Chapter 14

CONCLUSION

The plan of this book has now been satisfied. The reader may be very far from satisfied, but not, it is to be hoped, on the ground that many subjects have been omitted which might quite well have been included under the title of Woman and Womanhood. It was better to confine our search to principles.

For it seems evident that civilization is at the parting of the ways in these fundamental matters. The invention of aeroplanes and submarine and wireless telegraphy and the like is of no more moment than the fly on the chariot wheel, compared with the vital reconstructions which are now proceeding or imminent. The business of the thoughtful at this juncture is to determine principles, for principles there are in these matters, if they can be discovered, as certain, as all-important as those on which any other kind of science proceeds. Just as the physicist must hold hard by his principles of motion and thermodynamics and radiation and the like, so the sociologist must hold hard by the organic principles which determine the life and continuance of living things. Unless we base our projects for mankind upon the laws of life, they will come to naught, as such projects have come to naught not once but a thousand times in the past.

None will dare dispute these assertions, yet what do we see at the present time? On what grounds is the woman question fought, and by what kind of disputants? It is fought, as everyone knows, on the grounds of what women want, or rather, what a particular section of half-instructed women, in some particular time and place, think they want,--or do not want--under the influence of suggestion, imitation and the other influences which determine public opinion. It is fought on the grounds of precedent: women are not to have votes in England because women have never had votes in England, or they are to have votes in England because they have them in New Zealand. It is fought on party political grounds, none the less potent because they are not honestly acknowledged: the Liberal and the Conservative parties favour or disfavour this or that Suffrage Bill, or whatever it may be, according to what they expect to be its effect upon their voting strength. It is fought upon financial grounds, as when we see the entire force of the alcoholic party arrayed against the claims of women, as in the nature of things it always has been and always will be. It is fought on theological grounds by clerics who quote the first chapter of Genesis; and on anti-theological grounds by half-instructed rationalists who attack marriage because they suppose it was invented by the Church.

And whose voices never fail among the disputants? Loudest of all are those of youth of both sexes, who know nothing and want to know nothing and who have no idea that there is anything to know in attempting to decide such questions as this. It is argued in the House of Gramophones and such places, by common politicians of the type the many-headed choose, who would do better to confine themselves to the soiled questions of tariffs and the like, in which they find a native joy. It is argued by vast numbers of men who hate or fear women, and women who hate or fear men, as if any imaginable wisdom on this question or any other could possibly be born of such emotions.

Yet all the while we are dealing with a problem in biology, with living beings, obeying and determined by the laws of life, and with a species exhibiting those fundamental facts of heredity, variation, bi-parental reproduction, sexual selection, instinct and the like, which are mere meaningless names to nine out of ten of the disputants, and yet which determine them and their disputes and the issues thereof.

If these contentions be correct, there is plainly much need for an attempt, however imperfect, to set forth the first principles of woman and womanhood. Evidently the time for discussion of detailed questions has not yet come, since, to take a single instance, there is not yet to be heard on either side of the controversy a single voice asserting the fundamental eugenic necessity that, at whatever cost, the best women must be selected for motherhood, and the contribution of their superiority to the future stock.

Let us briefly sum up the substance of the foregoing pages.

First, we have stated the eugenic postulate, failing to grant which we and our schemes, our votes and our hopes, will assuredly disappear or decay, as must all living races which are not recruited from their best, Secondly, we have proceeded to analyze the nature of womanhood, its capacities and conditions, assuming that we can scarcely discover whither it should go unless we know what it is. To the party politician, hungry for the prizes that suit his soul or stomach, such an assumption is mere foolish pedantry; and the ardent suffragist will have little more to say to it. That, however, cannot be helped. It is to be hoped that all parties, _as parties_, will unite in banning the views herein expressed, and then one may take heart of grace and dare to hope that there is something in them.

They may be crystallized in the dictum that woman is Nature's supreme organ of the future. This is not a theory, but a statement of evident truth. It is an essential canon of what one might call the philosophy of biology, and applies to the female sex throughout living nature. Birth is of the female alone. No sub-human male, nor even man himself, can directly achieve the future; the greatest statesman or law-giver or founder of nations can only work, if he knew it, through womanhood. The greatest of these, and their name is very far from legion, was evidently Moses, as history shows, and he acted on this principle. On the other hand, those who have sought to achieve the future, as Napoleon did, failed because they defiled and flouted womanhood. The best men died on the battlefield and the worst were left to aid the women in that supreme work of parenthood by which alone, and only through the co-operation of men and women, the future is made.

