THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY OF WOMAN IN HEREDITY
Read before the World's Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893
Ladies and Gentlemen: – Poets, statesmen, novelists, and artists have for ages untold striven to eclipse each other in the eulogies of motherhood. On the stage nothing is so sure of rapturous applause as is some touching bit of sacrifice which has reached its climax in a mother's love wherein she has yielded all to shield, to protect, or to better the condition of husband or child. From the crude topical songs which advise the son to "Stick to your mother when her hair turns gray," through the various phases of maternal love and devotion or sacrifice in the "Camille" type of thought, on up to the loftiest touches in art and literature, there is alike the effort to celebrate the power, the potentiality and the beauty of motherhood and to stimulate the sentiments of gratitude and love and of admiration for and emulation of the ideal depicted. But through it all, in the building and nurturing of the ideal, there runs – ever and always – the thread of thought that self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-effacement, are the grandest attributes of maternity. That in order to be a perfect, an ideal wife and mother, the woman must be sunk, the individual immolated, the ego subjugated. To a degree and in a sense, that is, of course, true. For the willingness to go down to the gates of death; to face its possibility for long, weary months; to know that suffering, and to fear that death, stands as a sure and inevitable host at the end of a long journey – to know this and to be willing to face it for the sake of others is a heroism, a bravery, a self-abnegation so infinitely above and beyond the small heroism of camp or battlefield that comparison is almost sacrilege.
The condemned man, upon whom the death watch has been set, who cannot hope for executive clemency, who is helpless in the hands of absolute power, still knows that, although death may be sure, physical suffering is unlikely or at the worst will be but brief; but he alone stands in the position to know – even to a degree – the nervous strain, the mental anguish, the unthinking but uncontrollable panics of flesh and blood and nerve which woman faces at the behests of love and maternity and, alas, that it can be true, at the behests of sex power and financial dependence!
But when we study anthropology and heredity we come to realize the indisputable facts that her love, her physical heroism and her bravery, linked with her political and financial subject status, has cast a physical blight, a moral shadow and a mental threat upon the world, we cease to clap quite so vigorously at the theater and our tears or smiles are mingled with mental reservations and a sigh for a loftier ideal of the meaning and purpose of maternity than the merely physical one that man has depicted as material sacrifice to the child and self-abnegation and subjection to him. We begin to wonder if much of the vice, the crime, the wrong, the insanity, the disease, the incompetence and the woe of the world is not the direct lineal descendant of this very self-debasement of the individual character of woman in maternity!
We wonder if an unwilling, a forced or supinely yielding (and not self-controlled), a subject motherhood, in short, is not responsible to the race for the weak, the deformed, the depraved, the double dealing, pretense-soaked natures which curse the world with failure, with disease, with war, with insanity and with crime. We wonder if the awful power with which nature clothes maternity in heredity does not strike blindly back at the race for man's artificial and cruel requirements at the hands of the producer of the race. We wonder if mothers do not owe a higher duty to their offspring than that of mere nurse. We wonder if she has the moral right to give her children the inheritance that accident and subserviency stamps upon body and mind. We wonder how she dares face her child and know that she did not fit herself by self-development and by direct, sincere, firm and thorough qualifications for maternity before she dared to assume its responsibilities. We wonder that man has been so slow in learning to read the message that nature has telegraphed to him in letters of fire and photographed with a terrible persistency upon the distorted, diseased bodies and minds of his children and upon the moral imbeciles she has set before him as an answer to his message of sex domination.4
Self-abnegation, subserviency to man – whether he be father, lover, or husband – is the most dangerous that can be taught to, or forced upon her, whose character shall mould the next generation! She has no right to transmit a nature and a character that is subservient, subject, inefficient, undeveloped – in short, a slavish character, which is either blindly obedient or blindly rebellious and is therefore set, as is a time-lock, to prey or to be preyed upon by society in the future!
