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Title: Lysistrata; or, woman's future and future woman
Author: Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Lysistrata; or, woman's future and future woman" ***
FUTURE AND FUTURE WOMAN ***
LYSISTRATA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES
---------------------------------------------------------
_DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_ICARUS, or The Future of Science_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. _Fully Illustrated_
_WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES_
By Prof. A. M. Low. _With four Diagrams_
_NARCISSUS, or The Anatomy of Clothes_
By Gerald Heard. _Illustrated_
_TANTALUS, or The Future of Man_
By Dr F. C. S. Schiller
_THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS_
By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.
_CALLINICUS, A Defense of Chemical Warfare_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future_
By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.
_THE CONQUEST OF CANCER_
By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.
_HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge_
By Dora Russell (Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)
_LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman_
By A. M. Ludovici
_WHAT I BELIEVE_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_In Preparation_
_PERSEUS, of Dragons_
By H. F. Scott Stokes, MA.
_THE FUTURE OF SEX_
By Rebecca West
_THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS_
By Alan Porter
_AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.
_Other Volumes in Preparation._
---------------------------------------------------------
+E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY+
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LYSISTRATA
Woman’s Future and
Future Woman
BY
ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI
_Author of “Woman: a Vindication,” “A
Defence of Aristocracy”; etc._
WITH FOREWORD BY
NORMAN HAIRE, CH.M., M.B.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1925
By E. P. DUTTΟΝ & COMPANY
-------
_All Rights Reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOREWORD
LETTER FROM DR NORMAN HAIRE
MY DEAR LUDOVICI,
It has been a great pleasure for me to read _Lysistrata_—it is so
stimulating. Whether one agrees with your views or not (and I disagree
with many of them), the book impels one to re-examine one’s standards of
value, and that is the highest function a book can perform.
Perhaps I am prejudiced, but to me you seem very hard on the medical
profession. With the present idiotic system of paying the doctor better
for illness than for health the wonder is, not that we doctors have so
many faults, but that we have so few. In a saner age we shall get a
retaining fee for keeping each person or group of persons well, and so,
in order to avoid excessive work, if for no higher motive, we shall aim
at preventing disease rather than at alleviating it. To a large extent
we do that now, in spite of the fact that it takes money out of our
pockets.
Your exhortation to breast-feed babies is backed by all but a few
cranks, and I find your suggestion to make confinement easier by proper
diet during pregnancy very interesting. I remember that at the obstetric
hospital at which I was trained we used to notice that patients who had
been on special treatment for albuminuria had, in general, easy
confinements. It is very significant, from the standpoint of your
suggestions, that in the diet of these patients the protein element had
been very greatly reduced. I shall follow up your idea and let you know
the result.
I am sure you are right when you say “Sound and desirable women cannot
be happy unmated.” The fact that there are some women who can does not
invalidate the general truth—they are atypical.
Another of your phrases I would that you should trumpet forth in a voice
that should reach to the uttermost ends of the earth: “Strictly
speaking, moral depravity is no more voluntary than physiological
depravity.” I am confident that as Science advances the former will be
found always to depend on the latter.
In speaking of the unfit, infanticide, and concubinage, your frankness
is splendid, though on my pet subject, Birth-Control, I disagree with
you. There can be no doubt that much of our present-day
“humanitarianism” only results in wasting on the hopelessly unfit money
and care which might be spent very profitably on the fit, and in keeping
alive those who should never have been born. With the decay of
sentimentalism, infanticide must come to be practised on those who at
birth are obviously below a (variable) minimum standard, and
sterilization (destruction of fertility without interference with sexual
potency or pleasure) on those whose deficiency becomes unmistakable only
at a more advanced age. Contraception will be used mainly to ensure an
optimum interval between births in the interest of both mother and
child, and to limit the offspring to a (variable) number most suitable
in the individual, financial, and social circumstances of each family.
Some modification of our present marriage-arrangement is inevitable, and
concubinage seems quite a probable solution. At present we pretend to be
a monogamous people in spite of widespread fornication and adultery,
overtly with prostitutes and covertly with “amateurs.” But sooner or
later we shall have to drop the pretence and admit that men are
polygamous. (A few men are monogamous, and a few women polyandrous, but
both are exceptions.) Surely it would be better to allow every woman to
have half a husband, if she wants to, and remain respectable, than to
give half the women a whole husband and the others no share in a husband
at all.
For this book you will probably be denounced as a daring and fantastic
visionary, and I shall be blamed as an aider and abettor, but that
doesn’t matter. It will have stimulated many unthinking people to a
re-examination of their table of values.
Ever yours,
NORMAN HAIRE
_90, Harley Street, W._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
VALUES DIRECT SCIENCE
FROM a brief survey of his fellow-countrymen, there are many strange
lessons to be learnt in England to-day, by anyone who keeps his eyes
open and is on his guard against taking too much for granted.
The observer has only to exchange a few words with the men, women, and
children he passes by, and to look into their faces—no more is required
to tell him all he wishes to know. Nor will he need to have a very high
standard of human beauty to feel disappointed by the features of the
great majority, while the most elementary knowledge of psychology and
hygiene will enable him to see from their behaviour and expressions that
they are very largely harassed, unhealthy and badly fed (_i.e._, not
starving, but improperly nourished).
But among the first of the curious facts he will notice is this—that
large masses of his fellow-countrymen appear to have become so
thoroughly accustomed to living their lives with the help of every
variety of artificial aids that the latter no longer provoke either
shame or concern.
For instance, men and women—young and old—constantly pass by wearing
glasses, and they look quite cheerfully and confidently up through these
optical aids when they are addressed. To speak to others in the crowd,
and to see them smile, is to recognize instantly that some or all of
their teeth are bad or false. But they smile with just as much
conviction, whether their dentition happens to be natural or
manufactured. Numbers of the younger adults and children about have upon
their faces, in the region of their eyes and brows, certain tiny, almost
imperceptible, scars, revealing the fact that they were brought into the
world by means of obstetric instruments. And countless others there are
whose birth was just as artificial, though they bear no marks to show
it. But no one seems to trouble, or to inquire how such frequent
interference with a natural function might be avoided. Everywhere people
are seen shaking hands, and sincerely proclaiming themselves “Quite
well,” when that very morning, and many previous mornings, their
intestines have functioned only through the agency of some widely
advertized artificial aid. But none of them feels guilty of any grave
inaccuracy in declaring himself well in the circumstances.
Mothers can be seen by the hundred thousand, serenely wheeling in
perambulators, or leading by the hand, infants and children, not one of
whom has ever put its lips to a human breast. The advertisements
recommending the artificial foods on which these infants and children
have been reared can be read on every boarding. But it never occurs
either to the mothers themselves, or to the children, or to the
onlookers, to consider whether this state of affairs is of a kind that
justifies so much self-complacency, good cheer, indifference, and
apparent contentment.
These indications of a highly standardized life, revealing almost
universal imperfections of some kind in our bodies and their functions,
are now so common, so much a commonplace in our midst, that nobody
notices them, nobody mentions them as odd, and certainly nobody seems to
show any concern or alarm about their monotonous frequency.
Mention might be made of other less obvious aids to normal functions
which are in daily use among the population of these islands; but, since
we are speaking of the lessons that may be learned by an ordinary
observer who keeps his eyes and ears open in our streets and lanes, we
may well confine ourselves to the obvious.
Now, since all marked uniformity can result only from holding similar
fundamental views, similar general principles, in common, if our
wanderer wishes to pursue his observations he may be led to inquire from
what substratum of guiding rules, from what basic values, this
uniformity arises. If he is right in concluding that the population he
sees about him—the people who are regarded as well and healthy, not the
people who crowd our hospitals, asylums, and homes for cripples and
incurables!—are largely sub-normal, or sub-human, in the sense that they
are neither complete bodily nor capable of functioning without
artificial aids; if, moreover, he is right in thinking that they do not
seem to be much perturbed about their sub-humanity, he may wish to know
the nature of the atmosphere in which their thoughts and ideals are
formed. Their readiness to declare themselves “quite well,” or “quite
fit,” simply on the strength of their not being under a doctor, or on a
sick-bed, is singular. The question they ask themselves is not “Am I
really quite fit or well?” but “Am I just able to discharge my daily
duties, walk about, shop, have a family, and take ordinary meals?” If
they can answer this question in the affirmative, they reply with no
conscious insincerity that they are quite fit.
Evidently, then, among this population of to-day there is no severe
standard of good bodily condition, no cultivated taste about it. Or, if
there is, it is surprisingly low.
Defective functioning and incomplete bodily equipment no longer debars
anybody from regarding himself, or from being regarded by others, as
desirable and normal. Even in the vital matter of mating, this is so—how
much more customary it must be, therefore, in less vital matters! Stand
up, smile, and agitate your four limbs to indicate that they are intact
and still movable, and that is enough. The bias against a whole list of
defects and blemishes has completely disappeared.
Moral depravity is still stigmatized. About physiological depravity,
however, the world is frivolously indifferent. In the popular novels,
which best reflect the spirit of the age, the heroine rejects a suitor,
not because he has false teeth or chronic dyspepsia or varicose
veins—such things are so common that they are never mentioned; but
because he is “selfish,” or lacking in chivalry, or in “a sense of
humour.” The hero whom she accepts may be less healthy, less complete
anatomically than the man she rejects. He may also function less
normally, have two or three false teeth and a furred tongue—in fact, he
may be in every respect a much less desirable potential sire; but she
considers his “soul,” as the expression goes; and every reader is
satisfied that she behaves in the best possible way.
The spiritual atmosphere of our population, therefore, is one in which
all stress seems to be laid on the soul, in which the severe standards
are soul standards, and in which the importance of the body and its
completeness are almost entirely overlooked. As an instance of this, it
is interesting to note that there is no such thing to-day as a guilty
conscience about bodily depravity. The results of hundreds of years of
steady moralization has ended at last in the condition known as “guilty
conscience” becoming restricted entirely to the soul and to the moral
life. To say that so-and-so “can’t help it,” immediately stifles
criticism and arrests nausea. This alone shows how purely moral our
outlook is. Least of all are people able to despise themselves when
their own teeth are false, or when they habitually assist normal
functioning by means of artificial aids.
And in all these matters the unanimity of the modern civilized world is
so striking that the conclusion is forced upon us that here we are
confronted with the outcome of certain ruling and fundamental values
which must be common to all the people we have been discussing. From the
nature of the uniform attitude to which these values have led, we are
also obliged to infer that they must have taught at least two very
definite doctrines with unswerving consistency—(a) the over-emphasis of
the importance of the soul, and (b) the contempt and general slander of
the body. Or, to put it less offensively, they must have taught mankind
not only to place soul always before body, but also to leave the body
out of the reckoning when valuing the quality of human beings.
So much we know must have occurred, and we come to this conclusion
merely from judging the results which we see about us to-day. When,
however, we set out to inquire into the history of our population, and
attempt to discover whether such values have indeed operated in forming
their spiritual atmosphere, then, not only are our suspicions abundantly
confirmed, but we are actually able to lay our finger on the body of
doctrine containing the values whose existence we posited _a priori_.
Having attained this end, while we may still continue to deplore the
results we see about us, we can no longer wonder at them. Indeed, we
should marvel if, in such an atmosphere, we had failed to degenerate, or
ceased from degenerating. The wonder is, not that we have become a
nation of decadents and crocks, but that it should have taken all this
time to make us such a nation.
If our values had not for scores of generations turned us away from
strict standards concerning the body, it is inconceivable that we should
have become what we are; it is inconceivable that this atmosphere of
toleration and indifference towards bodily defects should have become so
universal. A nation ultimately becomes the image of its values. The
values are the die, the nation is the coin. From the face of the coin we
judge the die. From the faces of modern English people we can judge
their values.
Moreover, these values must have been so deeply rooted that they now
mould opinion without those whose opinion is moulded by them being
conscious of the source of their mental attitude. The best illustration
of this is that, although these values ultimately derive from a great
religion, the most irreligious people of the modern world share with the
religious the spiritual atmosphere we have been describing. People no
longer believing in the soul from the religious standpoint, nevertheless
show by their tolerance towards bodily defects, in themselves and
others, that they are being unconsciously influenced by the same
atmosphere. They may even have ceased to identify their opinions with
any fundamental values whatsoever, and regard their attitude as quite
original, as many, particularly women, do. No matter! Let them reveal
just that significant difference of standards in their judgment of human
“fitness” and their judgment of the “fitness” of animals, and we know
the ancestry of their mental attitude.