Thirdly, we have seen it to follow from this dedication of the greater and vastly more valuable part of woman's energies to the future that, just in proportion as she serves it and devotes herself thereto, she needs present support. Biology teaches us that the male sex was invented for this purpose; doubtless one should say for this "increasing purpose," since it is scarcely more than foreshadowed at first in the history of the male sex. The study of life has clearly proved that the male sex is secondary and adjuvant, and that its essentially auxiliary functions for the race have been increasing from the beginning until we find them in perfection wherever two parents join in common consecration and devotion to their supreme task, upon which all else depends and without which nothing else could be.

And just as woman is mediate between man and the future, so man is mediate between woman and the present. Woman is the more immediate environment, the special providence, so to say, of childhood; and man, in a rightly constituted society, is the special providence, the more immediate environment of woman, standing between her and inanimate Nature, guarding her, taking thought for her, feeding her, using his special masculine qualities for her--that is to say, in the long run, for the future of the race; this indeed being the purpose for which Nature has contrived all individuals of both sexes. If we prefer such phrases, we may say that the future or the children are parasitic upon woman, and that woman is "parasitic upon the male," which is one woman's way of putting it. Or we may say that these are the natural and therefore divine relations of the various forms in which human life is cast, and that our business is to make them more effective, more provident and freer from the factors which in all ages have tended to injure them.

Fourthly, we have everywhere seen cause to condemn sex-antagonism, and it is my hope that no page or line or word of this book can be accused of illustrating or justifying or inciting to or even attempting to palliate either form of this wholly abominable spirit of the pit. If such places there be, there assuredly is misdirection and falsity. This spirit is one of the great enemies of mankind. As aroused in women against men, it has done and is doing no little harm; as exhibited by men against the righteous claims of women, it is one of the supremely malign forces of history. Wherever and however displayed, it is false to the first and most essential facts of life, from the moment of the evolution of sex, hundreds of millions of years ago, until our own time. All who display it, however excellent their intentions, are enemies of mankind; all who work upon it for their own ends, political and personal, without feeling it, are beneath disgust. These are things true and necessary to be said, though they should not deter us from sympathizing with the unhappy individuals, not a few, whose lives have been blasted by individuals of the other sex, and who show the natural but tragic tendency to make their private injury cause for resentment against one-half of mankind. Surveying the pages that are past, I am almost inclined to regret that, the plan of the book notwithstanding, a special chapter was not devoted to Sex-Antagonism and to a demonstration on biological grounds of its wickedness and pestilence wherever it be found, and whatever plausible case for it may anywhere be made.

If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters, let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I call Eugenists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express in one phrase the reason why this hope is justified, it is because the long struggle between two antithetic conceptions of human society is reaching a definite issue.

These radically opposed ideas may for convenience be called the _organic_ and the _internecine_. The internecine conception of society forever sets nation against nation, race against race, class against class, sex against sex, individual against individual, on the ground that the interest of one must be the injury of the other. It is false. Nay, more, for man living his life on this earth as he must and will, it is the Great Lie.

And it is being found out. Even international trade and commerce, from which such a service could scarcely have been expected, are here contributing to philosophy. Our fathers talked of the comity of nations; we are beginning to discover their interdependence. The coming of that discovery is one of the few really new things under the sun. Not so very long ago, when mankind was far less numerous, such interdependence of nations did not exist; they were self-sufficient, just as the patriarchal family was self-sufficient still further ago.

But the interdependence of the sexes is so far from being a new fact that it is as old as the evolution of sex, and the decadence and disappearance of parthenogenesis or reproduction from the female sex alone. Once bi-parental reproduction becomes necessary for the continuance of the race, both sexes sink with either, and neither can swim but with both. Yet so far are we from realizing this most ancient of facts to-day that, on both sides of the woman question, wonderful to relate, are to be found controversialists who are seeking to deny this continuous lesson of so many million ages. The reader may take his choice of folly between them. On the one hand, there are the feminists who seek to do without man,--except for the minimum physiological purpose. The women are to sustain the present and create the future simultaneously, and man is to be reduced, apparently, to the function of the drone. Thus Mrs. Gilman in "Women and Economics." Over against her and those who think with her are to be set the men, and women too, who tell us that "men made the State,"--a sufficiently shameful admission--and that women have no business with these things. Do not their mothers blush for such; to have travailed so much, and to have achieved so little?

