CHAPTER VII

EUGENICS AND THE MODERN FEMINIST MOVEMENT

Eugenics is not essentially concerned with the right to vote nor is Eugenics specially interested in such abstract questions as the relative voting qualifications of the sexes. If these things really weighed at all Eugenics would naturally favour fitness instead of sex as the qualification for electoral enfranchisement. At present Eugenics views the feminist movement from the point of view of political power as a means to national efficiency. This standpoint is the more natural because there is every reason to believe that while the objective of the feminist is nominally Votes for Women it is actually an assertion of woman's all-round equality with men. I believe it will be a perilous enterprise, fraught with grave danger to the State if women successfully organise as a sex-party, prepared to study every question from the special interests or supposed interests of women. However much this definite policy may be repudiated it is a genuine danger, to which a prolonged suffrage agitation is bound, ostensibly or unintentionally, to contribute. It is to the interest of all who do not take a sex-party view of citizenship to abbreviate this struggle. It seems illogical, unnatural and undesirable that there should be a sex-basis of citizenship rights. All deprecation of anything even remotely approaching a sex-war is an argument for the acknowledgment of Women's claim to electoral equality with men. It is incredible that the mere extension of the franchise can create a revolution; a revolution is historically rather to be expected from refusing the suffrage to a class containing intelligent, capable law-abiding adults.

Let us not deceive ourselves, however, as to the real meaning of the claim for women's electoral emancipation. Whether that demand is granted or not the moral and intellectual driving-force of the agitation comes from a genuine reforming spirit, which will succeed with or without the vote in elevating woman to a position more worthy of civilisation than she has hitherto occupied. So much is certain to those who recognise in Mrs. Chapman Catt, Dr. Anna Shaw and the English Suffragettes the inspiration of Mary Woolstonecraft, the radical pioneer who first said "Woman must be free." A conspiracy of men to hinder women's emancipation might provoke a sex-war, the granting of such freedom as women claim can only end in mutual honour. Women will learn to realise and respect the differences between men and women when those differences do not wear the unmistakable taint of inequalities. The Eugenists' hope is for a peaceful solution, for the peace of the home is the hope of the child. The child is apt to be forgotten when men and women quarrel.

There are undoubtedly many property questions mixed up with the electoral claim, and the former have a genuine Eugenic side to them. It is not in the interests of the race that mothers should be in any doubt as to their immunity from financial worry during child-birth pains, or that they should have to consider any merely sordid question in deciding whether or not a perfectly healthy mother should increase the nation's stock of perfectly fit citizens. The position of a wealthy man's wife in the present day is often an anomalous one. Where the husband was rich at the time of his wedding, marriage-contracts usually protect the wife's interests to some extent. In the much commoner cases of gradually increasing wealth, of wealth coming unexpectedly or as the result of years of protected operations, the wife depends absolutely on her husband's good will. Often enough her exertions have helped to find this fortune. Her influence on his life is frequently an indispensable asset. Her care of the children she has borne give her a sentimental claim which justice cannot ignore. It is intolerable that husbands becoming rich men should be entitled to speculate and gamble with the whole of what should be considered the joint capital of the family, without obtaining the consent of the actual working partner. He should be at liberty neither to "deal" unauthorisedly with what might be considered the family's share of his fortune, nor to alienate by testamentary legacy anything beyond a fair proportion away from those who have the first claim upon his goods. In order to defraud his creditors or for less criminal reasons a man has often used his wife as a convenient banker. It will be easier to check this species of cheating when the wife herself becomes a creditor.

In the poorest circles where man and woman are equally destitute of worldly wealth this woman's property question is too inseparably mixed with the whole economic problem to be stated solely in terms of Eugenics. Eugenics does not profess to point out the lines on which the problem of poverty is to be solved. Eugenics only says that certain conditions (inconsistent with destitution) have to be observed if we want the race to improve and to save the nation from absolute decay. It is up to our politicians to find the means by which these conditions can be observed. A nation converted to the gospel of Eugenics will not boggle at providing the means for saving itself.

Middle-class women have a genuine grievance which is becoming articulate. The women-workers claim equal wages for equal work, and married women claim wages for the work they perform as housekeepers, nurses or cooks, or all three. If there is anything at all in the idea of attracting the best workers by high wages the women will win. It will be a misfortune to Eugenics if for any monetary reason the best women are attracted to commercial careers rather than to domestic duties, but women-workers will succeed by combination while wives will win only if legislation favours them. Legislation must and will be forthcoming to prevent the comparative attractiveness of motherhood from sinking still lower in the scale than at present.

