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

by Marie Carmichael Stopes

Sometimes people who would otherwise like to believe that a mother has this power, are deterred by their own experience or that of others, who have, under conditions of distress and unfavourable circumstances, had children whose dispositions seem not to have suffered, but appear as sunny and happy as a child apparently conceived under more favourable circumstances. Here, however, one is immediately faced by the difficulties of accurate observation entailing a large number of data which tend to cancel out; for the mother who may personally have been below her usual standard of health and spirits while bearing the child may, nevertheless, actually be in such a good physical condition, or be a member of such a sound, healthy stock that the child’s heredity was better than that of the average human being, and consequently that the child itself was provided with a healthy well-run body.

While to contrast with it and apparently to refute my thesis, there may be a mother full of the most ardent hopes and buoyant spirit, looking forward with supreme joy to the advent of her baby, doing all she can to give it every beautiful mental impression and physical health, whose work may yet be undone by some cruel chance, such as venereal infection, or some local malformation which has resulted in weakness in, let us say, the child’s digestion. We all know how peevish mere indigestion will make anybody. Or she, the well-intentioned and outwardly well-circumstanced mother may, unknown to herself, have been battling against the cruel handicap in some racial, heritable defect in her husband; the child, therefore, may, with all her efforts, yet fail to be joyous owing to the too strong physical bias which chance or heritable disease has given it.

The existence of such apparently conflicting and contradictory individual instances in no way refutes my main thesis, which is that granted equal conditions of clean and wholesome ancestry, granted equally favourable conditions of health and nutrition for the mother during her period of carrying the child, that that child benefits and is superior to the other who has had the advantage of a happy mother’s conscious effort to transmit to it a wide and generally intellectual and spiritual interest in the great and beautiful things of the world.

This fact is often illustrated in the different children of the same parents. Of children born under as nearly identical circumstances as may be possible within a year or two of time, the one may have a totally different disposition with totally different qualities from the other. The chance of birth, the inheritance of the innumerable possible characteristics latent in both parents might be sufficient to account for this were chance alone at work, but very often information may be obtained from the observant mother which correlates her own state while carrying the child with the after condition of the child itself.

One rather striking instance of such a correlation is by a curious chance known to me, and should be of general interest. Oscar Wilde, whose genius was sullied by terrible sex crimes, which he expiated in prison, is known to all the world as a type whose distressing perversion is a racial loss. His mother once confided to an old friend that all the time she was carrying her son Oscar, she was intensely and passionately desiring a daughter, visualizing a girl, and, so far as was possible, using all the intensity of purpose which she possessed to have a girl, and that she often in after years blamed herself bitterly, because she felt that possibly his perverted proclivities were due to some influence she might have had upon him while his tiny body was being moulded.

Evidence upon this subject of the power or otherwise of the mother to influence her coming child is wanted, and it is very difficult to obtain, partly because of the reticence of those who have been through the dim and secret mysteries of motherhood, and partly because their accuracy cannot well be tested until after the child has reached maturity. In these after years the mother is likely to be swayed by the course the child’s life has taken, into unconsciously laying stress upon one or other point which may seem correlated with its after achievements.

Evidence, however, in the form of notes kept during the time the mother is carrying the child which may be compared with the child’s life in later years are very valuable, and, if any readers have such with which they would entrust me, a sufficient body of such evidence might possibly be accumulated to assist materially in the formation of a strong spiritual asset in the creation of the best possible human beings.

The father who desires to influence his child must do so through the mother: had clever men more generally realized this we should have heard less of the lament that clever men so often have stupid sons.

Of the more physical aspects of the mother’s power to influence the form of the development of her growing child we have abundant evidence. If the mother is starved, and by starved I mean less the actual starvation from want of food than the subtler starvation of improper food or food lacking in the truly vital elements, then the child visibly suffers. For instance, rickets, a disease of grave racial significance to which reference has already been made (see Chapter [II]), is due to the lack of certain necessary elements in the food.

A simple diet, the simpler the better, is sufficient adequately to provide all the essentials of nourishment for the mother and her coming child, and much indeed may be done for the general health and beauty of the child by providing the mother with the best form of material from which the embryo may build itself. The use of foods containing large quantities of vitamine (real butter and oranges, for instance, are specially good) is very advisable. They are not only enriching in their action in assisting true assimilation of other foods, but they probably tend to make good the general drain on the mother’s vitality which would naturally take place were she not amply provided with these most subtle ingredients, which, though present in such minute quantities in fresh food, are yet of incalculable value. The effect of proper and specially adapted dieting, not only on the health of the mother, but also on the beauty and general vigour of the child, is a thing which is particularly expressed by various writers who have followed up the early experiments on diet made by Dr. Trall.[5]