendous sacrifices for the sake of producing finer men. It is a stiff demand to make even of the self-sacrificing sex! But would it have the anticipated results?

The question brings us to the well-fought battle-ground of breeding versus environment. When a suffragist procession in the States carried a banner declaring, “We prepare our children for the world; we must prepare the world for our children,” there was an outcry from some scientific persons, saying that that put the whole fallacy into a nutshell: the first was woman’s job, the second was man’s. It was for woman to breed the good child, and for man to make the good environment. A manufacturing nation still thrills responsive to the call for further division of labour; that is to say, the dominant class, the employers do. But can we really produce a human being on the same system as we produce the pin beloved of early economists? Let us look a little further. Even if we make the huge admission that a woman, a human being after all, with a mind, to say nothing of a soul, would retain her bodily and mental health under so hideous a system,—can this woman produce a good child all by herself? Does it not matter in the least who is the father of the child? Whether he has clean blood, and is of good stock? What of the racial poisons which a man may inherit, but may also acquire in the course of a misspent life? It is clear that the woman will have to select her mate, but how is a woman in subjection to do this? So that the first part of the division of labour manifestly cannot take place. The man must take part in preparing our children for the world. Can we really say that man alone does or can prepare the world for our children? It is too late in the day to tell us that, when every year that passes shows us more plainly the injurious effects upon the race of the industrial system, which is so largely the product of men’s minds, and of the great social evils which were treated of in Chapters X. and XI., and which men have so largely agreed to consider “necessary.” The theory of the cow-woman, who shall do nothing but bear and suckle babies, is not, as some people would have us believe, a revival of what once was and may be again. It never was. The masses of women have always worked very hard indeed. Nor will women be brought to accept it for the future. Degraded as women often have been, they have always had the one safeguard of work, even if it were not the work they would have chosen, and may have had to be done under unfavourable conditions. In complex modern society the work of women is even more necessary than in simpler days; only now there is more need than ever there was of intelligence, adaptability, scientific knowledge and organisation among women, for they cannot even be efficient mothers under modern conditions if their minds do not keep pace with knowledge and the arts of living.

Important, even of vital importance, as the work of physical motherhood is, and disastrous as everyone must admit would be any social developments which impaired this, it is a monstrous distortion to talk as if physical motherhood were the only work of women. The maidens, the widows, the women who are having no more children, have endless natural spheres of usefulness and happiness, if only men will leave them free. There is a good deal to be said for the view that a large number of unmarried women were needed to get the women’s movement well going. As a matter of fact, the leaders of the three chief suffrage societies are married women, and there are of course a very large number of wives in the women’s movement; but women with young children can scarcely see the wood for the trees, and such a gigantic piece of work as the organisation of the hitherto unorganised half of humanity has been one which has, of necessity, taken all the time and energy of very many women. Never again, in all probability, will there be such need for many women who can travel light. It is admitted that marriage may often be a brake on the man pioneer; much more must it be so for the woman pioneer. It will not take us a hundredth part of the time to use our liberty that it has taken to win our liberty. Many a man, one is proud to record, has done his utmost to strengthen the hands of his wife in the movement which they both believe in; but the husband is not unknown who likes to see all the other women progressive, only not his wife. And, of course, there are very many mothers whose children absorb, while they are young, the greater part of their energies. Children grow up and the mothers very often have two-score years to put in after the babies have left off coming. As women’s lives widen, there will be fewer of the mothers who bore their grown-up sons and nag their grown-up daughters. The work of such experienced matrons in the great organised work of mothering, care committees, schools for mothers, guardians of the poor, education authorities, is invaluable. But so long as the idiotic restrictions upon the civic work of women exist, and so long as women have not the means of independence, this work will still only be done by few of those who could do it so well. And the rest will still be like paddle-wheels out of water, wasting energy in a great whirring.

The men who speak of the maidens as waste products might also be invited to consider the millions of unmarried men, and to ask themselves whether these men really could marry, and whether there are not already very many men, who can marry only because they have devoted sisters who shoulder the burden of the old folk and the invalids; nay, more, who help, out of their difficult earnings, to keep their nephews and their nieces.

The conclusion is that not men alone, and not women alone, can either prepare children for the world or the world for children. But both together can. The analogy of division of labour won’t work when it is human beings that are being made. “Male and female created He them,” and both are indispensable. Therefore both must be equipped with knowledge and given liberty.

“What will the women do then?” cry the faithless. Nobody knows, and that is one of the things that make life so hugely interesting.

“… That roar,

‘What seek you?’ is of tyrants in all days.”