For this reason it is surely somewhat muddle-headed on the part of a
writer like Dean Inge, situated as he is, to plead with such vehemence
on behalf of Eugenics. For how can we hope for a reaction in favour of
the body as long as the values which lay all stress on the soul and
despise the body abide as an influence among us? Are they not the values
by which he stands, and which he is officially expected to inculcate
upon his generation?[1]
Footnote 1:
Mr. G. K. Chesterton is more consistent here, and shows a deeper
understanding of his true position. He, like Dean Inge, accepts the
fundamental values which by slow degrees have brought the modern world
into existence, and he therefore very rationally rejects Eugenics.
If ever these values are proved before the whole world to be false, and
cease to exercise any influence, no eugenic effort will then be
required. Because, the moment we begin to value people according to
their physiological _as well as_ their spiritual worth—the moment, that
is to say, we value them according to the promise which they give in
their own bodies and minds of guaranteeing the survival of human life in
a desirable form, eugenic mating will become quite as common and
instinctive as dysgenic mating is to-day.
Dean Inge, while recognizing the widespread degeneracy and physiological
botchedness to which allusion has been made, does not seem to perceive,
as our observer has, the singular readiness with which all modern people
overlook or condone it in themselves and others, and he argues,
plausibly enough, that our regrettable physical condition is due to our
industrialism and hypertrophic urbanism.
But this is tantamount to regarding the latest accompanying symptom of
our condition as its chief cause. For, in the first place, it is
extremely doubtful whether the Industrial Revolution could ever have
come about without that contempt for the body and its needs which lies
embedded in our ruling values. Secondly, does Dean Inge find no signs of
that contempt of the body before the Industrial Age? How about the
Middle Ages? How about the Great Rebellion in England? The present
writer once went to the pains of tracing all the Puritan contempt for
the body, and the fatal consequences it had for the English people, to
the values that Dean Inge upholds. He was even able to show that,
without those values, the seeds of modern industrialism could hardly
have been sown, as they were in the middle of the seventeenth
century.[2] Was not this before the so-called Industrial Revolution?
Footnote 2:
_Vide_ _A Defence of Aristocracy_ (Constable and Co., London: 1915).
How could the food-conditions in this country ever have become as
appalling as they are without an old tradition involving the neglect of
bodily concerns? These things antecede the Industrial Revolution, as the
present writer has shown elsewhere, by hundreds of years. Evidently,
then, strict standards about the body had already gone long before the
Industrial Age. And, when the latter came, it found no barriers in the
English people’s prejudices regarding the body and health: otherwise it
could never have proceeded as successfully as it did to a further
debilitation of the national physique.
We may take it, then, that the spiritual environment of all modern
sub-human people is the outcome of our fundamental values, as is also
their sub-humanity; and that this spiritual environment is characterized
by a tendency to neglect and despise the body and bodily considerations.
At all events, to put it in the mildest and most moderate terms, it is
impossible _altogether to absolve these fundamental values from
responsibility in the matter_; and to ignore their influence, and to
join the Eugenic movement, without first reckoning with their power, as
Dean Inge has done, is to be guilty of a confusion of thought unworthy
of anyone who professes to guide public opinion.
Now what is the material environment of our population?—Quite clearly,
it is one in which the mechanical elaboration of daily life has been
carried to a degree entirely bewildering. These sub-human people of the
twentieth century live among marvels of technical skill and ingenuity;
and the appliances, apparatus, and general equipment of their every-day
life have reached a complexity and perfection quite unprecedented in
history. Far from having learnt any lesson from the doctrines Darwin
taught last century, all our energy and skill have been concentrated in
precisely the opposite direction. Progressive evolution is no longer a
fact with us; for, as a species we are steadily falling back to a level
below that attained by our race in former ages. While we ourselves,
however, steadily recede along the scale of quality, our environmental
conditions, our tools, our means, acquire ever greater perfection.
The onus of evolution has, as it were, been transferred from our own
shoulders to the shoulders of our environment. Blinded by the dazzling
achievements of the mechanical and other sciences, we still speak about
ourselves as if it were we, as living organisms, who were continuing to
evolve. But, truth to tell, it is nothing of the sort. Even in the
sphere of intellectual powers, we are miserably below standards already
achieved.
To the bulk of unobservant and unthinking mankind, this state of affairs
is largely hidden; because, while science increases the efficiency of
our extra-corporeal equipment, it has also, _pari passu_ with our
degeneration, provided us with the means of keeping our corporeal
equipment going. Almost as fast as we have wanted them, the sciences of
chemistry and of medicine have given us the means of replacing lost
parts of our bodies, and of supplementing failing functions. A whole
sphere of activity—indeed a whole world of interests and ingenuity—has
been created by modern physical degeneracy. The patent-medicine,
patent-appliance, and patent-food industries, alone represent some of
the largest going concerns in the land. In fact, it might be said that
these industries themselves are but the reverse of the medal
representing our fundamental values. Where you have values such as ours,
you will necessarily possess a huge and flourishing medical profession
and a vast army of dentists, chemists, and osteopaths, daily directing
their wits towards making good the increasing defects of the human body.
You will also be compelled to have your patent-drug, patent-appliance,
and patent-food magnates, who, taking advantage of the universal
physiological depravity of their contemporaries, amass large fortunes in
merely offering “salvation” at popular prices to the physiologically
depraved.
To be strictly logical, even the nature of scientific research should be
added to the consequences of a people’s ruling values; because the
ultimate goal of scientific investigation is necessarily determined by
the desiderata implicit in values. If the values of an age tend more and
more towards tolerating bodily defects, and towards securing
satisfaction merely by patching or artificially replacing them,
scientific research will concentrate ever more and more on those
discoveries which promise either to alleviate physical degeneration or
else to conceal it. And, as fast as we slough off further parts of our
bodies, or lose further powers of functioning, we may rely upon science
being ever ready with artificial aids, to make our lives just possible
notwithstanding.
In this way, _values direct science_. If we altered our ruling values,
we should find that the direction of science was also altered, because
the desiderata always implicit in ruling values would then have changed.
“But,” cry the modernists _à outrance_, “if science is ever ready, and
will continue to be ever ready, with artificial aids to make good the
losses in our corporeal equipment and efficiency, why all this fuss and
pother? Why worry?”
Now this view, tacitly held or openly professed by the bulk of modern
mankind to-day, would be all very well, and would justify a certain
modicum of optimistic contentment, if we could act and think, and
continue to reproduce our kind in a desirable form, independently of our
bodies. But, unfortunately for the modern man, this is impossible. Not
only that, but a good many of life’s joys—some of its greatest and most
lasting—are connected precisely with the reproduction of our kind, with
the maintenance of our bodily efficiency, and with happy functioning.
The moment physiological serenity goes, the moment a function ceases to
be a pleasure, the body becomes the most tyrannical and insistent
pleader against Life. It constantly sets the most formidable
question-mark against the value of Life.
The pleasures of the healthily functioning body are very real pleasures.
They constitute a very large proportion of the sum of joy on earth. And
nothing can be more obvious than that Nature means them to contribute
largely to this sum of joy. To eat with false teeth is not as pleasant
as to eat with natural teeth. Artificially to promote either appetite or
digestion soon proves but a poor and delusive imitation of Nature’s way.
To wear glasses is not as good as to be without them. Neither is the
face or the expression of one who always wears glasses as attractive as
the face and the expression of one who does not. To a mother, the
hand-feeding of her infant child is not the unforgettable experience
that breast-feeding is. And, in the deepest and most rapturous
transports of love, where a large proportion of the ecstasy depends upon
the bodily savouriness and sweetness of the couple involved, natural and
normal physiological equipment is of paramount importance. A clean
mouth, full of natural teeth, firmly set in unimpaired gums; a clean
fresh tongue, not even slightly furred by incipient chronic indigestion;
a sweet breath, and the natural fragrance of a healthily functioning
body!—who knows love as Nature intended him to know it if he has not
known these things?
And yet, how many modern men and women ever can know love in this form?
How is it possible?
Can it be wondered at, therefore, that modern mankind as a whole are
beginning to suspect that the _joie de vivre_ is grossly over-rated? Can
it be wondered at that the bulk of mankind are beginning to feel that
life can well be lived without love?
This, then, is the disillusionment that follows on the heels of the
values directing our scientific progress. While, through them, we are
content to exist despite our defective bodily equipment, we are
gradually weaned from our love of life and from our deepest convictions
concerning the value of life. For not only does our debilitated or
incomplete body itself give us but second-rate joys, but the science
that comes to our aid offers us only substitutes, and we are apt to
measure the value of life according to those second-rate joys, and
according also to the level of happiness attained by means of these
substitutes.
Thus the values that revile both life and the body in the end succeed in
making both life and the body vile.
So much for the æsthetic side, which is important, because life is very
largely an æsthetic phenomenon. But there are even more serious
consequences than these. For instance, it is highly improbable that our
vitality and intellectuality can fail to suffer depreciation when once
normal functioning has been interfered with. So intricate and
inter-dependent are the various parts and functions of the superior
mammal’s body, that it is hardly possible to disturb the balance of one
part or one function without impairing the whole. Thus it is not
unlikely, in these latter days when ninety-nine per cent. of the
population of highly civilized countries is suffering from some kind of
defective function or bodily part, that all of us are sub-human in
spirit as well as in body. It is even conceivable that the hopeless pass
at which we are arriving in Western civilization is but the inevitable
outcome of our chronic sub-normality or sub-humanity, and that nothing
but a reform of our bodies can possibly help us out.
Nor is it any longer valid to argue that this view is materialistic. We
thank Dean Inge _en passant_ for his able reply to those who, objecting
to the standpoint that has just been advanced, are ready to accuse those
who hold it of materialism.
At all events we can honestly deny that we are materialists, and do not
believe that we are any the less religious or spiritual for having
fought hard for our heterodox religious views through years of
metaphysical study and thought. Secondly, we repudiate the suggestion
that to preach the care and maintenance of the beauty and health of the
body is necessarily material; for it is the invalid, the sick man, the
man of this age, who calls himself “well,” who is constantly reminded of
his body. A healthily functioning body can be forgotten. Thanks to its
serenity, its muteness in efficiency, it allows its owner to indulge in
every variety of spiritual exercise.
While, therefore, we accuse the values which for centuries have cast a
slur on life and the human body of being the cause of modern decadence,
we do not thereby proclaim ourselves either irreligious or
materialistic; for, let those who would too hastily presume both our
irreligiosity and materialism remember that there are other religions
besides that which first created the body-despising values to which we
allude.
And, when we challenge the modern age to prove that it can be anything
else than materialistic, with its countless millions of sick or
deficient bodies; when we challenge it to show in what manner the two
thousand years of body-contempt and body-neglect have led us to a
loftier spirituality, the very grossness of modern life, the very
besottedness of the modern mind, and the very system of government in
the modern world, _Democracy_, which is materialism in politics
(estimating the value of an idea or policy by measuring the
_body-weight_ behind it, not by measuring the authority, ability, or
competence behind it)—all rise before us in their ugliness, leaving us
but few qualms concerning the danger that we, of our persuasion, run, of
falling into materialism by questioning the values that have brought us
thus far.
The masses are materialistic to-day because, in the first place, lowered
vitality and defective functioning depress the spirit and dull the wits,
thus unfitting the mind for all lofty pursuits; and, secondly, because
at every moment of their lives their attention is either riveted upon
their own halting functions or else distracted by similar disturbances
in those among whom their lot is cast.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
THE PRESENT POSITION OF WOMEN
(I) THE UNMARRIED
WE have seen that the disillusionment that dogs the heels of the values
directing our civilization and its alleged progress consists in our
ultimate discovery that Life, as seen through the optics of our impaired
and science-aided bodies, appears to have lost a substantial portion of
its reputed value. The _joie de vivre_ becomes an antiquated myth, no
longer a present experience.
If, however, this is true from the standpoint of modern men, how very
much more true it must be from that of modern women! For, if it is right
to claim that some of Life’s greatest and most lasting joys are
connected with the maintenance of the species, woman, whose share in
reproduction is much greater than man’s, must necessarily be the greater
sufferer when the corporeal equipment of the race becomes defective.