If woman is not brave enough personally to demand, and to obtain, absolute personal liberty of action, equality of status and entire control of her great and race-endowing function of maternity, she has no right to dare to stamp upon a child, and to curse a race with the descendants of a servile, a dwarfed, a time-and-master-serving character.
We have been taught that it is an awful thing to commit murder – to take a human life. There are students of anthropology and heredity who think that it is a far more awful thing to thrust, unasked, upon a human being a life that is handicapped before he gets it. It is a far more solemn responsibility to give than to take a human life! In the one case you invade personal liberty and put a stop to an existence more or less valuable and happy, but at least all pain is over for that invaded individuality. In the other case – in giving life – you invade the liberty of infinite oblivion and thrust into an inhospitable world another human entity to struggle, to sink, to swim, to suffer or to enjoy. Whether the one or the other no mortal knows, but surely knows it must contend not only with its environment but with its heredity – with itself.
Not long ago a great man, who is successful beyond most human units, who is wealthy, socially to be envied, who enjoys almost ideal family relations, who is in all regards a man of broad intellect, of large heart, who is beloved, successful and powerful – not long ago this man said to me, when talking of life and its chances, its joys and its burdens and wrongs:
"Well, the more I think of it all, the more I know, the more I delve into philosophy and science, the more I understand life as it is and as it must be for long years to come, if not forever, the more I wonder at the sturdy bravery of those who are less fortunate than I. Does it pay me to live? Would I choose to be born again? Were I to-day unborn, could I be asked for my vote, knowing all I do of life, would I vote to come into this world? Taking life at its best estate are we not assuming a tremendous risk to thrust it unasked upon those who are at least safe from its pitfalls? I ask myself these questions very often," he said, and then hesitatingly, "I sometimes think it pays after all. Of course, since I am here I am bound to make the best of it, but for all that I am not sure how I would vote on my birth if I had the chance to try it – not quite sure."
"If you are so impressed with life for yourself – you, a fortunate, healthy, wealthy, happily married, successful man," said I, "don't you think it is a pretty serious thing to assume the right to cast that vote for another human pawn, who could hardly conceivably stand your chances in the world?"
"Serious," he exclaimed. "Serious! With the world's conditions what they are to-day, with the physical, moral and mental chances to run, with woman, the character-forming producer of the race a half-educated subordinate to masculine domination, it is little short of madness; it is not far from a crime. It is a crime unless the mother is a physically healthy, a mentally developed and comprehending, morally clear, strong, vigorous entity who knows her personal responsibility in maternity and, knowing, dares maintain it."
It has been the fashion to hold that the mothers of the race should not be the thinkers of the race. Indeed, in commenting upon this Congress of Representative Women, the most widely read newspaper on this continent last week said editorially:
"There is to be a great series of women's congresses held at Chicago during the Fair. The purpose is to illustrate and celebrate the progress of women. Accordingly there will be sessions to discuss the achievements of women in art, authorship, business, science, histrionic endeavor, law, medicine and a variety of other activities.
"But so far as the published programmes enable us to judge not one thing is to be done to show the progress of women as women. There will be no showing made of any increased capacity on their part to make homes happier, to make their husbands stronger for their work in the world, to encourage high endeavors, to maintain the best standards of honor and duty, to stimulate, encourage, uplift – which – from the beginning of civilization – has been the supreme feminine function. Nothing, it appears, is to be done at the congresses to show that a higher education and a larger intellectual advancement has enabled women to bear healthier children or to bring them up in a manner more surely tending to make this a better world to live in, the noblest of all work that can be done by women.
"We need no congress to show us that women are more thoroughly educated than they once were, or that they can successfully do things once forbidden to them. But have wider culture and wider opportunities made them better wives and mothers? A congress which should show that would make all men advocates of still larger endeavors for woman's advancement. A congress, on the other hand, which assumes that the only thing to be celebrated is an increased capacity to win fame or money will teach a disastrously false and dangerous lesson to our growing girls."