Fortunately, however, the greater number of those who think and determine the deeds of the mass are beginning, though the dawn is yet very faint, to perceive that this truth of the interdependence of the sexes, which is part of the greater truth that mankind is an organic whole, is not only much truer than ever to-day, but is vital to our salvation; and save us it will. In so far as we are keeping women inferior to men, we must raise them; in so far as we are keeping men, in other and certainly no less important respects, inferior to women, we must raise them. The future needs and will obtain the utmost of the highest of both sexes. Thus and thus only "springs the crowning race of human kind": wherein, as we hasten to the dust, living for a day, yet for ever, our eyes prophetic may behold the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Adolescence, 124 ---- and advertisements, 135 ---- and alcohol, 228

Alcohol, 54, 100 ---- accessibility of, 360 ---- and expectant motherhood, 367 ---- and breast-feeding, 371 ---- and industrialism, 360, 377 ---- and tobacco _versus_ children, 201, 251, 354 ---- widows and orphans, 350 ---- and womanhood, 348 _et seq._

Alcoholism and lead poisoning, 379 ---- and offspring, 380 ---- and Jewish survival, 382 _et seq._

Anti-Suffrage societies, 16

Asceticism, old and new, 102

Bees, arguments from, 31, 84, 322

Birth-rate, fall of, 288 _et seq._ ---- and infant mortality, 301 ---- and marriage-rate, 312

Board of Education Syllabus, 121

Breast feeding, 333 _et seq._ ---- and alcohol, 371

"British Medical Journal" on meat, wines, etc., 361 _et seq._

Brooding instinct in fowls, 82

Canada's need of women, 269

Childless marriage, 244

Children Act, 265, 372

Climacteric, 21, 77, 98

Confirmation and adolescence, 124

Conservation of energy, 64 ---- and higher education, 79

Contagious diseases, 219

Corset, 120, 186 _et seq._

Cycling for women, 119

Dancing, 120, 122

Degeneracy and inaction, 42

Determination of sex, 72 _et seq._

Divorce, conditions of, 291 _et seq._ ---- _versus_ separation, 293 ---- in Germany, 293 ---- Law Reform Union, 293

Dolls and their significance, 95, 166

Education, definition of, 156 ---- and instruction, 161, 172 ---- for motherhood, 151, 158 _et seq._

Educational question, 43

Endowment of motherhood, 282 _et seq._, 308

Engagements, length of, 135

Eugenic feminism, 7

Eugenics, _passim_.

"Evolution of Sex," 67

Exercise in girls' schools, Herbert Spencer on, 104 _et seq._

Expectant mother, 143, 367

Fabian Society, 182

Femaleness, constitution of, 76

Games _versus_ dumb-bells, 110 ---- mixed, 113

Gameto-genesis, 82

Germ cells and germ plasm, 27, 28, 81, 206, 367 ---- its immortality, 29 ---- and sex inheritance, 74

Girls' clubs, 123 ---- clothing, 125

Gonorrh[oe]a, 223 _et seq._

Gymnastics _versus_ play, 109

Hæmophilia, 3

Happiness in marriage, 236

Heredity and responsibility, 195

Heredity of sex, 73

Higher education, 151 ---- in London, 128 ---- and marriage rate, 78 ---- and conservation of energy, 79

Highest education, 154

Identical twins, 55

Illegitimacy, 148, 304, 336, 384

Infant mortality, 70, 172, 177, 194, 259, 325

Infant mortality and alcohol, 370

Insanity, 54, 225

Instinct and emotion, 164

Instinct, Spencer's definition of, 164

Insurance for motherhood, 315

Joy, physiological value of, 112

Kaiser's creed, 11

Knossos, 186

Law of multiplication, 66

Leprosy, 220

Maleness, constitution of, 76

"Man before speech," 39

Marriage age, 196 ---- Metchnikoff on, 199 ---- and quality of children, 204 ---- conditions of, 258 ---- and the "superfluous woman," 259 _et seq._

"Marriage as a Trade," 202

Marriage, social function of, 307

Married women's labour, 306

Mars, the parallel from, 50

Maternal instinct, 163 _et seq._ ---- McDougall on, 168 _et seq._ ---- in the cat, 171, 177 ---- alleged decadence of, 174 _et seq._