In these degenerate days of fourth-rate bodily joys, therefore, when the
corporeal equipment of man and woman has to be scientifically completed
with the help of elaborate extra-corporeal aids, it is among the women
of the species that we should expect to find the greatest revolt against
the old notions concerning Life, Motherhood, and Domesticity.
For man’s degeneracy in itself contributes an added woe to woman’s
impaired physical life, by depriving her of the very extra-corporeal
equipment (supplied by Nature herself in this case) for the urgent needs
of her body. Or, if it does not altogether deprive her of this
equipment, it gives it to her in a form so atonic, fireless, and
un-ideal that the misery of modern women, even when they are married, is
very great. Hence, we believe, the huge development of the modern novel,
the demand for which has been created almost entirely by the female
population. For only people whose lives are unsatisfying endeavour to
enjoy life vicariously in the unreal world of fiction.
Perhaps it was the recognition of this fact, that the value of life for
woman depends to a great extent on her physical efficiency and health,
which led the ancients to feel so much concern about the physical
condition of their womenfolk, and this probably explains why such
careful instructions are to be found in sacred books—like that of Manu,
for instance—regarding a father’s duty towards his daughters.
Manu goes so far as to say: “Reprehensible is the father who gives not
his daughter in marriage at the proper time.” And he adds: “To a
distinguished handsome suitor should a father give his daughter.... But
the maiden, though marriageable, should rather stop in her father’s
house until death than that he should ever give her to a man destitute
of good qualities.”
In _Ecclesiasticus_ we read the following exhortation to fathers: “Hast
thou daughters? Have a care of their body.”[3]
Footnote 3:
It might be argued against the line taken in the Introduction that
here is an instance of the care of the body in the literature from
which the body-despising values are alleged to hail. But this is a
misunderstanding. Not only is _Ecclesiasticus_ apocryphal, but also,
as everybody must know, the Old Testament and the New are quite
different in their attitude towards the body. In the New Dispensation,
and certainly in traditional Christianity, it is never suggested, as
it is in Judaic law, that a man who is bodily defective defiles the
sanctuary of the Lord when he approaches it. This healthy attitude to
the body, which constantly recurs in the Old Testament, can be found
neither in the New Testament nor in historical Christianity.
And in Aristophanes we find the following sentiment expressed by a
married woman: “Καὶ Θἠμέτερον μὲν ἐᾶτε; περὶ των δὲ χορῶν ἐν τοῖς
θαλάμοις γηρασχουσῶν ἀνιῶμαι” (But do not let us complain about
ourselves. What breaks my heart is the sight of all these young girls
who will grow old sleeping alone.) Aristophanes, _Lysistrata_, ll.
592-3.
Evidently these exhortations and sentiments hail from an age preceding
that in which the body-despising values were created, for they breathe a
different atmosphere, and ring strangely in our ears.
As late as the sixteenth century in England, when, it may be supposed, a
vestige of the old pagan spirit still lingered among our people, there
is indeed a tender allusion to the female body; and, strange to say, it
occurs in our _Book of Common Prayer_. But the very oddness of the
sentiment to our modern ears shows how completely foreign it is to the
atmosphere created by our values, and we may be sure that it is seldom
read, or, if read, seldom understood, at a modern marriage service. It
is as follows:
“For the husband is the head of the wife ... and he is the
Saviour of the body.”
We have lost all sympathy with this attitude. We no longer consider the
physical side of our daughters’ and sisters’ lives. We may wish them to
have a “good time”; or, if we are poor, we wish them to be
self-supporting. But bodily considerations scarcely enter into the first
wish, and into the second—never!
Coupled, however, with our attitude of callous indifference to the young
female’s body is also the increasing doubt which is spreading among all
classes regarding the actual value of the normal and natural life for
woman. Impaired physical efficiency has turned so many of the joys and
beauties of the natural life to pain and horror that there is no longer
that certainty which Manu felt about the desirability of motherhood for
women. And, even when motherhood is not regarded as a greatly over-rated
pleasure, the mates by means of whom motherhood can be experienced are,
as a rule, such poor shadows of men that the whole of Manu’s attitude
has begun to be discredited. The Feminist Movement, in fact, is actively
engaged in discrediting it, and that is why the Feminist Movement itself
may be regarded as a remote off-shoot of the body-despising values.
Indeed, things have come to such a pass in this country that at present
rich and poor alike are far more concerned about giving their daughters
a calling than a mate; and, when once this has been done, it is felt
that parents have discharged their responsibility.
The most convincing demonstration of the prevalence of this attitude was
the uproar that arose a year or two ago, when one or two imprudent
journalists inadvertently referred to our 2,000,000 excess of women over
men as “surplus women.” The daily press was immediately flooded by
indignant letters from women of all classes, protesting that, as a large
proportion of these 2,000,000 were self-supporting and ample room
existed for the remainder in our industries and professions, it was
absurd to speak of them as “surplus.” Articles soon followed, in which
the same views were expressed, though possibly more magisterially. But
there was no reference to the bodily destiny of these 2,000,000
females—not a hint that the word “surplus” might have some relevancy if
they were looked at in relation to the available males, or that a
civilization which condemns one-sixth of its adult females to celibacy
must be very wrong!
It was for all the world as if being self-supporting and useful in
industry or the professions were the sole and unique object of human
life, and nobody seemed to see that, in this case, there was no
conceivable reason why human beings should have been created or become
male and female. Of course the howl of indignation that arose at the
word “surplus” was greatest among those women who are frankly hostile to
men, and who are keenest about making the bodily destiny of their sex a
matter of no consequence. Nevertheless, the cruelty of the attitude
adopted by all was never actually felt as cruelty by anyone, because the
very people responsible for those articles and letters would have been
the last to suspect themselves, or to be suspected by others, of any
trace of inhumanity. All they wanted to imply, and wished everybody else
to believe, was that a human life can be full and can be lived
adequately _without that_!
And yet to anyone who reveres the body, and who knows how the spirit is
tortured by a body unsatisfied and neglected, how thoroughly unfounded
does this claim appear! A thwarted instinct does not meekly subside. It
seeks compensation and damages for its rebuff. True sublimation, except
through whole-hearted and unremitting religious practices, is rare. What
then is the fate of these 2,000,000 women? Can we reckon with certainty
on their all being so much below even the common standard of their
married sisters that they will have no instincts to thwart? There is an
inclination abroad to adopt this comforting view. So accustomed have we
become to the spectacle of our omnibuses, trams, and trains being filled
each morning with unmarried female workers, that we are easily led to
the erroneous conclusion that, as time goes on, these female workers
will grow as used to filling their lives by means of self-support as we
have grown accustomed to seeing them.
And, indeed, there would be something to be said for this view if, by a
kind of unemotional parthenogenesis, these spinster workers could breed
their own kind, each generation of whom would be ever more perfectly
adapted. But unfortunately this cannot be so. People forget that each
generation of them is born from mothers who, in an uninterrupted line
reaching right back to our anthropoid ancestors, have filled their lives
with something more than self-support and business usefulness. Each
generation of these unmated women-workers is born from mothers who must
have known the ardent embrace of a lover, the ecstasy of consummated
love, and the clinging devotion of adoring offspring. No break can have
occurred in this long dynasty of love, otherwise they—the women-workers
themselves—would not be there. It is impossible at present to rear a
species of human beings to lovelessness as you can rear a breed of dogs
to retrieving or sheep-minding. Love must always have existed one step
back. And it is this fact, that these unmated women-workers are all so
fatally close to love, all such near blood-relations of love, that makes
lovelessness such an ordeal and a trial to them—an ordeal and a trial no
human being who has not sinned against society should be made to suffer.
Thus the modern world is inclined to be very cruel to the young unmated
woman. For, while everything is done to facilitate her self-support and
usefulness, no provision is made either to ensure the sublimation of her
mating instincts (a problem of almost insuperable difficulty now, though
solved with success in the Middle Ages), or to give her the chance of
expressing them without dishonour and disgrace. On the contrary, the
whole tendency is to ignore, to shelve, and to conceal that aspect of
her life; and thousands of bitter or sub-normal women, whose thwarted or
deficient passions have unsaddled their natural love of man, are now
only too eager to assure her and everybody else that human beings can
well get on and be happy without sexual expression—in fact that a spirit
and a body can quite easily play the life-long rôle of a disembodied
spirit.
All this does not mean that the solution of the unmated woman problem is
an easy and obvious one, which modern people are too blind to see. But
it does mean that the very first step towards its proper solution can
never be taken as long as we persist in arguing and behaving as if a
full life can be lived by merely paying one’s way.
In 1921 the population of England and Wales amounted to 37,885,242
persons, of whom 19,803,022 were females. Of this female population
4,302,568 consisted of children under twelve, and the remainder,
amounting to 15,501,454, were divided up as follows:
9,070,538 were married or widowed or divorced, and 6,403,916 were
single. Of the married 1,106,433, and of the single 4,000,000 (to be
precise, 3,914,127) were occupied in some form of work, thus making a
total of 5,020,560 women-workers, 3,000,000 of whom were employed in
industry alone.
These figures give some idea of the formidable development of women’s
employment within recent years, nor is there any sign whatsoever that
the movement is likely to abate. Those who are aware of the harm that
modern industry and commercial offices have done to the spirit and
bodies of men for generations, by converting them into little more than
machine-minders or adding-machines, exercising few if any of their
highest faculties, may deplore the fact that the sex which hitherto had
still to a large extent escaped these dehumanizing labours should now be
enrolled in such large numbers to accomplish them. The last check on the
complete besotment of our people seems thus to have vanished. But, in
view of the existing atmosphere and tendencies, there seems to be little
hope of a reaction.
The 4,000,000 spinster workers alone represent a formidable army; and,
when it is remembered that this vast legion of single women not only
compete with and directly replace male labour, thus reducing still more
their chances of marriage, but are also drawn away from home and from
the many arts that could be learnt there, we cannot help feeling alarmed
at the possible consequences of the development we are witnessing.
The duties and virtues of the home are almost all connected with the
body and its care—sewing, cooking, and the nurture of the young. All
these arts are gradually being lost; and, when they have to be performed
by inexperienced hands, they are performed badly.
Meanwhile, abetting this movement and rendering it ever more
practicable, there are hundreds and thousands of commercial and
voluntary corporations whose whole energies are directed towards taking
the home-arts out of the hands of women. Science, as usual, following
the hints implicit in values, has come to the assistance of our female
population deficient in domestic skill and knowledge. The art of cooking
is gradually becoming simplified into a mere fool’s game, and in its
place we are being deluged by innumerable patent and proprietary
products, the preparation of which requires no thought and no trouble.
These products are very largely injurious to the bodies of those who
live on them, but, as they leave the housewife ample leisure to gad
about or else to earn money outside the home, no one complains. Quick
gravy-makers, pudding- and cake-powders, tinned foods of every
description all ready for consumption, custards, porridges, and jellies
that require only a few minutes’ cooking, jams and preserves, and a
multitude of other artificial aids to replace, though not to equal, the
dishes of former days, now compose the normal contents of almost every
working-class and middle-class market-bag. Never have the country’s food
and its preparation been in a more deplorable condition than they are
to-day. Nevertheless, so strong is the tradition to neglect bodily
concerns, that all this vast machinery for supplementing traditional
knowledge, skill, labour, and good food, in the home, has grown up in
our midst without a word of protest from anyone.
As regards the lot of infants and children, so completely broken is the
tradition which, once upon a time, was handed down from mother to
daughter, that now child-welfare-workers in every town in England,
equipped with but a smattering of sound knowledge on the subject, have
to teach the women of the masses the arts they have had no opportunity
of acquiring. In the departments of dress-making, millinery, and
lingerie, it is just the same. Together with the loss of skill and
knowledge in the home, the supply of ready-mades from outside increases
with leaps and bounds, and huge drapery-businesses, carried on in
palatial premises, now line all our leading thoroughfares in a
practically unbroken frontage.
Thus, even if the girls and young women of the nation who are or who are
not eligible for marriage were to remain at home, there would now be
little for them to learn, and still less for them to do; and the recent
Girl Guide Movement is the best possible proof that this fact has
already been recognized.