This fatal blunder as to woman's development as woman – quite aside from her home relations, which the editor confuses with it – has retarded the real civilization and caused to be transmitted – unnecessarily transmitted – the characteristics which have gone far to make insanity, disease and deformity of mind and body, the heritage of well-nigh every family in the land.
A great medical expert said to me not long ago, "There is not more than one family in ten who can show a clean bill of health, mental and physical – aye, and moral – from hereditary taints that are serious in threat and almost certain of development in one form or another.
"Now, if a man with a contagious disease enters a community he is quarantined for the benefit of his fellows, who might never take it if he were not restrained and isolated. But if a man with a hereditary or transmittible disorder, which is certain, enters a community, he is allowed to marry and transmit it to the helpless unborn – to establish a line of posterity – who are far more directly his victims than would be those who were exposed to a cholera contagion by a lack of quarantine. Fathers, physicians, society, and all educational and economic conditions have conspired to keep mothers ignorant of all the facts of life of which mothers should know everything; and so it has come about that the race is the victim of the narrow and dangerous doctrine of sex domination and sex restriction, and of selfish reckless indulgence. If not one family in ten can show a clean bill of heredity, is it not more than time that the mothers learn why, learn where, and in what they are responsible, and that they cease 'to close the doors of mercy on mankind?'"
Maternity, its duties, needs and responsibilities has been exploited in all ages and climes; in all phases and spheres, from one point of view only – the point of view of the male owner. If you think that this statement is extreme I beg of you to read "The Evolution of Marriage" by Letourneau. Read it all. Read it with care. It is the production of a man of profound learning and research, a man who sees the light of the future dawning, although even he sometimes lapses from a universal, language of humanity into hereditary forms of speech, hedged in by sex bias.
But in all the past arguments maternity with its duties to itself; maternity with its duties to the race, has never been more than merely touched upon, and even then it has been chiefly from the side of the present, and not with the tremendous search-light of heredity and of future generations turned upon it. It has been ever and always in its relations to the desires, opinions and prejudices of the present man power which controls it.
Some time ago a famous doctor in New York took up the cudgel against higher education for women, and under the heading of "Education and Maternity; Woman's Proper Sphere; the Dangers Which Threaten Intellectual and Society Women;" wrote in favor of ignorant wives and a larger number of children. A great journal published his article without protest, thus giving added prestige to the opinions expressed. This, too, in spite of the fact that at that very time the same journal was appealing for alms, for free nurses, for volunteer doctors and for a fresh-air fund to enable the ignorant mothers of the crime-infested, disease-pol-luted, over populated tenements of the city to get even a breath of fresh air by the sea, which is only two miles from its doors! In spite of the fact, too, that Lombroso, Ricardo, Mendel, Spitzka, MacDonald and other famous anthropologists and experts have pointed out so plainly in their criminal, insane, imbecile and mortuary statistics the all-pervading evil of rapid, ill advised, irresponsible parentage.
Professor Edward S. Morse, in a recent paper called "Natural Selection in Crime," which he courteously sent to me, said: "To one at all familiar with the external aspects of insanity in its various forms it seems incredible that its physical nature was not sooner realized. Had the laws of heredity been earlier understood it would have been seen that mental derangements, like physical diseases and tendencies, were transmitted."
Of late years there has sprung into existence a school of criminal anthropology, with societies, journals, and a rapidly increasing literature. A most admirable summary of the work thus far accomplished has recently been given by Dr. Robert Fletcher in his address as retiring president of the Anthropological Society of Washington. In his opening paragraphs Dr. Fletcher thus graphically portrays the scourge of the criminal and his rapid increase:
"In the cities, towns and villages of the civilized world every year thousands of unoffending men and women are slaughtered; millions of money, the product of honest toil and careful saving, are carried away by the conqueror, and incendiary fires light his pathway of destruction. Who is this devastator, this modern "scourge of God," whose deeds are not recorded in history? The criminal! Statistics unusually trustworthy show that if the carnage yearly produced by him could be brought together at one time and place it would excel the horrors of many a well-contested field of battle. In nine great countries of the world, including our own favored land, in one year, 10,380 cases of homicide were recorded, and in the six years extending from 1884 to 1889, in the United States alone, 14, 770 murders came under cognizance of the law.
