Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future

by Marie Carmichael Stopes

Nevertheless, to allow a young girl or woman to enter upon these months of trial without making clear to her what she has to face, is cruel indeed. For a sensitive woman the experience, even at its best, and when most free from incapacities, is yet incredibly and penetratingly more terrible than she anticipated. The more sensitive and more conscious she is, the deeper and profounder may be her joy in her coming motherhood, but, at the same time, the more intense the physical experiences through which she must pass.

The modern sensitive young woman does not take things blindly and patiently and with resignation, with a pious belief in her own inferiority, which may have helped to dull and moderate the sensations of her grandmothers. The more evolved she is, the more she may be willing to bow to natural law, but the less is she content to suffer wanton cruelties imposed upon her by ignorance, stupidity or coercion.

Many are the midwives, maternity nurses and medical practitioners with whom I have discussed such matters, and from whom, often incognito, I have asked advice. I may say that none gave all the necessary advice, not one gave one-tenth of what is in this book, only one or two gave any necessary simple advice in the sympathetic and understanding fashion desirable, and only one or two appeared to have any clear generalizations or scientific understanding of the facts about which I asked. The resignation, the shrugging of the shoulders in the face of things which would otherwise make one weep, or the cheerful braving out or pretending that things are not as bad as they are, which is the general attitude of mind of the maternity nurse is little more helpful than that of the practitioner. Concerning many of the practical facts of the later months of pregnancy and actual birth, and the succeeding weeks of recovery, the properly trained midwife seems on the whole wiser than the average general practitioner, wiser even than the specialist who may come at a crisis, but who does not watch his patient through the succeeding weeks.

Many young women who have recently been mothers have told me of the mental and physical horror which they then experienced, and of the added horror that they should feel horror. They have asked me to generalize, if it is possible, from their cases in such a way as to help others who enter upon maternity’s difficulties for the first time, so that they may at least be spared that terrible sense of isolation and of exceptional failure when they experience one by one the things which are inevitable, or the things which are, by our artificial lives, so frequently imposed.

The bearing of a child very often may be complicated by actual disease, and then requires, of course, expert medical attention. With those who are in any sense actually ill, and who should be in the hands of a doctor, I am not here dealing, for, in this respect, as throughout my other books, I desire only to write of health for the healthy so that they may have sufficient knowledge to maintain their health and raise the vitality of the race.

I may say here that, even for the healthiest, it is very advisable, not only for her first, but for every succeeding pregnancy, that a woman should be examined and measured by some wise and healthy-minded medical practitioner or midwife at least once during the first three months and twice again during the last three months, but that, for the first baby, it would be better to go at least every month for examination. In that way, the various insidious disturbances of the excretory system, and other fundamental things which may go a little wrong, even in an otherwise healthy woman, can be detected immediately and dealt with. Many however, find a great difficulty in bringing themselves to do this.

Undoubtedly it is much better for the prospective mother to go to a specialist, old enough to be wise and experienced and mellow, and yet young and virile and active enough to be acquainted with modern knowledge, and healthy and clean enough to look for and to desire health and normality in those who come for advice.

This should pre-eminently be the special field for women doctors, but there is not nearly a sufficient body of them with the necessary qualifications to meet the requirements of the community, and I should like to see a new profession created for women who, to the experience and the training of first-class midwives, have added a sufficient training in general medicine to be specialized to advise the healthy prospective mother, and to be able to detect at once anything which should necessitate handing her on to the doctor of disease. Such practitioners should rank in status somewhere between the cultivated midwife of gentle birth (such as a Queen Charlotte’s Hospital nurse) and the medical woman. Thus the prospective mother would be spared that hard and bitter contact with one who has become myopic in the observation of disease, and would be able to go to someone specially trained to encourage health. Meanwhile, as this is but a bright picture of what may come in the future (and that will come if women make a sufficient demand for it) it may spare many women distress if I set out the physical difficulties and peculiarities which are most liable to occur with a healthy woman.

From the welter of accounts of the effects of pregnancy, I have disentangled into three groups those which normal women may have to face. The difficulties are:—

(1) Those nature-imposed; these are essential; they cannot be avoided by the healthiest woman. They can be perhaps, to some extent, mitigated. They are things which the coming mother must be helped through and over; she cannot be saved from them.