Meanwhile, it may be asked what it is that these 4,000,000 learn away
from their homes. What do they acquire in exchange for their lost arts?
Those who have not actually adopted dress-making, millinery, or lingerie
as an occupation, have, as a rule, acquired only the knowledge necessary
for running a certain machine—a cutter, a folder, a binder, a stamper,
or a typewriter, etc. Or else they have learnt to wait in restaurants,
sell goods across a counter, or keep books. Only about one million of
them are either domestic servants or hospital nurses.
Those engaged in industry or commerce who remain at their work and do
not marry are at least prevented from passing on their acquired
besotment to the next generation; but, meantime, no one inquires about
their bodies, and the general feeling is that a girl withered and broken
by long years of typing is not a tragic figure because in the first
place her career has been morally unimpeachable, and secondly it has
brought neither herself nor anyone else any pleasure.
In the better classes, teaching and the professions obtain the bulk of
the recruits each year,[4] and girls are now trained quite unselectively
from earliest childhood with a view to entering these occupations, as if
it were taken for granted that they would never marry.
Footnote 4:
In 1923 in England and Wales there were 22 women barristers, and 66
law students; 5 women solicitors; 76,117 Government officials, and
2,000 doctors; and, in 1921, 93,987 elementary and secondary
school-teachers.
Not all of the 6,403,916 spinsters—whether workers or not—are doomed to
spinsterhood. As we have seen, the excess of females over males in
England and Wales is only 1,720,902.[5] But unless they attempt to
emigrate, these odd 2,000,000 must certainly remain unmated, and even if
emigration could now be organized on a much bigger scale than hitherto,
they could hardly be satisfactorily disposed of.
Footnote 5:
Although, however, the actual excess of women amount to 1,720,902, the
number of women actually doomed to spinsterhood is much greater, owing
first to the cases of celibacy among the available men and secondly to
the marriage of widows.
The self-governing Dominions cannot absorb more than 432,284[6] in all,
and even if they could, it is doubtful whether such a large number of
girls could be induced to leave their native country. Why should they,
when almost every one of them considers her chance of matrimony at home
as at least equal to her sister’s or neighbour’s?
Footnote 6:
This figure represents the excess of men over women in Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in 1921.
Dame Muriel Talbot, O.B.E., writing on the effect of Dominion life, is
not so very encouraging either. “For the woman,” she says, “it means
only too often an unduly heavy burden of work since there are so few at
hand to help.”[7]
Footnote 7:
See _The Woman’s Year Book_, 1923.
Owing to the degeneracy and unattractiveness of modern man, a certain
noble and estimable proportion of these 6,000,000 will of course refrain
from any attempt at marriage. Still faithful to the lost and antiquated
values that once led people to respect and care for their bodies, they
will feel secretly that their bodies deserve something better than the
mate the twentieth century can offer them; and, although they may be
fully and admirably equipped for happy motherhood, this noble and very
small minority will turn nauseated away from it in order to become
absorbed in interests that will help them to forget. These are the
greatest sufferers among modern women, and their unmated condition
constitutes our greatest national loss.
But the great majority will be too thoroughly unsophisticated, too
completely immersed in the values of their day, to see anything wrong or
odd in degeneration. These, like the 9,000,000 already mated, will
strive after marriage and the home. They will insist on having their
third-rate or fourth-rate bodily ecstasies with the inferior men of the
age, and on rearing their fourth-rate children. And, if their hopes are
disappointed, either through their inability to find a mate or owing to
the rude awakening that too often comes with modern matrimony, they will
become either wretched spinsters or disgruntled wives. We shall consider
their fate as wives, however, in the next chapter.
There are also a large number whose bodies are so conspicuously inferior
in passion and equipment that they will be indifferent to marriage
through sheer physiological apathy. Looking at life through the optics
of their atonic or badly functioning bodies, they will declare love
unnecessary to human well-being, and the natural life a wholly
antiquated desideratum. They will lack the desire even for fourth-rate
bodily experiences, and scorn all such experiences in consequence. They
will boast that they are “above sex.” To them the Feminist reformers
will point triumphantly in refutation of all the arguments of those who,
like ourselves, claim that sound and desirable women cannot be happy
unmated. And the more simple and unsuspecting among mankind, looking
upon these adapted unmated women, will begin to believe that the
Feminists are right. As the number of these women increases every year,
and, in their systematic depreciation of the value of life, they are
joined and supported by thousands of disillusioned married women who
also have become slanderers of love and man, the ranks of those who
scoff at marriage and motherhood as the only satisfactory calling for
women, swell with imposing rapidity.
With two million spinsters, and—if we reckon the disgruntled married
women—with probably two or three million more women distributed all over
England, who are prepared to malign both man and life and to cause the
effect of their thwarted impulses to be felt in a thousand ways, a good
deal of misery and friction must necessarily arise from modern
conditions which it is extremely difficult to relieve.
But the most serious aspect of the spinster and embittered wife
question, from the standpoint of the nation’s life, is the compensation
which, consciously or unconsciously, these unmated women and revolted
wives, particularly the wealthy and leisured ones, seek for their
thwarted instincts. The mother’s fostering care never having been
experienced, its joys and thrills are sought along other channels. The
lust of exercising power becomes a consuming passion, and its owner is
usually quite indifferent as to the means she uses to express it. Any
movement, any policy, any kind of interference may supply the
opportunity, and the merits of the case will always be subordinate to
the urgent need of alleviating the hunger for compensatory power. Thus
influences and forces are let loose which have about as much wisdom in
them as accident alone can be expected to introduce into any lustful
action; and, all the while, the loftiest motives will be professed for
the activities pursued. The very natural discontent which arises from
thwarted instincts will also tend to express itself in many instances,
particularly among the disillusioned married, as a bitter hatred of man;
and, as I shall show later, in its extreme form as an unconscious
jealousy of healthy young women and happily married women. This will
lead to an attempt to wean the latter from the lure of love and men.
Signs are already visible which show that such a movement is on foot,
and, although these Lysistratas of the modern world have not
Lysistrata’s patriotic motives, this will not make them any the less
anxious to achieve their end.
At all events, from the imperfectly concealed triumph with which such
people, particularly the female working-woman leaders, will tell you
that in 1923 700,000 of the 5,020,560 women-workers were _directly
replacing males_ in industry alone, it is impossible not to read the
signs of hostility to the male in their general outlook; and, to examine
their literature, is to become convinced of it, careful as they are to
cover it up.
Among the organizers of women-movements to-day, there can be no question
that there is this note of hostility to the male; and the reason of it
is that women-movements are largely led either by spinsters or else by
unhappy married women.
Now the attitude of Feminism towards our vast army of spinsters and
disgruntled wives is that of Socialist organizations all over the world
towards discontented labour elements. It is one in which the latent
discontent is turned to every possible advantage for the Cause. Feminism
offers no bodily solution of the problem presented by our unmated women
and our disillusioned wives, and it escapes from the responsibility of
so doing by consistently regarding the whole crowd as nothing more than
disembodied spirits. It does not even recognize that the muddle in which
we now find ourselves is chiefly due to physical degeneration: for that
it is too Puritanical. All it does is to promote and intensify the very
tendencies which have brought us to our present pass, and to use the
power obtained from its supporters to express in every possible way,
legislatively and otherwise, its general hostility to man and its
radical hatred of the bodily side of life.
Meanwhile, it misses no opportunity of appealing to the vanity and
mistaken ambition of its potential victims, in order to lure even the
normal and desirable among modern young women in ever greater numbers
into neutral pursuits and interests only fit for neuters. And it sets to
work with a conscience so clean, with such a profound conviction of its
rectitude, and above all with such a great display of moral indignation,
that the more guileless sections of the modern world, always taken in by
moral indignation, are almost led to believe that Feminism is a natural
and desirable evolutionary development, on which all hope for the future
depends.
Why does Feminism act with a conscience so clean and a conviction so
profound of its rectitude?—Because, behind it, it feels the support of
the body-despising values, which tell it that Puritanism is right, that
sex-equality is at last a fact owing to the marked degeneration of man,
and that man, as the traditional enemy of female “virtue,” is _the_
enemy _par excellence_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
THE PRESENT POSITION OF WOMEN
(II) THE MARRIED
WE shall now examine a little more closely the lot of the 9,000,000 odd
women in England and Wales who are or who have been married, and
endeavour to find out whether similar tendencies to those already
discovered in the previous chapter are making their influence felt in
the matrimonial life of the country.
Attention has already been called to the fact that, almost as fast as
bodily parts or functions are lost, science comes forward with aids that
enable us to carry on notwithstanding; and also that these substitutes,
combined with the third-rate bodily experiences secured by our impaired
physique, make us question the value of both life and love.
Nowhere, however, are the effects of imperfect functioning or incomplete
bodies more acutely felt than in the married state; and that is why, if
science had recognized the importance of securing happiness for this
state, it would have left no stone unturned in order to restore to us
the natural conditions on which happiness depends, instead of giving us
ever more and more efficient substitutes.
In our present world the effect of the body-despising values enters as a
disturber of our bliss into almost every aspect of matrimony.
It enters first in the form of our impaired physiques, and affects the
female partner in two ways: it depreciates the quality of her most
important _natural_ extra-corporeal equipment, _man_, and therefore the
quality of her joy; and it further depreciates that joy through her own
indifferent bodily condition.
It enters next in the form of Puritanism, which, thanks to its
associated fear of, and incompetence in, sexual matters, arrests the
male partner’s impulses, causing him to hesitate, flounder, and
frequently to fail, whereby the ideal relationship of two ardent lovers
is marred, if not destroyed; and it usually succeeds in preventing them
from attaining the top wave of ecstasy by imposing inhibitions against
perfectly instinctive desires.
Finally, it enters by rendering ever more and more harassing for the
woman the natural consequences of conjugal intimacy—gestation,
parturition, and lactation; and by converting these once beautiful and
enthralling functions into things of ugliness and pain.
We cannot here discuss the many ways in which our bodily disorders and
defects interfere with the happy congress of man and wife. Suffice it to
say, however, that science already gives a good deal of assistance even
here, and is likely to perform a good deal more.
At all events, this much we may say without impropriety—that, as fast as
Puritanism and bodily imperfections together have conspired to cast a
slur on sex by converting the congress of the human couple from an
experience of magic beauty into an ordeal of both painful embarrassment
and actual pain, not only have a certain number of women begun to think
that conception without congress would be a god-send, but a scientific
technique, which realizes this desideratum, has also been brought to
ever greater efficiency. Artificial impregnation—the scientific aid
again!—is now a thoroughly familiar operation, frequently performed;
and, if the present tendencies continue, and the body-despising values
culminate in their extreme logical consequence—the elimination of the
body—there can be no doubt that it will become ever more and more
customary.
In the limited space at our disposal, however, we must concentrate upon
gestation, parturition, and lactation in this chapter, more particularly
as they form so important a part of woman’s share in married life.
Now it may be stated straight away that there are no human functions
that have got into a more alarming state of abnormality and muddle than
gestation, parturition, and lactation. Indeed, so great are the
divergences from Nature in the two latter functions, that it is no
exaggeration to say that, all hope of ever recovering normal conditions
having long since been abandoned, all persons have now resigned
themselves to an almost complete reliance on artificial aids. In the
middle and so-called “upper” classes instruments and anæsthetics are now
very nearly the rule in helping the function of parturition, while among
the poorer classes they are very common. And in regard to lactation, all
kinds of unnatural food, including, of course, cow’s milk, take the
place of breast-feeding.
The doctors, the nurses, the mothers, and the whole population have, we
declare, resigned themselves to the modern conditions of difficult and
scientifically aided childbirth; but it would be more strictly accurate
to say that they have meekly prostrated themselves before a _fait
accompli_; for, as far as we have been able to judge, no attempt on a
grand scale has ever yet been made to ascertain whether the present
difficulties are as hopelessly inevitable as they seem, or whether a
more normal method of functioning might not be recovered.
The ugly circumstances of modern childbirth, mitigated to some extent
only by a liberal use of anæsthetics, are now sufficient to intimidate
any young woman who happens to reflect, before marriage, on her future
prospects; while to those already married they constitute a heavy
lowering cloud, which hardly ever disperses until the climacteric at
last puts an end to all anxiety. Stated in the most moderate terms,
these ugly circumstances at least add to the arguments which, in our
Puritanical and Feminist atmosphere, accumulate year by year against
both the body and the sexual life; and for this reason alone, if for no
other, it is important for us to examine them and to see how, or
whether, they can be mitigated.
