Fire and electricity and other useful forces we have long since obtained the mastery over and turned from a menace to a blessing to mankind. But another even mightier force has ravaged the world like unchained lightning. Because it has not been controlled. Men thought that it must not be. So the fear of its consequences has haunted homes in every land since the pronouncement, “I will greatly multiply thy conceptions.” All of the great religious teachers said that you must not take the misery out of maternity. It was meant to be there. And science, which had accomplished miracles in mitigating other suffering, stood afar off from the woman in childbirth. So much as an anæsthetic to deaden the pain was forbidden, until quite recent times, as an interference with the will of the Almighty. It was Queen Elizabeth of England who broke that taboo. By virtue of her royal authority, she demanded chloroform. And got it. Her daring could then, of course, be followed by other women. Newer iconoclasts are calling for twilight sleep, that achieves maternity in a dream. Add birth control. And we shall be out of the trouble in which the unhappy lady called Eve so long ago involved all of her daughters.
Birth control means, instead of a maternity that is perpetual, unregulated and haphazard and miserable, a maternity that is intelligently directed and limited. So that it shall be volitional. The rising value of a baby at last requires that people shall be as carefully produced as the shells we are making with such infinite accuracy. Most of all, it is important that there shall not be too many babies lest some of them not well done shall be only worthless and good for nothing. You see, you have to think about quality as well as quantity when you are counting for a final output. Russia, which had a birth rate of 50 per thousand, the highest birth rate in Europe, is the nation whose military defences have crumpled like paper. It was France, with a birth rate of 28 per thousand, the lowest in Europe, that held the line for civilisation at the Marne. And it was Germany, which has always imposed on its women as a national service the speeding up of population, that plunged the world into the agony of this war. Because 55% of the families of Berlin live in one-room tenements and there is nowhere to put the babies that have kept on coming, Germany reached out for the territory of her neighbours. The pressure of population too large for too narrow boundaries is as certain in its consequences as is the pressure of steam in a tea kettle with the spout stopped up. There’s sure to be an explosion. Germany exploded. Back of her military system, it is her maternity system that is responsible for the woe of the world to-day. It’s plain that the way not to have war anywhere ever again is not to have too many babies!
John Stuart Mill, the great economist who two generations ago looked into the future and saw a vision of the woman movement that would be, said: “Little advance can be expected in morality until the production of large families is regarded in the same light as drunkenness or any other physical excess.” And he added: “Among the probable consequences of the industrial and social independence of women, I predict a great diminution of the evil of overpopulation.” John Stuart Mill meant Mrs. Webber and Mrs. Smith. Two children to be enjoyed instead of ten to be endured, is an ideal of family policy possible of attainment even in the east ends and the east sides of the world. For to Mrs. Webber or to Mrs. Smith, handling her own wage envelope, no one any more may say, “I shall not give you money for shoes to-morrow unless—” Volitional motherhood is the final truth that shall make women free. No one can compel the new woman to be anything that she does not wish to be, not even to be a mother until she chooses the time.
After that curse pronounced upon Eve, there was a promise: “The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head!” “We can do it, dear.” That’s what the new woman will say triumphantly to the man who comes back to her from the Great War. Together they will take up the task of making, not only a new earth, but a new race!
And I think he will be glad for what she tells him. The wonder is, not so much that women in the past were willing to endure the “subjection of women,” but that men consented to it. A bird in a cage can of course be made to eat out of the hand of the owner who feeds it. But see the bird that is free and will come at your call!
The women in industry and commerce and the professions and in government, whom we are seeing in these years of war passing all barriers, will at last make their final stand for what? It is for happiness. Look! Even now, who has the vision to discern, may discover the gates of Eden swinging wide. And when the man in khaki, with the age-old yearning in his heart, “Woman wanted, my woman,” comes back to clasp her in his arms once more, these two everywhere shall enter in. For the ultimate programme toward which the modern woman movement to-day is moving is no less than paradise regained! It may even, I think, have been worth this war to be there.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
[Page 27]—changed l’Opera to l’Opéra