"And what has society done to protect itself against this aggressor? True, there are criminal codes, courts of law, and that surprising survival of the unfittest, trial by jury. Vast edifices have been built as prisons and reformatories, and philanthropic persons have formed societies for the instruction of the criminal and to care for him when his prison gates are opened. But, in spite of it all, the criminal becomes more numerous. He breeds criminals; the taint is in the blood, and there is no royal touch can expel it."
Commenting on this Professor Morse says: "Certain results of the modern school of anthropology, as presented by Dr. Fletcher, may be briefly summed up by stating broadly that in studying the criminal classes from the standpoint of anatomy, physiology, external appearance, even to the minuter shades of difference in the form of the skull and facial proportions, the criminal is a marked man. His abnormities are characteristic, and are to be diagnosticated in only one way. That these propositions are being rapidly established there can be no doubt. As an emphatic evidence of their truth, the criminal is able to transmit his criminal propensities even beyond the number of generations allotted to inheritance by Scripture."
And where do all these lunatics and criminals come from? From educated mothers? from mothers who are in even a small and limited sense allowed to own themselves, to think for themselves, control their own lives? Not at all. They are the mothers whose lives belong to their men, as this learned doctor, who objects to the higher education of women, argues that all wives should.
Maternity is an awful power, and I repeat that it strikes back at the race, with a blind, fierce, far-reaching force, in revenge for its subject status. Dr. Arthur MacDonald, in his "Criminology," says: "The intellectual physiognomy shows an inferiority in criminals, and when in an exceptional way there is a superiority, it is rather in the nature of cunning and shrewdness… Poverty, misery and organic debility are not infrequently the cause of crime."
Who is likely to transmit "organic debility?" The mother of many children or of few? Who is likely to stamp a child with low intellectual physiognomy? The mother who is educated or she who is the willing or unwilling subordinate in life's benefits?
Again he says: "Every asymmetry is not necessarily a defect of cerebral development, for, as suggested above, under the influence of education defects of function can be corrected, covered up or eradicated." Can this be true of criminals and not of normal women?
Again he says: "When we consider the early surroundings, unhygienic conditions, alcoholic parents, etc., of the criminal, where he may begin vice as soon as consciousness awakes, malformation, due to neglect and rough treatment, are not surprising. Yet the criminal malformations may be frequently due to osteological conditions. But here still hereditary influence and surrounding conditions in early life exert their power." Benedikt says: "To suppose that an atypically constructed brain can function normally is out of the question."
So long as motherhood is kept ignorant, dependent and subject in status just that long will heredity avenge the outrage upon her womanhood, upon her personality, upon her individual right to a dignified, personal, equal human status, by striking telling blows on the race.
But let me return to the arguments of the author of "Higher Education and Woman's Sphere," since he represents all the reactionary thought on this topic and because he ignores utterly, as do all of his fellows, woman's duty to herself and her awful power for good or evil upon the race, according as she makes herself a dignified, developed, educated and independent individuality first and a function of maternity second. It seems to me that in discussing no other question in life is there so little logical reasoning and so much arbitrary dogmatism as in the ones which are usually embraced under "woman's sphere." In the first place, it is assumed that because women are mothers they are nothing else; that because this is her sphere she can have, should have, no other.