Mendelism, 4, 67, 74, 75, 81 _et seq._, 330

Menstrual function, 108

Monogamy and its critics, 272

Monogamy and polygamy, 261

"Morning Post," quotation from, 340

Mortality in childbirth, 217

Mosaic legislation, 147

Mother and child worship, 148

Motherhood, endowment of, 282 ---- physical and psychical, 83

Motherhood insurance, 315

"Mrs. Warren's Profession," 138

Muscles, relative value of, for women, 117

Muscularity and vitality, 99

Natural selection, 32

Nature and nurture, 52, 214

Neanderthal skull, 38

Notification of Births Act, 132

Organic analysis by Mendelism, 81

Parental instinct, 95

Parthenogenesis, 72

Patent medicines and alcohol, 361 _et seq._

Physical fitness for marriage, 208

Physical training of girls, 99

Physiological division of labour, 87

Play centres, 22

Preventive eugenics, 24

Progress and the nervous system, 102 ---- definition of, 37 ---- the two kinds of, 38

Prudery, 130, 132 _et seq._

Psychical fitness for marriage, 211

Puberty, 98, 124

Racial instinct, 167, 180, 225

Racial poisons, 24, 382

Radium, 35

"Reproduction" and "parenthood," 141

Rescue homes, 137

"Richard Feverel," 191

Rights of mothers, 293 _et seq._ ---- of women, 319

Scotland, educational strain at puberty, 115

Separation _versus_ divorce, 293

"Sex and Character," 68

Sex equality and sex identity, 56 _et seq._

Sex and breathing, 93, 94

Sex and the blood, 93

Sex in childhood, 92

Sex antagonism, 391

"Sexual instinct" and "racial instinct," 144 _et seq._

Sexual attraction, Spencer on, 240 _et seq._

Sexual selection, 144

Skipping, 122

Socialism, 182 ---- and motherhood, 282

Socialism and responsibility, 309

Swedish gymnastics, 121

Swimming, 120

Syphilis, 54, 222 _et seq._

Terms of specialization, 87

Transmutation of instinct, 171 ---- of sex, 251

Vacation schools, 22, 114

Variation within a sex, 89 ---- amongst women, 90

Venereal diseases, 219 _et seq._

Venus of Milo, 120, 186

Vital imports and exports, 267

Vitality superior in women, 99

Widowhood, causes of, 217 ---- and motherhood, 303

Women and colonization, 268 _et seq._

"Women's Charter," 311, 315

Women and economics, 327 _et seq._

INDEX OF NAMES

Aristotle, 39

Aurelius, Marcus, 257

Bacon, 182

Ballantyne, Dr. J. W., 370

Bateson, 77

Bonheur, Rosa, 58

Botticelli, 184

Bouchard, 290

Brieux, 138, 221

Budin, Prof., 336

Bunge, Prof. von, 334, 371

Burke, 225

Burns, John, 325

Butler, Lady, 58

Carlyle, 8

Chesterton, G. K., 266, 333

Clouston, 21

Coleridge, 40, 178, 184

Croom, Sir Halliday, 119

Darwin, 26, 47

Duncan, Miss Isadora, 123

Duncan, Dr. Matthews, 210

Ehrlich, 233

Eliot, George, 58

Ellis, Dr. Havelock, 61, 93, 118, 119, 186

Evans, Dr. Arthur, 186

Fawcett, Mrs., 21

Forel, 86, 149

Galton, 7, 52, 203, 205, 208, 211

Geddes and Thomson, 65, 84

Gilman, Mrs. C. P., 327, 393

Goethe, 225

Haeckel, 82

Hamilton, Miss Cicely, 202

Haynes, E. S. P., 293

Helmholtz, 36

Horsley, 254

Huxley, 46

Kelvin, 35

Key, Ellen, 8, 59, 347

Kipling, 188

Laitinen, Prof. Taav, 381

Lamarck, 158

Lister, 20, 209

Maclaren, Lady, 315

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 325

Marshall, Prof. Alfred, 381

McDougall, Dr. W., 165

Meredith, 48, 142

Metchnikoff, 199

Mill, J. S., 174

Milne-Edwards, 87

Minot, 87

Mosso, 120

Mott, Dr. F. W., 356

Napoleon, 305

Nation, Carrie, 23

Newman, Sir George, 121

Newsholme, Dr. A., 384

Nightingale, Florence, 17

Pasteur, 217

Pearson, Karl, 205, 380

Phillpotts, Eden, 191

Plato, 2, 56, 182

Rotch, Prof. Morgan, 336

Ruskin, 19, 48, 150, 157, 189, 345

Sappho, 58

Scharlieb, Dr. Mary, 371

Shakespeare, 52

Spencer, Herbert, 6, 45, 48, 64, 81, 104, 129, 156, 159, 171, 240, 320

St. Francis, 46

St. Paul, 150

Stevenson, 154

Sullivan, Dr. W. C., 376, 381

Thales, 64

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 21

Ward, Lester, 72, 261

Weininger, 68

Weismann, 26, 28, 82

Wells, H. G., 182, 282, 310, 313

Westermarck, 186

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 14

Wordsworth, 13, 48, 159, 189, 256

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "The Germ-Plasm." English translation in Contemporary Science Series, London: New York.