The most important question which many suffragists are preparing to face is to whom shall women look for their support. There is of course for the daughters of the rich an inheritance which places them above the vulgar struggle which ninety per cent. of our women have to face. For this great majority the alternatives to State-maintenance are generally speaking marriage or the labour-market. There is much to be said for the State-provision of maintenance for motherhood, which is elsewhere referred to. The principle is neither new nor revolutionary. Most States make some provision of the kind, and this State-provision is often excellent in efficiency but frequently quite demoralising in the restrictions with which it is hedged. Obviously with no Eugenic inspiration State-helps of the kind can never be anything but a stop-gap which self-respecting women will not seek voluntarily and which will always be given grudgingly. Its conditions will no longer degrade but will tend towards race improvement by encouraging the fit and warning the weak and diseased. For this double purpose the State will employ ladies to visit poor mothers so as to make sure that at least no mother shall want for food, shelter and the best medical attention, while she is assisting in what will be universally regarded as the highest and best interests of the nation. If State-subventions of this kind are beset with restrictions, what are we to say to "charitable" enterprises. Some few are ideal institutions, the vast majority are only justifying their existence by doing badly what would be otherwise left undone. Some exist merely because medical students must have some experience of maternity cases, sometimes the accommodation for mothers is so scanty compared with the number of students that many score of students attend a single mother, whose experience in such a case is not an enviable one.

Neither charity nor the present limited State-aid touch the larger question. It would almost seem as if the State and the charities had a grudge against motherhood. It is as if some monstrous misunderstanding of Malthusianism had led these authorities to believe that the interests of the race demanded the accentuation of the primal course. "In sorrow," indeed, do the poor "bring forth children." There is a prejudice too against the noblest emotions of motherhood. Cases are common where the relieving authorities, public or voluntary, faced with the absolute inability of a parent to contribute towards a child's keep, undertake the child's care under conditions which exclude the parents' continued interest in the child's welfare. A mother unexpectedly widowed is "relieved" of her four young children who are sent sometimes to different orphanages, often at a distance from the mother who loves them and who would be their very best guardian. She has to find work amongst strangers to support herself, while losing money every "visiting day" if she can anyway get to see her children, whose aggregate keep costs actually more than would comfortably maintain them and their mother under ideal conditions. It is this almost fiendish masculine administration of the maternal functions of the public authorities which women most vehemently protest against. There seems no remedy for it except a recognition that a man cannot be a mother, not even a step-mother.

Apart from the maternal side of woman's life there is her individual life to consider, and while this is of enormous importance to herself its chief interest to Eugenists (as such) is that only out of healthy and happy conditions of womanhood can a noble motherhood be expected to grow. Slave-mothers are apt to breed slave-children, and still worse for the race slave-women are disinclined to become mothers. It is of course unfair to see no distinction between slavery which professes no fine sentiment towards its chattel objects, and the refined system which places woman on a pedestal and worships her but denies her the elementary rights of citizenship. The Eugenist ideal of marriage is the union of equality, two citizens joining together in love and wisdom and with such sanction of the State and the Church as may be, with resultant harmony of life and its fruit in an increase of the truest wealth any State can possess, namely well-conceived, well-formed, and well-matured men and women.

In the Eugenist State there will be a determined enmity to the increased generations of the criminal, the weak-minded and the diseased. But if reform is forced on women by men, instead of being the spontaneous decision of a genuine democracy, the grossest tyranny will be perpetuated (however wise its object, humane its methods and Eugenic its result). A benevolent despotism might be endured in its disposition of the issues of war, the production of wealth, or the distribution of honours, nothing but the sovereign will of the people can be tolerated in the Eugenic field, and here if nowhere else woman being essentially concerned must have an equal voice with man. Where women cannot be convinced that Eugenic reform is in the interests of the race we must trust to personal persuasion, individual example and such public opinion as we are capable of influencing. The powers of the State must not be invoked in the face of popular protest, it will be to the interests of Eugenists that such protest shall be able to express itself in the ballot-box instead of by surreptitious evasion or mob-law.

The double standard in morals must go. Whatever our standard may be it must be colour-blind as regards sex. The modern feminist movement is in harmony with Eugenic science, in insisting on this point being made clear. For ages past masculine hypocrisy has been able to exact from the opposite sex a crushing worship of Mrs. Grundy, by the simple expedient of ruling men out of the conventions they dictated to women.

The time has come for a candid reconsideration of moral problems on the basis of sex-equality. It may be that some fine sentiments will vanish, perhaps women will descend from the dizzy height where they are supposed to dwell. Truth at least will gain, pretence will give place to reality and we shall be capable of postulating a new and better morality based on the essential facts of life. To the consideration of the best possible life for men and women must be added the Eugenic claims of the race. We live and die but the race continues, heirs of our perfection, inheritors of our defects. We pass, but we must think of those to whom this heritage passes. The strong woman mated to the strong man is proud of a posterity which will do them honour. The woman-movement aims at removing the obstacles to this endeavour. The tragedy of the woman's life is when either her own or her husband's unfitness to bear anything but a tainted stock is disregarded by law, custom and the brutality of lustful bestiality. She who might be, as she desires to be, the guardian of the nation's truest interests, is overpowered and compelled to be the medium of national pollution. This knowledge strengthens the women's agitation; the determination to end such a shameful degradation makes the women's movement irresistible.