Some well-meaning radical writers mistakenly suppose that the emancipation of women means the withdrawal by the group of any interest in, or any attempt to regulate, such things as the hours and conditions of female labour. That would simply imply that the group takes no interest in reproduction—in its own survival. For if the group does not make some equation for the greater burden of reproduction upon women, the inevitable result will be that that particular service will not be rendered by those most desirable to be preserved.
Given the fundamental assumption that the group is to survive—to be perpetuated by the one possible means—if it withdraws all solicitude about the handicap this entails to women as a whole, introducing a spirit of laissez-faire competition between men and women, the women with sense enough to see the point will not encumber themselves with children. For each one of these who has no children, some other woman must have six instead of three. And some people encourage this in the name of democracy!
The most involved problems must inevitably centre around the women who, to quote Mrs. Hollingworth, "vary from the mode," but are yet functional for sex. Some have no sex desires at all, some no craving for or attachment to children, some neither of these. It is a question still to be solved whether some of them ought, in the interest of the race, to be encouraged to reproduce themselves. In less individualized primitive society, seclusion, taboo and ignorance coerced them into reproduction. Any type of control involving the inculcation of "moral" ideas is open to the objection that it may work on those who should not reproduce themselves as well as those who should.
In a sense, this problem will tend to solve itself. With the substitution of the more rationalized standards of self-interest and group loyalty for the irrational taboo control of reproductive activities, there will be as much freedom for women to choose whether they will accept maternity as there is now, in the period of transition from the old standards to the new. The chief difference will be that many of the artificial forces which are acting as barriers to motherhood at the present time—as for example the economic handicap involved—will be removed, and woman's choice will therefore be more entirely in harmony with her native instinctive tendencies. Thus those women endowed with the most impelling desire for children will, as a rule, have the largest number. In all probability their offspring will inherit the same strong parental instinct. The stocks more poorly endowed with this impulse will tend to die out by the very lack of any tendency to self-perpetuation. It is only logical to conclude, therefore, that as we set up the new forces of social control outlined in this chapter, we are at the same time providing more scope for natural selection, and that the problem of aberrant types consequently becomes only a transitory one.