Thank heavens this is so, too, for the good of the race. I thought one of my colleagues expressed the whole thing very neatly in a paper given to a private psychiatric group recently. “If the feminists had been able to injure the maternal instinct of nineteenth-century woman to the same degree that they injured her sexual instinct, the Western world would by now be well on its way to being depopulated.”
No, the maternal instinct cannot be fundamentally affected by adverse circumstances. However, the proper handling of information about the maternal instinct by a mother is very important to the proper sexual development of her daughter. Misunderstandings about maternity and what it means can scare a young child badly—so badly, in fact, that fear of it can be a direct cause of later frigidity.
Here’s why the maternal instinct can cause trouble to a young girl’s developing sexuality. Most women know this, even if they have never phrased it in this manner.
To gratify the maternal instinct a woman has to put her very life right on the line. In a real sense she has to be willing to say, and to keep on saying: “I am willing and ready to die for the sake of or the safety of my child.”
I’m not only speaking of the now very slim chance that she might die in childbirth, though I should like to point out that until very recently that possibility had to be faced by every mother-to-be. And the enormously high mortality rate in childbirth throughout history and in every civilization shows very clearly that women were willing to face death to have their child. They have not changed.
What I mean more directly, however, is the fact that the maternal instinct demands of the woman in every situation an ever-readiness to put her child before herself, before her safety, before her personal needs, before everything.
Just yesterday I read of a woman who had saved two of her children from their burning home. The place had gone up like tinder and she had snatched them up, one seven and one ten, and, holding them under her arms, brought them to safety down a flaming stairway. She had thought her twelve-year-old had gotten out by himself but then discovered that he had not. She started back at once, without a moment’s hesitation, to rescue him, but the building was now on the point of collapse and she was restrained by several firemen. However, so powerful was her drive to save her child that she broke away from their grasp and entered the building.
She found him, too, on the kitchen floor, overcome by smoke, and somehow got him to the front hall and out. She was badly burned, though she will live. But the child was all right; the child was all right! That was all that mattered.
And it is all that matters to every mother, unless, of course, she is dreadfully ill mentally—psychotic, in fact.
Just think of it; this aspect of the maternal instinct is more powerful than the instinct for self-preservation, which is known to be one of the basic instincts of all life. It supersedes self-preservation, annuls it; there are no reservations about it. It will never whisper: “You’ve done all you can; three powerful men are holding you down and you can’t get to him anyway.” It will fight powerfully and to the very end for the mother’s right her indomitable need, to save her child.