I am now ready to consider the question of the proper age for motherhood about which an immense variety of opinion is expressed. The general tendency has been, even in the last few years, to raise the age at which a girl may marry, and to raise the age which the medical profession advises as the earliest suitable for motherhood. But still one often hears of elders, whom one would in other respects like to follow, advising the early bearing of children.
Now I should like every potential parent to consider what type of child they want. Do they want to secure healthy, jolly little animals with no more brains than are sufficient to see them creditably through life? If so, let them have their children very early. Such healthy sound people with no special gifts are valuable, and there is much work in the world for them to do. On the other hand, do they want to take the risk for their child of a possibly less robust body, but with the possibility, indeed, in healthy families, almost the certainty, of an immensely greater brain power, and a more strongly developed temperament? Then let them have their children late. And if a man desires to have a child who may become one of the master minds whose discoveries, whose artistic creations, whose ruling power stamps itself upon the memory of our race, whose name is handed down the ages, then let the father who desires such a child mate himself with the long-young late-maturing type of woman I have just described, and let her bear that child some time between the age of thirty-five and forty-five.
How often one hears some version of the phrase: “Yes, it is so sad, poor, dear Lord So-and-So, a charming man, but no brains at all; his younger brother such a brilliant man; but that is always the way, the eldest sons in the aristocracy do seem to get the gift of property balanced by the lack of brains.” Now I enquire, and I should like my readers to enquire, into the secret of this phenomenon, which is by no means universal, but is sufficiently common to be endorsed. In my opinion, the interpretation of this fact is that the earlier children were born when the mother was still too young to endow them with brains, particularly if the mother was one of the gifted and cultivated women of the late-maturing type.
This also leads me to consider another generality which is frequently used as an argument by those who oppose conscious and deliberate parenthood. Some people say that by the direct control of the size of the family to a small limited number which the parents definitely desire, we would be eliminating genius from our midst, and their argument runs: Look at Nelson, he was a fifth son; look at Sir Walter Scott, he was a third son; and so on. This to the uncritical seems conclusive, and many people of great capacity, ideals and heart, who otherwise would be wholly on my side in my claim that every child born shall be deliberately desired, and that all other conceptions shall be consciously prevented, are swayed by this argument and say: “Yes, your position would be obviously the right one for the race if it were not that later children are so often the better.” I turn, therefore, to a consideration of the life histories of these men’s mothers. Why was Nelson the genius of his family? Because his mother was too young to bear geniuses at the time she was bearing her elder children. But this is not yet a sufficiently accurate consideration of the subject; I want to know also of which type the mother was, for, in my opinion, the right age for the parenthood of a woman depends also on the type to which she belongs, whether the early maturing or the late maturing. If she knows herself to be the latter, after it is patent, as it must become patent to every one once the idea is placed before them, that such women are in our midst, then that woman and her husband should usually defer parenthood until she has reached at least thirty years of age. If this were done, then not the fourth, fifth or seventh but the first child would stand a very great chance of being a world leader, a powerful mind, perhaps even a genius. First children have been geniuses (Sir Isaac Newton was an only child); all depends on the age, the conscious desire, the general type and the surrounding conditions during prenatal state of her infant, of the mother who bears him and the father from whom he also inherits potentialities.
A few investigations bearing on the effect of the parent’s age have been published by the Eugenics Society and some individuals, but none of these appear to me to be of any value, for none take into account the necessary data concerning the type of the mother which I here point out, and in all the calculations crude errors occur.
The best woman, with comparatively few exceptions, is already and will still more in the future be the woman who, out of a long, healthy and vitally active life, is called upon to spend but a comparatively small proportion of her years in an exclusive subservience to motherhood. A woman should have eighty to ninety active years of life; if she bears three or perhaps four children, she will, even if she gives up all her normal activities during the later months of pregnancy and the earlier of nursing, still have cut out of her life but a very small proportion of its total. She should, indeed, after she once is a mother, always devote a proportion of her energies to the necessary supervision of her children’s growth and education, but with the increasing number of schools and specialists, nurses, teachers and instructors of all sorts, the individual mother has much less of the purely physical labour of her children than formerly. That this is not only so, but is approved by the State can be seen at once by imagining a working class mother insisting on keeping her child at home all day under her personal supervision—the School Inspector would step in and take the child from her for a certain number of hours every day. But this book is primarily for middle and upper class women, and for them motherhood increasingly should mean a widening of their interests and occupations.
The counter-idea still expressed, even by leading doctors and others, is that the whole capability of the individual mother should be devoted solely to contributing to her children. This is exemplified in the recent statement of Blair Bell: “A normal woman, therefore, would not exploit her capabilities for individual gain, but for the benefit of her descendants.” This view is a false one and is based on a narrow vision.
This pictures an endless chain of fruitless lives all looking ever to some supreme future consummation which never materializes. By means of this perpetual sinking of woman’s personality in a mistaken interpretation of her duty to the race, every generation is sacrificed in turn. The result has not been productive of good, happiness or beauty for the majority. No; the individual woman, normal or better than the average, should use her intellect for her individual gain in creative work; not only because of its value to the age and community in which she lives, but also for the inheritance she may thus give her children and so that when her children are grown up they may find in their mother not only the kind attendant of their youth, but their equal in achievement. With a woman of capacities perhaps still exceptional, but by no means so rare as some men writers would like to pretend, the pursuit of her work or profession and honourable achievement in it is not at all incompatible with but is highly beneficial to her motherhood. As Charlotte Gilman says:—