The curious part of it is that, here, we are not confronted by
degeneration or malformation nearly to the extent that some people
suppose; but by ignorance, lack of initiative in the medical profession,
and the foolish superstitions of all the chief actors in the muddle—the
expectant mothers, the doctors, and the nurses.
A certain percentage of births still takes place each year under normal
conditions—that is to say, without anæsthetics or instruments; but even
of these it is safe to say that they are accompanied by much more pain
than can possibly be natural; while, owing to circumstances quite
independent of the mother’s bodily condition, even these cases often
receive quite unnecessary scientific aid.
The circumstances that cause doctors to interfere more and more
frequently with confinements that promise to be normal are the
following: In the well-to-do classes, _the extreme busyness of the
doctor_, on the one hand, _which makes him disinclined to wait for
Nature to do her work_; and, on the other, his interested relationship
to his patient, which makes it almost necessary for him to appear as her
champion. By encouraging the patient to be put to sleep and to allow the
process to be hurried, the doctor thus kills two birds with one stone.
After only a few hours’ labour, therefore, he will employ anæsthetics,
and the result is that what might have been a fairly normal confinement,
free from anæsthesia and instruments, becomes a serious operation, in
which damage is frequently inflicted on the young mother.
In the poorer classes the same thing happens, except that poor women
often go to some public institution to be confined. It should not be
forgotten, however, that young and aspiring doctors have to acquire some
practice with the obstetric forceps, and that it is precisely in homes
and hospitals that this practice can be obtained. Instead of its being
the excessive busyness of the doctor that leads to the hasty and
unnecessary use of instruments, therefore, it is now the circumstance
that the woman may find herself in a maternity-home or hospital. And the
tragic part of it is that the demonstrating surgeon in such cases, far
from electing an abnormal pregnancy for his exhibition, deliberately
chooses the most normal of his patients, because of the greater ease
with which the demonstration can then be made. Thus, even when Nature is
most willing and modern women are most normal, natural functioning is
spurned and rebuffed. Such cases, however, are possible only in an
atmosphere that has long been infected with body-despising prejudices.
In no other atmosphere would the doctors dare to behave in this way.
At all events, among both the rich and the poor, normal confinements are
becoming increasingly rare, and we shall now try to discover why, except
in case of obvious abnormality, this is so; and why, moreover, even in
normal confinements there is always, or almost always, the alleged
“sorrow” or excessive pain of biblical tradition.
Provisionally we suggest the following reasons for the difficulties of
parturition among modern women, and for the fact that nothing is done to
restore more normal functioning:
(=a=) _The absurd superstition that our heads are getting larger and
that the pelves of women are getting smaller._ Doctors are persuaded
that the difficulty of modern childbirth must be due to “Progress.” And,
since “Progress” is erroneously connected in their own and most people’s
minds with the belief that men are growing more intelligent (which quite
obviously they are not), the facile conclusion is reached that, as our
brains must be growing larger, our heads must follow suit. It is hardly
necessary to say that this is sheer nonsense, and no more than an
indolent excuse for the Conservative stagnation of the medical
brotherhood. The heads of modern people are certainly not larger than
the heads of their ancestors ten thousand years ago (_vide_ Keith’s
_Antiquity of_ _Man_); and as to the shrinking of women’s hips, this
also is an invention. It is certainly found, but only where the pelvis
is rachitic, or where undue strains on the thighs in early childhood (in
violent games, etc.) have led to a premature stiffening of the fleshy,
and a premature ossification of the bony, parts. At all events, it is
much less common than is usually supposed; and, in any case, it is very
seldom that there is any disproportion between the sizes of the foetus
and the pelvis. See, however, how convenient the explanation
is—Increasing brains, larger heads, and shrinking pelves!—The doctors,
shrugging their shoulders before this apparently vicious circle, can
quietly resign themselves, _à la_ Walrus and Carpenter, to a permanent
engagement as artificial functionaries to supersede a perfectly natural
human function; and, what is more, they need feel no dread about growing
thinner or poorer themselves as time goes on, nor trouble to discover
how normal functioning can be recovered.
(=b=) _The still more absurd superstition that a baby should be 8 or 9
lbs at birth._ This is universal in England, and whether it is the daily
newspapers over the birth of a prince, or a poor woman’s neighbours over
the birth of a new pauper, everybody is jubilant if an 8-lb baby is
born. It may have required a team from Harley Street to deliver it, and
it may, and usually does, lose weight after birth; but all this does not
matter: nobody cares, nobody troubles to think, provided that it has
registered the full 8 lbs in the first hour of its existence.
Unfortunate women, permanently injured by instruments, smile
triumphantly over the thought that they have had a baby-boy weighing 9
lbs. But what can we expect when their doctors encourage them in these
lunatic transports?
(=c=) _The belief, deeply rooted in the modern and lay minds, that it is
God’s decree that children should be brought forth in sorrow._ Having
rejected the _Genesis_ version of the origin of man and all living
creatures, it is remarkable that the modern world, led by its men of
science, should take so seriously a curse mentioned in the first book of
Moses, which, even if its effect be admitted as possible, had probably
only a tribal or national application when it was uttered. And it is
still more odd that they should regard us and our womenfolk as still
lying under its spell. For, apart from the fact that there are savage
and semi-civilized tribes still in existence with whom childbirth is not
nearly such a sorrowful event as some might suppose, but a simple and
easy function (_teste_ almost every ethnological work), why should we
assume that the Jewish women, to whom the curse originally applied, were
normal or lived normally? From our knowledge of the Syrian Jewess, it
seems highly probable that, if her remote ancestors resembled her, their
confinements must have been extremely sorrowful. But what has that to do
with us? This never seems to have occurred to the modern medical man;
and, taking the _Genesis_ curse as his motto, he has now solemnly
allowed the agony to be piled up, till it is no longer merely in sorrow,
but almost in tragedy, that children are brought forth—not to mention
the extra-corporeal equipment of instruments, etc. And, why should there
be any limit? When once the principle is admitted, where is the line to
be drawn, particularly if it pays not to draw it? We protest, however,
that even if we admit—which we do not—that there must be “sorrow,” this
can hardly have meant the miserable failure and elaborate scientific
technique which modern medicine has made of parturition in general.
Now, in view of these three articles of faith, not only are the doctors
and the public in an attitude that paralyses all endeavour to effect a
change for the better, but both the doctors and the public have ceased
to ask whether any such change is possible. Having ceased to ask the
question, no effort is made to inquire into the means of achieving the
end it suggests; and, as usual, everything is staked on artificial aids.
Anyone who, like ourselves, asks whether there are not other ways of
overcoming the enormous difficulties of parturition among modern women,
in order to remove this cloud from life and love and restore pleasure to
a natural function, is laughed at.
Nevertheless the present writer continues to ask the question, and for
the following reasons:
For a long time it has seemed to him suspicious that Nature, who is so
uniform in her methods and who with such unfailing consistency has made
all vital functions pleasant, should have made this one conspicuous
exception, particularly in regard to a function linked to the most vital
moment in our lives. Being unsatisfied with the verdict of science on
the subject, therefore, he made inquiries on his own account, and was
not at all surprised to find, not only that a number of existing races
still enjoy infinitely greater ease in parturition than most European
women, but also that, as he expected, there are still to be found among
mankind faint vestiges of that ecstasy which he believes must once have
attended the function in normal circumstances. Even the dreams of some
European women lead the inquirer to suspect the existence of this
ecstasy not so very far back along the racial line. When, however, the
present writer expressed this view in a recent work dealing with the
subject,[8] he provoked the most violent indignation, particularly among
women themselves.
Footnote 8:
See _Woman: A Vindication_ (Constable and Co.: 1923).
After having made a number of observations and experiments on the higher
animals, he discovered not only that parturition is in fact ecstatic
among these animals when in their natural condition, but also that their
ecstasy can quickly be altered to anguish by only the smallest
divergence from the normal in their food during gestation.
Observing animals in a state of nature, moreover, he arrived at this
interesting conclusion, _that their young_, even when the mothers are in
splendid fettle, _are only skin and bone at birth_, that their birth is
an ecstatic function to the mother only when they are in this state, and
that young born in this way not only never lose weight, but grow as
plump and vigorous as could be wished in the first twenty-four hours.
If, however, the gestating mother’s food be so modified _as to make it
unlike the natural food of the species_—for instance, if large
quantities of potatoes, bread, cabbage, and rice-pudding be given to a
female cat, with rations of cooked instead of raw meat—the birth of the
kittens, which are grossly fat, is immensely difficult, and some of them
may be still-born or appear only after long delay in mutilated
fragments.
The present writer has confirmed these facts repeatedly, and they led
him to ask this question: _whether civilized women, even in antiquity,
have not habitually taken the wrong food during gestation, with the
result that their babies have been too fat or too hard in the bone at
birth_?
It is notorious that a small, healthy 6-lb baby frequently flourishes
better than the heavier infant of 8 or 9 lbs; also that, since the
larger baby usually loses weight after birth, its bulk is demonstrably
unnecessary at that stage. What then prevents us from adopting what is
obviously Nature’s plan—the birth of relatively thin and small babies,
through care of the gestating mother’s food?
It is obviously only a question of feeding and hygiene, and of ridding
the public and the medical profession of a number of absurd prejudices:
the rest will necessarily follow if only it be earnestly desired.[9]
Footnote 9:
As the present chapter is being written, we notice with pleasure that
at a conclave of doctors held recently at Bradford, Dr Μ. E.
Mackenzie, of Leeds, put a question to the meeting which showed that
she is evidently on the track of the reforms we recommend; but we were
not surprised to find that the President, Dr J. S. Fairbairn, declared
that he did not take her remarks seriously. (See _British Medical
Journal_, Aug. 16th, 1924).
We feel convinced, from our study of animals, that this is the direction
in which inquiry should be directed, for at least it offers some hope of
an improvement, whereas the elaboration and more persistent use of
artificial aids offers none. Doctors should exert themselves to discover
that ideal gestatory diet which will lead to an infant’s being born
whose weight is from 6 to 6½ lbs, whose body is lean, whose head is
small and not too hard, and who will gain and not lose weight after
birth. But we can hardly refrain from adding that, when once these
food-conditions are found, medical men are likely to discover that they
have much less to do than at present by the bedside of the expectant
mother, and that they will then be invited to delegate their duties to
someone less learned, less expensive, less pressed for time, and
therefore less interested in achieving the result by scientific aids.
Dr Eichholz of Kreuznach, writing in the _Frauenarzt_ as early as 1895,
outlined a system of dieting which he declared produced the results
described above; while Dr Lahmann, who was the first to point out that
our aim should be to obtain smaller and thinner babies, with heads less
hard at birth, experimented with a diet poor in nitrogen, which he
declared was completely successful.
According to Lahmann, it is not only excessive feeding and drinking
during pregnancy which, owing to the natural greed of women and the
sycophantic encouragement of that greed by ignorant doctors, is the
universal error, but the excessive eating of foods rich in protein; and
he recommends a diet rich in food-salts and poor in meat and cereals,
which seems to approximate very well to what one may imagine the food of
primitive mankind to have been.
The compass of this work, however, does not allow us to enter into the
minutiæ of the Lahmann diet. All we wish to emphasize here is that, if
only we can rid our minds of a few ridiculous superstitions and aim at a
natural ideal, the attainment of which cannot be beyond the wit of man,
the probability is that the “sorrow” in which children are brought forth
will be greatly mitigated, if not wholly removed, and much of its
pristine bliss restored to the life of woman and to motherhood.
Since our aim should be the recovery of our belief in the value of life
and love, by improving our bodily functions, we cannot halt at any
difficulty in the way of our success. But success means not only
contesting the sway of the body-despising values, but also fighting the
Conservatism and prejudices of a great profession, which, while it has
great power to-day, can hardly fail to identify its best interests with
a perpetuation and aggravation of our present physical disabilities.
Passing now to lactation, which constitutes one of the chief joys of
motherhood, and which, in its serenity and bliss has in all ages
symbolized the beauty of the feminine virtues, the home, and the family,
it will perhaps not astonish the reader to hear that there is at present
no human function, except parturition, which is more often replaced by
artificial means than this one.