[2] "Parenthood and Race-Culture: An Outline of Eugenics."

[3] "The Obstacles to Eugenics," published in the _Sociological Review_, July 1909.

[4] See his "Pure Sociology."

[5] _I. e._ marrying cells.

[6] Here, as in many other cases, I am indebted to that invaluable repertory of facts, Dr. Havelock Ellis's "Man and Woman."

[7] This may be obtained from any bookseller at the price of 9d.

[8] Further particulars may be obtained from the Vice-Principal, King's College (Women's Department), 13 Kensington Square, London, W.

[9] From _La Question Sexuelle_, French edition, p. 62. The author wrote the book first in German and then in French.

[10] The modern use of the word environment really dates from Lamarck's original phrase. In his discussion of the characters of living beings, he spoke of the _milieu environnant_. The higher the type of organism the more comprehensive must the term become, not only quantitatively but qualitatively.

[11] "An Introduction to Social Psychology," by William McDougall, M.A., M.B., M.Sc., Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy in the University of Oxford.

[12] From the writer's paper, "The Human Mother," in the Report of the Proceedings of the National Conference on Infantile Mortality, 1908, p. 30.

[13] It it well to quote here the most recent comment of the late Sir Francis Galton upon this subject. It is to be found in his celebrated Huxley lecture, now published by the Eugenics Education Society, together with much of the illustrious author's other work, under the title, "Essays in Eugenics." The passage relevant to our discussion runs as follows:--

"There appears to be a considerable difference between the earliest age at which it is physiologically desirable that a woman should marry and that at which the ablest, or at least the most cultured, women usually do. Acceleration in the time of marriage, often amounting to seven years, as from twenty-eight or twenty-nine to twenty-one or twenty-two, under influences such as those mentioned above, is by no means improbable. What would be its effect on productivity? It might be expected to act in two ways:--

"(1) By shortening each generation by an amount equally proportionate to the diminution in age at which marriage occurs. Suppose the span of each generation to be shortened by one-sixth, so that six take the place of five, and that the productivity of each marriage is unaltered, it follows that one-sixth more children will be brought into the world during the same time, which is roughly equivalent to increasing the productivity of an unshortened generation by that amount.

"(2) By saving from certain barrenness the earlier part of the child-bearing period of the woman. Authorities differ so much as to the direct gain of fertility due to early marriage that it is dangerous to express an opinion. The large and thriving families that I have known were the offspring of mothers who married very young."

[14] An unavoidable delay in the publication of this book makes possible reference to Professor Ehrlich's synthetic compound of arsenic, known as "606," the anti-syphilitic potency of which will render even less excusable the cowardice and neglect against which the foregoing is a protest.

[15] This is a libel upon poor people everywhere. There has been some confusion between drink and poverty.

[16] "T. P.'s Weekly," Christmas Number, 1909.

[17] The first treatise on Infant Mortality in English, written by Sir George Newman at the present writer's request, and published in his New Library of Medicine in 1906, gives abundant and trustworthy information as to the initial incidence of this disproportionate mortality.

[18] "Socialism and the Family," Sixpenny Edition, p. 59.

[19] The address of this Union is 20, Copthall Avenue, London, E. C.

[20] "The primal physical functions of maternity."

[21] W. Claassen in the Archiv für Rassen-und-Gesellschafts-Biologie, Nov.--Dec., 1909. See the Eugenics Review, July, 1910, p. 154.

[22] We decided to reprint the Report of that Conference, and a few copies of the reprint are still obtainable.

[23] In his "Alcoholism." 1906.

[24] In the articles, "Racial Poisons: Alcohol," Eugenics Review, April, 1910, and "Professor Karl Pearson on Alcoholism and Offspring," British Journal of Inebriety, Oct., 1910.

[25] This study has only just begun, but remarkable results have already been obtained. The interested reader should refer to the Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress on Alcoholism held in London in 1909.

[26] This Report, published in 1910, can readily be obtained through any bookseller. Its number is Cd. 5263, and the price only 1s. 3d.

Transcriber's Notes:

1. Original chapter titles were inconsistently named. For example "CHAPTER VI" was followed by simply "VII" without the "CHAPTER" designation. The original printing has been retained.

2. p. 269: word omitted in original ("on") has been added: "I have recently been on a tour throughout Canada...."