Men are fathers. That is their sphere, therefore they should not be mentally developed, legally and politically emancipated, socially civilized or economically independent. This would appear to most men, doubtless, as a somewhat absurd proposition. It appears so to me, but it is not one whit less absurd when applied to women. Yet this is constantly done. Because women are mothers is the very reason why they should be developed mentally and physically and socially to their highest possible capacity. The old theory that a teacher was good enough for a primary class if she knew the "A B C's" and little else has long since been exploded. A high degree of intellectual capacity and a broad mental grasp are more important in those who have the training and molding of small children than if the children were older. The younger the mind the less capable it is to guide itself intelligently and therefore the more important is it that the guide be both wise and well informed. In a college, if the professor is only a little wiser than his class it does not make so much difference. In a post-graduate course it makes even less, for here all are supposed to be somewhat mature. Each has within himself an intelligent guide, a reasoner, a questioner and one to answer questions.
With little children the one who has them in charge most closely must be all this and more. She must understand the proportions and relations of things and wherein they touch – the bearing and trend of mental and physical phenomena. She must furnish self-poise to the nervous child and stimulus to the phlegmatic one. She must be able to read signs and interpret indications in the mental and moral, as well as in the physical being of those within her care. All this she must be able to do readily and with apparent unconsciousness if she is best fitted to deal with and develop small children. More than this, she must be not only able to detect wants but have the wisdom to guide, to stimulate, to restrain, to develop the plastic creature in her keeping. If she had the wisdom of the fabled gods and the self-poise of the Milo she would not be too well equipped for bearing and educating the race in her keeping.
But more than this the ideal mother should know and be. She must have love too loyal and sense of obligation too profound to recklessly bring into the world children she cannot properly endow or care for. It does not appear to occur to the physicians and politicians who discuss this question that it may be due to other causes than incapacity that the educated women are the mothers of fewer children than are the "ideal wives and mothers" of whom they speak in their arguments against her higher education – the squaws of the Kaffirs and Black-feet Indian women, who "devote but a few hours to the completion of this act of nature," as our doctor felicitously expresses it. It is no doubt true that habits of civilization do tend to make the dangers of motherhood greater. So do they tend to render men less sturdy – less perfect animals. A Kaffir or an Indian buck would not find it necessary to stay at home from his office, for example, because of a broken arm, or a gun shot wound in the leg. He would tramp sturdily through the forest, and sleep in the jungle with an arrow imbedded in his flesh. He would sit stolidly down on a log and cut it out of himself with a scalping-knife. Yet nobody would think it a desirable thing for a member of the Union League club to stop on his way up Fifth avenue and attend to his own surgery on the sidewalk. They would expect him to faint, and to be "carried tenderly into the nearest drug store" and a doctor would be sent for. He would be put under the influence of an anaesthetic drug during the operation, and carefully nursed for weeks afterward by his devoted wife, and intelligent physician. Then if he pulled through it would be heralded far and wide as because of his "magnificent physique, his pluck and the excellent treatment he received." Well now, is he a less "manly man" than is the Kaffir or the Indian buck? Is he a less desirable husband and father? Is he "deteriorating in his sphere?" The fact is, the more sensitive men have become to pain, whether it be mental or physical, the more manly have they grown, the more nearly fitted to be the fathers of a race of men and women who are not mere brutes. The race does not need the brute type any longer. It has already too many mere human animals to deal with – in its asylums, almshouses, prisons and impoverished districts.
This world is in no danger of suffering from a lack of children, the cry has always been "over population" and even in our new country the wail has begun. Not more children, but a better kind of children is what is needed. Who will be likely to furnish these? The ideal "squaw wife" or the educated woman, who knows that her obligation to her child begins before it is born, and does not end even with her death, for she must leave it the heritage of a good name, an earnest life, a noble example, even after she is gone.
If by "being unfitted for the sphere of wife and mother" it is meant that this sphere is truly that of a mere animal – a healthy animal – if in order to be an ideal wife to civilized man, woman should remain a savage; if to be a mother to an intellectually advancing race she need not even comprehend the advance, then truly are these arguments against her higher education and intellectual development logical.
