Even among the women of the people gestation and childbirth, being, as they are, painful, are also objects of the liveliest repugnance and of protestations of every kind. I have never seen a woman of the people who did not complain at being pregnant and who would not have preferred any other malady. Ah! Nous ne faisons pas, nous recevons—“We women have no voice in the matter,” said one of them to me—“if but we had!” She epitomized in a word the physiological and psychological position of the poor woman. Those who have not had children, far from complaining of it, congratulate themselves, and in any event they rarely desire more than one.
Large families among the poor traceable to ignorance.
In Picardy and in Normandy, as M. Baudrillart remarks, a woman who has many children is made the butt of raillery. And if other provinces are less sterile, it is owing to religion or to ignorance. The women have not yet become acquainted with Malthus. They know of but one remedy against an evil that they fear—to keep out of the way of their husbands. The wife of such and such a labouring man prefers a beating to the risk of having another child: but as she is the weaker she often succeeds in bringing upon herself both the beating and the child. Fear of pregnancy is more often than is commonly believed the cause of dissension in poor households, and for that matter in rich households also. The instant a woman reasons, instead of submitting to the law, she inevitably feels the disproportion that exists, for her, between the pleasures of love and the pains of maternity. She must be supplied with a new conception of duty, and that not simply in the way of a religious obligation which the husband can ridicule but of a moral obligation.
Girls should be educated for maternity.
Catholic education, as we have already remarked, does great harm in rearing young girls in a false modesty, in never speaking to them of the duties of marriage for fear of awakening their imagination in the direction of their future husband. The actual result is precisely the opposite of the calculated result. Young girls see nothing in marriage but the future husband and unknown pleasures. They never think of any matter of painful duty which they must accept in advance; they do not consider children as a question of duty but of necessity simply, they are actuated by but one ambition, that of diverting themselves. Girls should be educated and prepared for motherhood; our present education is adapted to the formation of nuns or old maids, sometimes of courtesans, for we neglect early to inspire woman with a feeling of duty for her proper function, which constitutes also a large portion of all that is moral in her life—the duty of maternity. Happily, married women cannot remain sterile simply by wishing it, their husbands must become their accomplices; it is their husbands, who, in the last resort, are responsible. If the husband, out of complaisance to his wife or to his wife’s relatives, undertakes to be a Malthusian malgré lui, he plays almost as ridiculous a rôle as that of Georges Dandin: the man who permits himself to be dictated to in the matter of not having children is almost as complaisant as the man who acknowledges the children of other people.
Paternal love tends to restrict the number of children.
Another cause which explains the low birth-rate in France is that paternal and maternal love is more tender and more exclusive there than in other countries. The French family, whatever may be said to the contrary, is much more closely united than the English or German family: in it a sort of fraternity obtains between parents and children. Members of a family separate with regret, and the ideal of the father is to have so few children that he may always keep them by him. We are too refined, too far advanced from a state of nature, to submit without suffering to the rupture which puberty naturally brings about in the animal family, to the flight of the young bird whose wings are grown; we have not the courage to accept the dismemberment of the household, far less to wish it as a necessity and, on the whole, a good thing. This affection has of course its egoistic side, and it is on that side that it results in sterility. Parents rear children less for the children’s sake than for their own.
Two legal remedies.
Having thus passed in review the principal causes which restrict the number of children in French families let us consider what influence law and morals might exert in counteracting them. Legal reforms should be directed especially toward the two following points: 1. Reform of the law relating to filial duties (maintenance of parents); 2. Reform of the law of inheritance; 3. Reform of the military law, so as to favour numerous families and permit emigration to the French colonies.