THE NEW FATHERHOOD
Sir, that’s just the point. But the liberty that was lost, is found. No one, as we have seen, is going to compel this new woman to be anything that she does not want to be. Let us not forget this now as she goes on talking. For she is coming presently to that which is at the heart of the whole woman question, nay, more, the human question.
“Dear,” she is going to say, “there is that which matters more than all the rest for us now to decide. It’s the children, the children are on my mind.” Then she is going to emphasise how important it is that parenthood shall be equalised. By the laws that men have made about it, quite universally, equally in fact in England and Germany and France and Italy and Russia and the United States, the father is the only parent. His will decides its religion, its education, and all of the conditions under which the child shall be reared. There are a few of the United States, most notably those where women vote and one or two others in which pressure has been brought to bear by the feminists, where the law has been corrected. Also in Scandinavia and in Australia, as soon as women have come into the vote, one of their first efforts has been to establish what is known as “equal guardianship,” the right of a married mother to her own child. To an unmarried mother, by a strange perversity in the statutes of men, is conceded not only all the right to the child but there is put upon her all of the responsibility of its parenthood.
The new woman is not going to rest content to have it stand that way. Already the world is being forced to a new deal for childhood. The sins of the fathers are being lifted from the children on whom society in the past has so heavily visited them. A baby has broken no law. Why brand it, then, as “illegitimate”? War babies crying in all lands have brought statesmen to startled attention. Government after government has arranged for what is called the “separation allowance” to go to the woman at home to whom the soldier at the front knows that it belongs—even though she has no marriage lines to show. So the War Office pen writes off one discrimination. Of children who used to be called “illegitimate,” 50,000 born annually in England and 180,000 born annually in Germany will now be entitled to start life with equal financial government aid that the others get.
It is the first step in the direction of the new arrangements about parenthood. The polite fiction that used to pass, that there were any children without fathers, is going to be ruled out of court. Of all the laws that have been written that evidence the difference in the point of view of men and women, see the illegitimacy laws. Napoleon put it in his code “La recherche de la paternité est interdite,” and it was only in 1913 that the feminists of France, led by Margaret Durand, succeeded in getting that edict modified so that a woman in France is no longer “forbidden” to look for the father of her child. Up in Norway, where women vote, they put on the statute books in 1915 a very different law: it commands that the father of the child shall be found. This is the famous law framed by Johan Castberg, minister of justice, and inspired by his sister-in-law, Fru Kathe Anker Moler. The draft of the bill was submitted in advance to the women’s clubs of the country: the National Women’s Council of Norway stamped it with the seal of approval. So that there can be no doubt but that it has put the matter as a woman thinketh. Even the title of the new law significantly omits all objectionable reference: it is a “Law Concerning Children whose Parents have not Married Each Other.” They are equally entitled to a father’s name and support and to an inheritance in his property as are any other kind of children. The father must be found! Not even if the paternity is a matter of doubt among three men or six men or any several men, can any of them, or all of them, escape behind “exceptio plurium,” which in other lands affords them protection. In Norway, they are every one of them a party to the possible obligation. And the financial responsibility of fathering the child in question is distributed pro rata among them. What the Norwegian law accomplishes, you see, is the abolition of anonymous paternity.
Like this, there is a great deal in the laws and the religion and the public opinion of the world of yesterday that will need revision. Lastly, there is that which is of more significance than all the rest. Way back in the beginning of things, the lady who was called Eve, you remember as the Sunday school lesson ran, got the world into a lot of trouble, it was said, by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Too little knowledge, some one else has told us, may prove a dangerous thing. But there is a Latin proverb on which a school of therapeutics is founded, “Similia similibus curantur.” Then, if “like cures like,” what we need to-day is more knowledge to make right the ancient wrong that afflicts the earth! Well, we have it.
THE WHISPER OF GOD
This new woman will look back into the dear eyes that search hers. In her level glance there will flash an understanding of life that never was in woman’s eyes before in all the ages of sorrow since the angel fixed up the flaming swords that shut her out of Eden. For in the white silence where she has found her soul, she has heard even the closest whisper of God. If man before missed it, why, maternity was naturally the matter that he could not know and could not understand. This is the new revelation, that maternity shall be made more divine! There has been a halo about it in song and picture and story. But we want to put a halo on in London’s east end and New York’s east side. Creation itself is to be corrected.
Doesn’t it need to be? See how many men, it is being discovered to-day, are not well enough made for soldiers. England is obliged to reject 25% of her men as physically unfit. America is reported to have rejected 29%. The other nations cannot show any better figures. If in the great arsenals that are manufacturing munitions of war, one shell in four turned out was spoiled, the industry would have to be at once investigated and put on a more efficient basis than that. Quite likely the mistake might be discovered to be “speeding up.” There had been an effort to turn out too many shells. If fewer shells are made, they can be better made. And you will get just as many in the end. For by the present process, all these shells that fail, you see, do not count in the real output.
It’s just like this about people. We’ve been trying to have too many. When Mrs. Smith in London or in New York or Frau Schmidt in Berlin, has six or eight or more children in, say, two rooms, some of them are going to have rickets and some of them are going to have tuberculosis and some of them are going into penal institutions. So that when you come to want them for the army, you find that one in four has failed. Why, even chickens would. A poultry fancier does not presume to try to raise a brood of chickens in quarters too crowded for their development. He measures his poultry house and determines how many chickens he can accommodate with enough air and space—and how many he can afford to feed. He limits the flock accordingly. Mrs. Smith in London or New York and Frau Schmidt in Berlin, can too!