The vast multiplication in recent years of patent infant-foods and
preparations of cow’s milk sufficiently demonstrates the extent to which
modern women are failing in this respect; and, when it is remembered
that this failure is to be observed in all classes, even among those who
cannot plead society obligations as an excuse, the situation appears to
be deplorable enough.
No doubt a certain percentage of this increase in artificial feeding is
due to actual physiological defects; but we must not make too much of
that. Truth to tell, degeneration and defective functioning account for
but a trifling number of those who, every year, have recourse to the
bottle instead of the breast in the feeding of their infants. For, with
few exceptions, lactation can be established in every woman.
The general authoritative opinion seems to be that “when care is
exercised and adequate attention paid to the necessary details, the
glands can in nearly all cases be brought into the required degree of
activity,” and that “if the value of natural feeding were realized, it
can hardly be doubted that the capacity for breast-feeding would be
found to be practically universal among the women of England.” (Dr Janet
E. Lane Claypon).
The enormous popularity of artificial feeding, therefore, must be due to
the increased activities of women of all classes outside the home, which
is one of the most noticeable features of the Women’s Movement, and the
consequent disinclination on their part to undertake the rearing of
their children in the natural manner. Together with the decline in the
function on the one hand, and women’s refusal to suckle on the other,
there has, as usual, arisen both a scientific technique and a host of
substitutes which take the place of mother’s milk; and, in accordance
with our traditional tendencies, we have once more neglected the effort
to restore natural conditions, in order to apply all our ingenuity to
the task of bringing artificial aids to perfection.
Now this would be all very well, and no one could rightly complain, if
the substitutes in this case were more akin to natural conditions than
are most artificial aids. If this were so we might regret, from the
sentimental and the æsthetic standpoints, the evanescence of
breast-feeding, and sympathize _en passant_ with the mothers who were
deprived of it as an experience; but we should be able to advance no
practical reasons why it was to be deplored from the standpoint of human
desirability.
And, indeed, for many years this has been the position. Although doctors
and commercial corporations repeatedly protest that breast-feeding is
best, they are quite ready in the same breath to admit that artificial
feeding can be made “as good as mother’s milk”; and no one is in the
least perturbed when he hears that his own child or that millions of
other babies are being hand-fed. We have even read the work of one
English doctor who smugly proclaims that we shall improve on Nature in
this matter!
Thus, once again, while flagrant abnormalities are becoming the rule
amongst us, science hastens to set our minds at rest by a shower of
artificial aids; and, since we can “carry on,” nothing more is said.
The problem appears to be a simple one, and, to give scientists their
due, they have done little to complicate it. Mother’s milk contains so
much water, so much protein, carbo-hydrates, fat, and mineral salts,
and, when once you have these ingredients in the proper proportions, you
have a synthetic product “as good as mother’s milk.” Indeed, so long
have these ingredients and their quantitative values held the field, to
the exclusion of everything else, that we have come to believe that
cow’s milk or even Allenbury’s is as normal as breast-feeding.
And yet, if we were to undergo a strange and uncommon test hardly ever
applied in highly civilized countries, how quickly would our blind faith
in even the best artificial methods receive a shock! True, sentiment
alone would be responsible for the commotion; but in this case sentiment
would be strangely akin to true knowledge.
Place a human baby at the dug of a cow, a goat, or an ass, as you
sometimes see them placed in semi-civilized countries, and what is it
that you immediately feel? The sight is an offence to the eyes, a
humiliation of our racial pride.—Why?
Instinctively we feel and intellectually we know that Nature makes the
wisest provision for her needs. When, therefore, we see one of our
babies at the dugs of a goat, our sense of fitness is shocked: even our
practical utilitarian prejudices receive a blow. We know instantly that
the baby cannot have been meant to take that milk, because it is a
nobler creature than the goat and its body has tasks and feats to
perform with its food which the kid has not. Above all, it has that huge
brain to develop, which the kid has not. Can it be possible that Nature
could have overlooked that? The human brain is not only larger at birth
than that of any other animal, but its rate of growth is also greater.
Is it conceivable that Nature could have made no special provision for
that?
Hence our sense of degradation and revolt—feelings which somehow are not
provoked when the milk reaches us in a bright glass-bottle, or in a nice
clean tin covered with printed matter—because all the degrading side of
it is then hidden from our view.
The strange part of it, however, is that this sense of degradation and
revolt is based upon fact; for not only on _a priori_ grounds may we
deny that goat’s milk or any other substitute can adequately replace
breast-feeding, but we may also deny it from positive knowledge.
Years ago Dr Biedert showed that the most important differences between
human and cow’s milk were qualitative rather than quantitative. A little
later Dr G. von Bunge confirmed this view; and Dr Halliburton, the great
physiologist, has recently repeated and emphasized it. It is impossible
to enter here into the qualitative differences to which these
authorities refer: suffice it to say that the gravity of the whole
question from our standpoint lies not merely in the greater
digestibility of human milk, but in the conspicuous difference between
human milk and all other substitutes as a brain-developing food. Dr von
Bunge, who calls attention to this point, claims not only that human
milk is more complex than its substitutes, but that in it we find
lecithin bodies in peculiar proportions, which serve for the
construction of the inordinately large human brain.
It is not surprising that this important point should have been
overlooked all this time. As we have already said, materialism is
necessarily the creed of body-despisers. But, if Dr von Bunge’s view is
correct, how severe must have been our loss in intelligence and genius,
precisely owing to the decline in breast-feeding! Certainly the
uncontrollable and increasing stupidity of our governing classes for
over a hundred years, seems to point to the truth of von Bunge’s views;
for it is among them that, for social reasons, artificial feeding has
been, and still is, most common. Dean Inge comments somewhere on the
increasing besottedness of modern people, and we entirely agree with his
view; but we wonder whether it has ever struck him that the decline in
breast-feeding, which is the outcome of his body-despising values, may
be one of the most powerful contributory causes of it.
For we should always bear in mind, in comparing our poor spiritual
achievements with the genial performances of antiquity, the Middle Ages,
the Renaissance, and the pre-Victorian era, that the artificial feeding
of infants is essentially a modern invention, and that it was unknown to
antiquity.
From Plato down to Pope Alexander VI no one had ever heard of a baby’s
bottle. The alleged ancient artificial feeder discovered in Cyprus by
Franz von Löher was probably no more than an old traveller’s gourd or
wine-bottle. As late as the fifteenth century the only kind of
infant-feeding, other than breast-feeding by the mother, that was known,
was that which a foster-mother, or so-called wet-nurse, could provide.
Metlinger in 1473 appears to be the first to mention cow’s milk as a
substitute, and Rosslin comes next, in 1522, with a theory about
egg-yolk and bread-mash. But these men speak of these substitutes as
applicable only in case of extreme need, and there is nothing to suggest
that the practice of artificial feeding was common.
At all events, it is safe to say that the vast expansion of artificial
feeding, as we know it to-day, is something quite recent and new; and,
since there appears to be no doubt that, qualitatively, human milk is
quite inimitable, it is impossible to calculate the damage which the
latest development of “Progress” may ultimately do to the spirits and
bodies of civilized men.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
WOMAN’S FUTURE
PEOPLE ultimately _become_ the image of _their_ values. Discover their
ruling values, and their future is foretold.
Now, if we are right in inferring from the many signs and portents to
which attention has been called, that our values are largely
body-despising values, and that modern conditions already reveal these
values well on their way to a complete triumph; if we are right,
moreover, in recognizing in modern degeneration, science, Feminism,
Puritanism, and the increasing cleavage between the sexes the logical
outcome of these values, then there can be but two possible alternatives
for the future: either the complete realization of the desiderata
implicit in these body-despising values, or else a revolt against them,
the strength for which will be drawn from the æsthetic, older, and more
healthy side of our nature. As both of these alternatives are possible,
and, moreover, each will mean a different future for women, it will be
necessary to examine them separately.
Dealing first with the future which will result from the complete
realization of the desiderata implicit in our body-despising values, we
must now recall the main tendencies of the present day, so that we may
discover whither they must necessarily lead.
We have seen that in our present world we have:
(=a=) A population the bulk of which are physiologically sub-human, and
frivolously oblivious of this fact. It is a population, therefore, to
which the value of Life and Love is beginning to be a matter of doubt,
and among which Puritanical prejudices are likely to become a
spontaneous growth where they are not already present. Puritanism,
however, must also bring about this indirect and unexpected result:
that, where it prevails, man is likely to become an object of general
disapproval; because, since the desires of the body are regarded as
sinful, man as the initiator, instigator, and active agent in the sexual
encounter, will gradually appear as the traditional villain of creation,
the natural butt of all gratuitous moral indignation.
(=b=) A body of sciences and commercial enterprises which, guided by
body-despising values, tends rather to provide us with an
extra-corporeal equipment for our declining bodies than to aim at
restoring to us our pristine functions and original corporeal equipment.
This enhances our doubt concerning the value of Love and Life, though it
helps us to “carry on.”
(=c=) A marked decline in the ability, versatility, and masculinity of
men, which is the outcome partly of physical and partly of intellectual
inferiority, brought about on the one hand by besotting and cramping
labour for generations, and, on the other, by the deliberate attempt,
throughout Anglo-Saxon civilization and its imitations, to limit the
notion of manliness to martial bravery and proficiency at sports. This
has led to a loss of mastery over all things which is far from edifying,
and has enabled women during the last century and recently to draw
unduly favourable comparisons between themselves and men—which, while
comprehensible in the circumstances, give quite a distorted view of the
situation. It is the case of two climbers, M. and W. who, while
ascending a hill, find that, through the sudden weakness of M., W.’s
pace appears to be wonderfully enhanced. W., however, interprets M.’s
retrograde movement not as abnormal weakness but as accelerated speed on
her part, and therefore feels contempt for M. as M., not merely as
enfeebled M.
(=d=) A large body of disgruntled women, mostly unmarried, who, having
turned away from Life and Love either through lack of mates or the
nausea acquired in modern matrimony, are prepared to slander not only
Life, but also motherhood, domesticity, and Man, and who, in their
conscious or unconscious jealousy of younger women and girls, try to
convince the latter that life can be lived happily without bodily
adaptation.
(=e=) Social circumstances which force millions of women into open
competition with men, and therefore increase the initial hostility
fostered by (=a=), (=c=), and (=d=).
(=f=) A state of abnormality so acute in some of the chief functions
connected with the sexual life that more and more cogent arguments are
found ready to hand for those who, through Puritanism, jealousy of the
rising generation, or hostility to the male, wish to slander life and
emancipate themselves _and others_ from “_that_ side of it.”
(=g=) A movement known as Feminism, generated chiefly by (=a=), (=c=),
and (=d=), and greatly reinforced by (=e=) and (=f=), but having also a
strong trace of (=b=) in its attitude, which claims that it can recruit
among its own supporters the mastery, ability, and strength to put the
world right, and which proposes to do so by superseding man everywhere,
if possible, even in his reproductive rôle.
This is the picture at a glance. To what can it lead?
The history of all reforms and radical innovations in this world has
shown that far-reaching changes are always the work of a leading,
active, gifted, and small minority, striving with zeal and determination
to realize an ideal. This ideal may be based on misconception or on
error; but that does not matter. In the end, the wilful minority
establishes the environment, or mould, and the inert, ductile masses
pour into it and receive their shape.
Now there is not a particle of doubt in anybody’s mind that the leading,
active, and gifted minority now constituting the van of the Women’s
Movement, are by far the most vital and energetic body of women in the
civilized world, admirable in their zeal, and noble in their readiness
to shoulder the responsibility of setting things right. This does not
prevent us, however, from believing them mistaken in their reading of
the situation, and pathetic in their illusions about their own and their
sex’s capacities. So indefatigable are they, indeed, that large numbers
of apparently monorchid and shallow-minded men have already gone over to
their side; while the conversion of girls and young women to a sexless
life is one of the least obvious but most pernicious results of their
activities. And, since there appears to be no general recognition that
our present state of muddle and lack of mastery over all things is the
outcome of masculine degeneracy; since, moreover, there seems to be no
attempt made to discover how man himself can recover his quota of manly
qualities, it is not only possible, but highly probable, that the mass
of mankind, through not having its attention called to the only remedy,
which is the regeneration of man, will, out of sheer lack of principles
and policies, see in the quack-cure of Feminism their only hope.
