I am deliberately trying to undermine the plea for the endowment of motherhood, because the proposal seems to me to present very grave difficulties which even so penetrating a sociologist as Mr. H. G. Wells has, apparently, not appreciated. Mr. Wells is, of course, in a very different position from the Feminist writers who advocate the complete endowment or maintenance of wives or mothers by the State. Such a scheme would cost about £300,000,000 a year, and need not be discussed. Mr. Wells suggests rather a modest contribution per child born (leaving out, I assume, wealthier mothers); a practicable scheme, with much in its favour. Yet it seems to me that such endowment would mean that we would encourage the weakest in will, the most sensual, the least intelligent and least provident of our people, to breed. Intelligent women would not abandon the practice of restricting births because the State offered them a few shillings per child. The better class—whether of manual or professional workers—would have to pay for the undesirable fertility of the worst class. We are just beginning to realise that quality of children is more precious than quantity, and the endowment of motherhood would not encourage this saner view. The kind of brute who is at present restrained by the paternity-law would be restrained no longer: the rougher type of husband—a very numerous type—would pay so much less to his wife when he found the State contributing (either in cash or kind) to her: the man who at present practises restriction, not out of consideration for his wife and family, but to have more shillings for himself, would cease to practise it, and lay a greater burden on his wife.
But, while there seem to be such grave objections to the endowment of motherhood that we do better to strengthen women in their individual demand of justice, we must remember that the wife will have the advantage of other changes in the home. Domestic service is becoming more and more repugnant to girls, and some form of co-operative and efficient housekeeping, with common servants and restaurant, will be adopted. Some day a photograph of a twentieth-century suburb will provoke a smile. Perhaps the museum of the future will set up models of our establishments, just as we set up in our ethnographical galleries models of a Kaffir or a Papuan household. Boys and girls will gaze with admiring delight at the naïveté of the model: a thousand brick boxes, separated by a thousand little gardens, with three thousand little chimneys smoking, a thousand amateur cooks perspiring over a thousand fires, and a thousand inefficient servant-girls flirting with the servants of rival butchers and dairymen. The common nursery will especially relieve the mother and lower the death-rate. The State will one day have an interest in seeing that each babe ushered into the world, at such pain and sacrifice, becomes a useful citizen. If any mothers care to entrust the child more fully to it, the State will find it profitable to respond. These things can be arranged without more detriment to parental affection than there is in the case of women—often women who write beautiful things in defence of the old tradition—who have nurses for the child and send it later to a distant school for the greater part of the year.
Reforms of this kind will enormously relieve the home life and enable even mothers to earn, if they wish, quite as much as the State would ever be able to award them. The work will be better done, by trained workers, at less cost. People do not reflect that this change has been proceeding for centuries. Once the wife brewed the ale, and baked the bread, and spun the linen: later she entrusted these things to experts working for the community, and reserved for herself the making of preserves, pickles, underclothing, and antimacassars: now these things have gone to the expert, and the wife confines her amateur efforts to scolding children and cooking refractory joints. She will be relieved when it is all over, and we shall have no more of the “beautiful doll” or the domestic drudge. The independent position and greater leisure and broader interest in life will make her intellectual activity more similar to that of man’s.
I speak, of course, of the mass of women, and do not forget that already the intellect of alert and thoughtful women is equal to that of men of the corresponding class. The majority will be, as it were, differently orientated toward life by these changes. A saner muscular activity will restore the balance of the system, and will rid them of the excessive nerve-energy, particularly of the sympathetic system, which finds expression in facile and explosive emotion. There will assuredly always be a bias toward sentiment in woman, and we have no reason to fear a deterioration of the distinctively feminine sentiments of tenderness, refinement, and sympathy. The relief from the more irritating domesticities ought to accentuate them. On the other hand, the idea of obeying the male or practising self-sacrifice for his undue benefit, will certainly disappear; and it is quite time that it did. Self-sacrifice, in case of need, comes instinctively to either sex, but the kind of self-sacrifice which a selfish masculine tradition has pressed on women is degrading to the man and unjust to wife and daughter. All that is attractive and really beneficent in woman will be fostered, but on the emotional side it will become less and less characteristic of one sex. The sharp contrast of the sexes tends to disappear. There is something grotesque about the traditional idea that the human male must be distinguished by a greater capacity for taking alcohol and using meaningless expletives and telling sexual stories. Even in physical strength and athletic skill the sexes are approaching; nor does one find any loss of charm or grace in some of the finest women athletes.
These changes are proceeding, and, apart from inevitable errors and excesses, on which caricaturists fasten with their genial unscrupulousness, the result is promising. Contemporary expressions of alarm are often ludicrous. Thousands of ladies who are horrified at the emergence of “a new sex” are themselves contriving, by means which would have caused their prolific grandmothers to raise white hands to heaven, to limit their families to two children. We take our reform in small doses, as if complete social health were a thing to be considered very seriously. Yet if one patiently traces in imagination the effect of all these changes on the womanhood of the race, one foresees a generation of women which recalls Shelley’s lines:
“And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms, From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure; Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, Looking emotions once they feared to feel, And changed to all which once they dared not be, Yet, being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride, Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill-shame, The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall, Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.”
Grant the poet his licence; women are not more likely than men to become angels. The moral superiority which some Feminist writers claim for their sex is founded on a curiously narrow view of life; if man, instead of woman, had to pay the penalty of sexual intercourse, we should probably find the aggression on the other side. Yet the most sober-minded of us must expect from this healthier balance of powers, this easing of the domestic burden, this limitation of care to a few children, and this independence of marital generosity or marital selfishness, a great advancement in the character and happiness of woman.
Shelley, however, was thinking less of wives than of free women, and economic independence will swell their numbers. The changes I have described will make marriage far less onerous, but they will also make it easier for a woman to dispense with marriage, and before the end of the twentieth century there will be in every city a growth of temporary unions and independent conduct. Woman will be mistress, morally and economically, of her own destiny; she will consult neither husband nor priest. The plain moral law, which forbids a man to inflict pain or injustice, will be more faithfully observed than it ever was before. There will be an immense reduction of the hypocrisy, the prostitution, the misery and illness, which this fictitious law of chastity has always caused; and the alteration of public opinion will remove from a woman the unpleasant consequences which unwedded love entails at the present time. It is preposterous to say that the State will be injured by these changes, and it seems clear that woman will be happier, more healthily developed, and not less tender and graceful than she can be under the present reign of shams.
CHAPTER VIII.
SHAMS OF THE SCHOOL
The constructive scheme which I have in mind throughout this criticism of our prejudices and institutions may, as I said, be summed essentially in two words: industrial organisation and education. When we have reformed our administrative machinery, which we miscall “government,” and abandoned our military and naval atrocities, and simplified international life, our chosen public servants will find that these two are their chief concerns. Probably the supreme concern will—once we have constructed an orderly industrial machinery—be education, in the sense which I would attach to the word. Every year a million new citizens will join the community, and it will be the State’s first business to see that they are thoroughly prepared in every respect to contribute to its weal and happiness, and that they maintain throughout life sufficient intellectual alertness to control their common concerns with wisdom and in a progressive spirit. It is as a necessary preliminary to this that I have dealt critically and reconstructively with the home and the parent.