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

by Marie Carmichael Stopes

Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination or joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.

Tagore: Gitanjali.

One of the great sources of disharmony in our social life is the extent of the extraordinary ignorance about ourselves which still persists. From this spring our conflicting opinions and diametrically opposed views, and also the apparently self-contradictory evidence on almost any point of fundamental importance which is brought before the public.

In no respect is there more conflict of opinion than concerning the age at which a woman should marry and become a mother. On the one hand, we have advocates of very early motherhood, and they point to the fact that a girl of seventeen is often already a woman and strongly sexed; they point to the hackneyed statement “that a girl matures sooner than a boy”; they point to the fine and healthy babies which very young mothers may bear and to the greater pliability and ease of birth, and these facts and their arguments may appear conclusive. On the other hand, the actual experience of many people conflicts with these apparently justified conclusions.

All the highly evolved races tend to prolong childhood and youth. All tend to replace early marriage by later marriage and parenthood to the obvious advantage of the race.

Marriage and parenthood at fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, which once were common in almost every country, are being replaced by later marriage and parenthood. As Finot 1913 says:—

A mystic chain appears to attach the age for love to the consideration enjoyed by women. In the Far East, woman is offered very young to the passion of man, and disappears from existence at the time her contemporaries are just beginning to live. Love, for this very reason, has a purely sensual stamp, degrading to man and to woman. The lengthening of the age of love elevates the dignity, and at the same time increases the longevity, of woman. Beyond the age of thirty or forty the woman, dead to love, was fit only for religion or witchcraft. Her life was shattered. Prematurely aged she went out of the living world. The prolonged summer of Saint-Martin in women will doubtless have consequences which we should be wrong to fear. There is a solidarity of ages. The cares bestowed on the child benefit the old man. The enlargement of the age of maturity allows the child longer to enjoy the years of life that are intended to form bodies and souls.... The sentimental life of the country has undergone similar results. Balzac, in proclaiming the right to love on the part of the woman of thirty, aroused in his contemporaries astonishment bordering on indignation. In his day, was not a man of forty-four considered an old man?[6] Let us not forget that forty or fifty years before Balzac, a philosopher like Charles Fourier, despairing of the sentimental fate of young girls who had not found a husband before the age of ... eighteen years, claimed for them the right to throw propriety to the winds. According to the author of the Théorie des Quatre-Mouvements,[7] this was almost the critical age (Problems of the Sexes, transl. Jean Finot 1913).

The relative ages of husband and wife also have their influence, but should, to some extent, depend more on their physiological age than on their actual years. They should, however, not be widely different. As Saleeby says:—

The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man’s age at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority—contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.

We, therefore, see that, as might have been expected, this question of the age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from the average point of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. First, for herself, the greater her husband’s seniority, the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of married women. But further, the existence of widowhood is a fact of great social importance because it so often means unaided motherhood, and because, even when it does not, the abominable economic position of women in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is not necessary to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked (Woman and Womanhood, 1912).