Given, therefore, the persistence of the body-despising values, and the
conditions to which they give rise, we may expect to see the energetic
minority of women, who now lead the Feminist movement, determine the
future of their sex; and, if we watch them and try to understand them,
we shall be in a position to describe the world they will call into
existence.
We have seen that Feminism is not only the outcome of the modern world’s
main characteristics, but also that it embodies these characteristics as
elements in its general attitude. Truth to tell, if we take our values
as given, together with all the results they were sure to bring about,
then Feminism was a foregone conclusion from the start.
Neglect and degeneration of the body were bound to lead to a loathing of
the body and the wish to be emancipated from its thraldom. This,
however, necessarily destroyed one of the chief bonds between man and
woman, and left the natural and radical hostility of the sexes naked and
unconstrained. This is one side of Feminism.
Next we have the fact that physical neglect and degeneration were also
bound to lead to the decline of man as the male, both in the material
and in the spiritual senses. This, in its turn, led on the one hand to
our lack of mastery in everything, which caused women to wonder whether
they could not help to clear up the muddle; and, on the other, to a
growing contempt of man’s powers, and, as we have seen, to an
exaggerated notion of woman’s. This is the other side of Feminism.
To complete the movement, all that we required was, (=a=) a large body
of disgruntled females, either spinsters or wives, all ready to slander
life and man; and (=b=) economic pressure driving women into open
competition with men in all paid employment. Both these conditions
having been fulfilled, the rest naturally followed.
The first indication we had that Feminism consisted of these elements
was the fact that the old passionate calls to which women once responded
gradually began to yield before calls of mere vanity and to the desire
for notoriety. Numbers of women no longer showed the old eagerness to
express physical passion, or the old sad resignation when it was
rebuffed: they were content with gratifying their vanity in every kind
of sterile pursuit that gave them the appearance of being important.
Without any promise whatsoever of doing better than degenerate men, and
certainly without any past record of achievement that would justify us
in expecting wonders from them—for in those departments of life over
which they have held supreme sway for thousands of years the most
deplorable muddle and ignorance prevail[10]—they claimed municipal and
even parliamentary power, they sought prominence even in empty
privileges, such as the right of sitting among the Peers; and were
triumphant when, at last, they figured in a position which has naturally
excited the abhorrence of all decent men for centuries—the jury box.
Footnote 10:
_Vide_ Chapter X of _Woman: A Vindication_.
The whole change revealed in the leaders of the movement and numbers of
their followers a transmutation of the once powerful bodily passion into
something more feeble, more volatile, and more exclusively dependent on
vanity; while accompanying it throughout were the two elements growing
daily more acute—the longing to be rid of the thraldom of sex, and
hostility to man, which these women like to see more general.
Nothing startling has come of women’s political power, and we can
prophesy with perfect confidence that nothing ever will; even when, as
may quite possibly happen, Parliament consists only of females. So far,
the measures they have introduced or clamoured for have indicated merely
a continuation and intensification of the Puritanical tradition, but not
a sign of anything hopeful or new, in the sense that it was beyond
degenerate men.
But the very demand for the vote was, in itself, merely a confirmation
of the view, held by ourselves and a few others, that no possible good
could come from Feminism, that it offered no hope of a better world, and
that it was a quack remedy for our sickness. For, if there had been any
intrinsic quality in it, any political or other genius peculiarly
feminine and foreign in kind and degree to anything found in man, how
can we explain that one of its first claims was to obtain a political
privilege, the futility and undesirability of which had been
demonstrated _ad nauseam_ long before this century dawned? Modern
democracy with its political machinery is so thoroughly discredited, and
is moreover such a menace to our national greatness, that, if there had
been any social acumen or shrewdness in woman, she would have proved it
by utterly scouting this political _faux pas_ of degenerate manhood. A
creative woman’s movement, if such an idea can possibly be conceived,
would have introduced something new and hopeful into our political life.
It might, at least, have tried to resuscitate the best in our
pre-democratic past; and, even if it did not show this amount of flair,
it might, when it got the vote, straight-way have shown its power by
initiating reforms that are peculiarly within woman’s province. It might
have demanded a reform of our food-conditions, and of the
proprietary-food, patent-medicine and culinary-aid industries, which are
in a scandalous state; or a reform of the conditions under which
midwifery is practised in this country. But it neither attempted, nor
showed any inclination to attempt, any one of these feats. It demanded
the preposterous vote; and, having got it, proceeded, both in Parliament
and out, to try to effect only Puritanical reforms, some of which were
frankly hostile to men.
We are likely to suffer a rude awakening, therefore, if we look to
Feminism for any marked improvement in our affairs. Nobody with any
profound understanding of woman’s nature, and of her past achievements,
can possibly expect it. What we can expect, however, when once the
forces of Feminism are completely organized, is a systematic
intensification of all the tendencies that have culminated in the modern
Women’s Movement.
The hostility to man and the jealousy of happy and passionate youth,
felt by all disaffected women, whether spinsters or wives, is sure to
lead to every effort being made to lure girls more and more from bodily
happiness. We can, therefore, expect an increasing emancipation of girls
and women from domestic arts and duties, together with an aggravation of
our present vices regarding foods. This will be accompanied by the
intensive manufacture of every kind of condensed, preserved, compressed,
and synthetic food, with a corresponding multiplication of aids to
minimize trouble in food-preparation. The ideal will be a standardized
and complete food, containing its own correctives for failing digestion,
to be obtained probably in tabloid form, and requiring no further
preparation whatsoever. Ultimately, there can be little doubt that this
form of food will be discovered, and may possibly become the product of
a special Government Department. Meanwhile, the human system will have
undergone years of painful attempted adaptation to increasingly bad
food-conditions, and acute indigestion, with repeated intestinal
operations, will probably have become as common as dental caries and
tooth-extraction are to-day.
The tendency as regards men will be to rear ever larger numbers of them
along the lines already indicated by modern taste—that is to say, their
manliness will be limited more and more to military courage and
proficiency at games. Thus, while they will prove increasingly harmless
and amenable to female rule—as Aristotle said such men always would—they
will be even more besotted, more lacking in mastery, will-power and
understanding, more feeble as lovers, and more contemptible than the men
of to-day.
We can expect an increasing assertion of the rights of females in every
branch of industry, commerce, and the professions, accompanied by such a
multiplication of ready workers that competition between the sexes will
become acute. The first moment of violent strain will occur when women
employers and women labour-leaders, both working under Feminist
guidance, appropriate certain industries wholly to female labour. This
will be accompanied by a vast extension of an idea already
materialized—the female bank, that is to say, financial houses and
interests devoted entirely to the women’s cause. Epicene organizations
and staffs will then tend to disappear, and soon the national industry
will be divided into two sections, each of which will be conducted by
and for one sex only, and in which the most poorly paid workers will
belong to the other sex. These two sections will confront each other
jealously like two competing nations, and, while each will try to
encroach on the domain and wealth of the other, it will also try to
compass the other’s failure.
Occasionally this bitter rivalry will lead to riots and savage
street-fighting, in which, owing to the fact that moral indignation will
always be on the side of the women, the men are certain to be routed,
and to lose credit, prestige, and lives. In any case, owing to the
continued besotment of men, the female domain will steadily corrode and
eat into the male, and soon men will cease to be employers altogether,
and become the poorest-paid workers in an industry run entirely by
women.
Abetting and assisting this movement, we shall see engineering and
machinery so much perfected that skill in operative work will entirely
vanish. A team of intelligent monkeys will then be adequate for the
productive work of the nation, and, with this final blow at the
spiritual and physical qualifications of both sexes, women will overrun
every department of production. This development was adumbrated during
the Great War, when it was found that, although 5,000,000 men had left
their work, girls and women easily took it over. Hundreds of thousands
of these men imagined that they had been doing both skilled and manly
work. The ease with which they were replaced by inexperienced girls and
women proved that they were wrong. It also proved, incidentally, that
such was the extent of our urban degeneration and emasculation that only
the fewest among the peace-occupations of the country were essentially
masculine or demanded masculine qualifications.
Meanwhile, owing to health having suffered a further decline, owing to
motherhood having become more and more distressing, and owing to sexual
and bodily joys having become more completely suspect, celibacy among
women will be more common than it is at present, and legislation may
have to be passed to compel a greater percentage of wage-earners to
marry. To help increase the population, greater benefits will be
conferred on parents than ever before. But, as by this time it will be
becoming more and more plain that man is growing superfluous except as a
fertilizer and a soldier, and as, through his contemptible condition,
the feeling will be gaining ground that it is an indignity for a free
female citizen to live in intimacy with him simply in order to provide
the state with children, there may be an attempt to legalize marriage by
proxy, accompanied by scientific fertilization without actual congress
with any man personally known to the woman. Artificial impregnation will
tend to become common, and women—the wealthiest and most embittered
foremost—will soon give up ordinary marriage altogether and choose to
have children without concourse with the other sex. The whole act of
fertilization will be consummated in the surgery, just as vaccination is
now. There are signs even to-day that this revolt against cohabitation
is spreading, and there are not a few women who, either in their
Puritanism or jealousy of their happier sisters, would be glad to see it
become more common.
Keeping pace with these changes, lactation will wholly disappear, and,
even among the lowest women, it will be regarded very much as
cannibalism is to-day. Pictures and statues of women in the act of
suckling will be mutilated, destroyed, or hidden from the public view,
just as a certain class of Greek statues are now mutilated and
concealed; while the ideal of beauty in the female will be a creature
completely flat-chested and with the hips of a youth. Girls and women
who happen to throw back to the ancestral type will be pitied, and may
even be operated upon, just as people with facial blemishes are now.
Meanwhile modifications will have occurred in the relations of the
sexes. The congress of male and female will have begun to seem much more
guilty and disgusting even than it is to-day, and as the male will still
be looked upon (as he is now) as the principal culprit in the matter,
the age of consent will probably be extended to thirty-five or forty, if
not to the menopause. Seduction and rape will be punished brutally,
probably by means of emasculation; and men of vigorous sexuality will be
eliminated in order to make way for a generation of low-sexed, meek, and
sequacious lackeys.
It will not be long before even the necessity for male soldiers will
vanish. When the manipulation of the engines of war becomes as simple as
typing or making tea, girls and women will make just as efficient
soldiers as men; and, since war will then be carried on without
visualizing the enemy, all that will be required will be an army of
obedient operatives, who will not need the traditional courage and
endurance of the male in the face of the foe.
When once artificial impregnation is an every-day occurrence, a
Parliament of women will doubtless pass legislation to make it illegal
for any man to procreate a child naturally, if it is the wife’s desire
to have one by the intermediation of science; and, no matter how many
children she may wish to have in this way, he will be compelled to
support them. This, however, will be the final blow to marriage.
Hundreds of thousands of women will still be naturally fertilized, but
they will be despised, and form a class apart. Social prejudice will be
against them, and movements will be started to emancipate and rescue
them, just as there are movements to-day to rescue harem-women. Jealousy
will still play a part in this movement; but, owing to the deplorable
degeneration of men as lovers and mates, it will be fainter than ever
before.
There will, of course, be fluctuations in this development, and some
decades will reveal shameful lapses into matrimony and natural
fertilization. Then the Lysistratas of the Feminist world, burning with
indignation once more, will be heard crying aloud, just as Lysistrata
cried over two thousand years ago in Greece:
“ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν αὐτὰς ἀποσχεῖν οὐκέτι οἵα τ᾽ ἀπὸ τῶν ἀνδρῶν· διαδιδράσκουσι
γάρ.”
(I can no longer hold the minxes. They are running to the men; they are
deserting).—Aristophanes, _Lysistrata_, ll. 718-9.
But the aggravated horrors of childbirth, and the alarming increase in
the performance of the Cæsarian section, together with the general
surfeit of the body and the intensified loathing of men, will cause
these retrograde movements to diminish, and very soon such a clamour
will arise for extra-corporeal gestation that science will be allowed no
rest until a technique is discovered that will meet the public demand.