But even then they are not fair. Why? Simply because she has not been consulted as to her choice in the matter. The argument is still based on the tremendous assumption that man's happiness, man's desires, man's wishes, man's rights, are the sum total of all desire, all right, all freedom, all happiness and all justice. It omits two tremendous equations – that of the woman herself and that of her offspring, who will have a right to demand of her how she dared equip him so badly for the life into which she has taken the liberty to bring him. To demand of her how she dared equip herself so ill for her self-imposed task of creator of a human soul!
Up to the present time woman's moral responsibility in heredity has been below the point of zero, for the reason that she has had no voice in her own control nor in that of her children. With the present knowledge of heredity she who permits herself to become a mother without having demanded and obtained (1) her own freedom from sex dominion and (2) fair and free conditions of development for herself and her child, will commit a crime against herself, against her child and against the race.
But the learned doctor deplores the fact that educated women are bringing fewer children into the world, and argues that, this being the case, it shows that education is not within woman's sphere. Now, if a man does not choose to become the father of ten or twelve children nobody on earth feels called upon to criticise him as not properly filling his sphere – as out of his proper sphere – in case he prefers to spend more of his time on mental development and progress than upon irresponsible physical indulgence and paternity. If he makes up his mind that he cannot or does not wish to become responsible for the mental and physical endowment and well-being of more than one or two children, or of none, nobody says that his "college training unfitted him for the holy position of husband and father, which is his sphere." Perhaps the college training may have a good deal to do with it in the sense that with his developed mind and wider information, his sense of right and of personal obligation to the unborn has tended in that direction. We do not often notice a vast degree of self discipline of this nature in the uneducated, whether it be man or woman, but is this a reason for deprecating intellectual training for our boys? Why then for the girls? It appears to me that it is one of the greatest possible arguments in favor of higher education for women, unless, indeed, it is desirable to be mere Kaffirs, both male and female, which has its strong points. Kaffirs are healthier, hardier, more irresponsibly, happily brutal. They have few nervous moments, I fancy, over the future good of wife or child or friend. Their sense of obligation does not keep them awake nights. They are neither afraid nor ashamed to create helpless human beings simply to furnish targets for another tribe. They have not even a glimmer of the thought – still embryonic, indeed, in civilized man – that the woman whose life is risked, and the child upon whom life is thrust unasked, are of the least consideration in the matter. These have no rights which the Kaffir lord is bound to respect. I fancy if he were asked a question on the subject he would look at you in stupid, silent wonder, if he did not ask: "What have they got to do with it? I am the race. What she and my children are for is to look after me, to make me comfortable, to be my inferiors, for my glory." Most likely he would be so stupidly unequal to even the shadow of a thought not purely egotistic that he could not even formulate such preposterous questions and self-evident statements as these. But his civilized brother does it for him – so why complain?5
Now, suppose a woman would prefer to enjoy her mental capabilities to the full and develop these rather than to be the mother of a large brood; suppose she thinks she should be a developed woman first before daring to become a mother, whose right is it to object? If men prefer Kaffir wives there is a large assortment on hand. Squaws, both white and red, are to be had for the asking.
Whose right is it to decide that all women shall be squaws in mental development, in social position, in legal status and in political and economic relations, if all women do not choose to be such? Has a woman not the right to be a human being and count one in the economy of life before she is a mother – quite aside from her maternal capabilities? If not, when and where did she forfeit that right? When and where did man get his? Every man has and maintains the right to be a man first – a unit, a responsible human being; after that – aside from it – he may, if he choose, become also a husband and a father. Is it not more than possible that the whole human race has been dwarfed and retarded and hampered in its upward struggle because of this unaccountable effort to climb one side at a time, because brute force and phenomenal egotism have always refused to place humanity on terms of equal opportunity and leave nature alone?