The results achieved by men like Alexis Carrel, Ebleing, and Fische, all
of whom are now working with success on tissue-culture and the
transplantation of anatomical structures from one living organism to
another, will be improved upon, and a means will be discovered by which
the fertilized ovum will be matured outside the female body.
At first, we venture to predict, this will occur by again enlisting the
cow or the ass into our service. Science already suspects that vital
fluids are not specific, and it is probable, therefore, that in the
early days of extra-corporeal gestation, the fertilized human ovum will
be transferred to the uterus of a cow or an ass, and left to mature as a
parasite on the animal’s tissues, very much as the newborn baby is now
made the parasite of the cow’s udder. And, with this innovation, we
shall probably suffer increased besotment, and intensified bovinity or
asininity, according to the nature of the quadruped chosen. Thus
extra-corporeal gestation, or “ectogenesis” (to use a word coined by Mr
J. B. S. Haldane for the purpose) will become a possibility, and the
Feminist ideal of complete emancipation from the thraldom of sex will be
realized.
Fresh legislation will now be passed, which will make it a felony for a
man to give a woman a child in the old corporeal sense, and any male
found guilty of such an offence will be sentenced to death or else to a
long term of hard labour. In view of the initial heavy cost of
extra-corporeal gestation, however, public centres will be provided
where the Borough Council will undertake to “grow” children for the
destitute and the poor.
A little later on, of course, this artificial aid will be perfected, and
even the cow will become unnecessary. The fertilized ovum, cultivated in
embryonic tissue-juice, will then be independent of the foster uterus of
animals, and will mature very much as chickens now do in incubators.
These discoveries are all potential in the scientific achievements of
our day, and implicit in our values. All they need to bring them into
existence is the further direction of these values, together with the
continued anti-sexual and anti-masculine bias of Feminism.
With this final blow levelled at the corporeal equipment of sex,
triumphant Feminism will probably reach its zenith, and in a few
generations a kind of woman will appear the only vestige of whose sex
will be her smooth face and primary genital glands. Men will then be
frankly regarded as quite superfluous. Having lost their powers, first
as spiritual and bodily leaders, secondly as masters and lovers, thirdly
as skilled craftsmen and soldiers, and fourthly as specialized workers,
their social use will have lapsed, and their numbers will begin to be
felt as a source of irritation and even indignation.
At this stage the social muddle will have become so intricate, and have
grown so alarmingly out of hand, that nothing but the most drastic and
sweeping changes will be able to prolong the life of the community. A
shortage of food, occasioned by difficulties arising in the Government
Department responsible for food-preparation and food-distribution, will
give the signal for the last and most bitter sex-struggle. Either
through incompetent administration or the revolt of the workers, there
will be a threat of starvation. No food will be made for weeks, stores
will be on the point of being depleted, and panic will reign everywhere;
when suddenly a few of the leading women will perceive with apocalyptic
clarity not only that the superfluity of men has become a burden on the
community and a menace to the food of the children, but also that the
reduction of their numbers to the barest minimum indispensable for the
purposes of fertilization would be a twofold boon—it would relieve the
food-crisis both for the moment and possibly also for the future, and
obviate for ever the danger of a masculine or slave rising.
A sex-fight at the distributing station of a large store will suffice to
light the first spark of this new conflagration. A dead set will be made
against the men, not only round the original focus of the trouble, but
everywhere. The legislature, recognizing their opportunity, will support
the popular fury, and proceed to a systematic slaughter of males, until,
with the help of the regular troops, it will be found necessary to
protect and preserve a small nucleus for next year’s fertilization.
By that time, however, a significant precedent will have been
established, and a lesson learnt that will not easily be forgotten. The
superfluousness of men above a certain essential minimum (about 5 to
every 1,000 women) will have become recognized officially and
unofficially as a social fact. The legislature will establish laws to
guarantee that this minimum should not be surpassed, and in a very short
while it will become a mere matter of routine to proceed to an annual
slaughter of males who have either outlived their prime or else have
failed to fulfil the promise of their youth in meekness, general
emasculateness, and stupidity.
The only circumstance that can avert this ultimate development is the
discovery by science of a means of determining the sex of the ovum. If
this can be done, then, of course, only a certain small number of males
(½%) will be reared every year, and the periodical slaughter will be
avoided. But in this connection it should be remembered that man will
long since have grown too dull to be capable of scientific wonders of
any kind; and, as it is not in woman’s nature to be inventive or to make
great discoveries, the probability is that society will petrify at the
level of mechanical and scientific progress reached at the moment of
man’s most serious decline, and, therefore, that the periodical
slaughter of males will remain just as much a necessity with the human
female workers as with the worker-bees.
Meanwhile, to these millions of workers life will have become little
more than a dreary, colourless, and hopeless round of toil and
self-sacrifice. The only sources of excitement and pleasure will be the
pastimes offering chances for public parade and appeals to vanity, the
criticism of the latest Government foods and their corresponding
digestive aids, and the reading in the papers about the prosecution of
refractory female characters, either for sedition, immorality, or
indolence. Under immorality will be included all attempts at writing,
reading, or circulating any poem, novel, or treatise faintly reminiscent
of love as we now know it, all attempts at unearthing or recalling the
“obscene” literature of former ages—particularly the romantic fiction of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and all efforts to draw, paint,
carve, or otherwise represent any graphic image of barbaric woman, when
she still bore on her body the traces of the corporeal equipment for
motherhood.
Looking round upon this cold, hard, and business-like world, however, in
which the unremitting industry, so much exalted by Maeterlinck, will be
the only activity and almost the only interest, it is not unlikely that
millions of these female workers will ask themselves, with ever
increasing perplexity and distress, what purpose it all serves, what
good it all does, and what advantage or pleasure they derive from it. In
their lives of stoic “purity” and monotonous bread-winning alone, they
are likely to discover that even waiting for the end is intolerable, and
many who will regard the normal term of human life as an unmerciful
prolongation of their inexplicable misery will have recourse to all
possible means of terminating their hardships. Gradually it will dawn
upon a few independent and rebellious spirits that to have attempted to
live like spirits before the spirit-world was reached, to have attempted
to extinguish the joys and thrills of the body and to taste of the
interests of angels, before having shuffled off this mortal coil—in fact
to have planned and organized an æsthetic phenomenon such as life
without retaining its æsthetic side, was a tragic and utterly brutal
blunder. By the time, however, that this inevitable discovery is
made—the only great discovery that an exclusively female community is
ever likely to make—those who will be responsible for it will look
aghast upon their own and their sisters’ bodies; and, perceiving with
horror the impossibility at that late hour of recovering the functions,
powers, and bodily parts, which centuries of disuse and degeneration
will have withered to nothing, they will, if they still have enough
spirit left, execrate and curse the memory of those who first envisaged
their state as a future possibility, and who, having once conceived it
as desirable, deliberately planned and schemed to bring it about.
“Almighty God,” they will cry in desperation, “mercifully spared the
bees our consciousness!”
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CHAPTER IV
FUTURE WOMAN
THE picture, given in the last chapter, of the world that is likely to
result from the extreme consequences of our present tendencies may seem
overdrawn and fantastic; but it should not be too readily dismissed as
absurd on that account. The fact that, as a whole, it may seem
incredible is no argument against the inevitability of certain of its
chief characteristics; for it should always be remembered that, since
the main stream of human life as we now know it, is based upon the
bodily relation of the sexes and upon the love which makes this relation
a thing desired, all influences tending to deteriorate the human body or
to upset that bodily relation, and all scientific technique and
substitutes which tend to supersede it, must, if they are allowed to
develop, lead to a dislocation so complete of the original scheme that
there is no telling in what monstrous changes they may culminate.
Had we not already reached bodily degeneration, brought about and
condoned by body-despising values; had we not a Puritanical tradition
reinforced by Feminism; and, finally, had we not a group of sciences
whose discoveries, either actual or potential, allow us to expect every
kind of extra-corporeal substitute and aid for our defective corporeal
functions and parts, we could afford to laugh at the dangers indicated
in the previous chapter. In view, however, of the undeniable truth of
the description of our state previously given, it is impossible lightly
to reject the ultimate evanescence of sexual love, for instance, as a
remote future development. And, if we admit that, we must reckon with
the disappearance of our most effective protection against the
instinctive hostility of the sexes.
It is for this reason that there is still a fight to be fought with
Feminism, and why we ourselves, though heart and soul pro-feminine,
still remain active anti-Feminists. People point to the victories of
Feminism in recent years, and say: What is there left for active
anti-Feminists to do? Now that women have the vote and that they sit in
Parliament, now that they have practically the whole of the Press behind
them, their battle is surely won, and anti-Feminism is a lost cause!
Obviously, however, if anti-Feminism means resisting the further
development of Feminism, to prevent it from culminating in some or all
of the changes outlined in the previous chapter; if it means a struggle
to maintain the natural relations of the sexes, together with the normal
functioning of male and female in reproduction; and if it also means the
retention of the family, the home, and some beauty in our social scheme,
then it certainly cannot yet be a lost cause, and those who, like
ourselves, remain anti-Feminists despite the Feminine Franchise, the
Feminist Press, and the Woman Μ. P., feel that we have still much to
protect and much to achieve before we can regard our position as
hopeless.
Fortunately, however, there is an alternative to the developments
described in the last chapter—an alternative which, if we so choose, we
may well be able to bring about quite as certainly as the future already
outlined. But, if we are in earnest about this alternative future, and
if we seriously wish to realize it, we must not forget that, since the
other is more or less implicit in our present trend, and will evolve
automatically out of it if only we continue to acquiesce in everything
that constitutes modernity, this other, or alternative, future will
require to be actively fought for.
The future is in our hands, and we can mould it as we will—certainly!
But, as we have seen, it is also as potential in the present as a flower
is potential in the bud. While, therefore, the future sketched in the
last chapter—or, at all events, very essential parts of it—will come
without any special effort on our part, merely as a further growth of
existing tendencies, the alternative future, which we now propose to
describe, will, if it is to be realized, demand from us not only the
hardness and determination of iconoclasts, but also the creative gifts,
patience, and constructive energy of builders.
There is much in our present that must be destroyed, and even more that
will subsequently require building and re-building.
Among the first things that we shall destroy is our table of value. We
shall do this, however, not in the spirit of anarchists eager only for
greater licence and more “freedom”—for that is always the temptation of
the mob, and requires no particular courage or constructive programme;
but in the spirit of builders who want more discipline for greater
achievement.
The first values to be destroyed will be the body-despising values, and
everything connected with them. We shall no longer condone ugliness or
physiological depravity either in ourselves or in others. The fact that
some bodily defect cannot be helped by the man who reveals it does not
make him any the more desirable. We shall remember that, strictly
speaking, moral depravity is no more voluntary than physiological
depravity; and, since we refuse to accept the excuse _mea non culpa_ for
moral depravity, it is only logical and right to reject that same excuse
for bodily depravity. Why is it important not to accept this excuse for
bodily depravity? Because to condone is to overlook, to condone is to
accept, and, above all, to condone is to become accustomed to. Where
physiological depravity is a matter of custom, however, it very soon
ceases, as we know, to be regarded as depravity; and mating,
love-making, and procreation quickly become possible in spite of it.
That is why it is more important to alter our values than to promote
Eugenic legislation. For, if our values are altered and physiological
depravity is no longer condoned, Eugenic legislation will become
unnecessary, and will be anticipated by the taste of the people;
whereas, if our body-despising values remain intact, Eugenic legislation
will always be fighting an up-hill fight.
The most difficult feature connected with the task of suppressing our
body-despising values is the duty it enjoins on each individual not only
of condemning his neighbour but also of condemning himself, if he is
physiologically depraved; but this each of us will learn to do. We shall
feel the shame of bodily defects once more, and strive unremittingly to
recover bodies complete anatomically beautiful, and no longer defective
functionally. Even at the risk of great immediate suffering, we shall
learn to eschew artificial aids of all kinds, and regard it as beneath
our dignity to use them. Then, since very little is beyond the wit of
man, other means will be found, and we shall recover our former bodily
splendour.
We must bear in mind, however, that we are almost at the eleventh hour;
that to-morrow may be too late; and that, if we wish to spare ourselves
the great discovery of the desolate women-workers of the previous
chapter, there is no time to lose.
Secondly, we shall destroy the value which makes it noble, virtuous, and
desirable to sacrifice the greater for the less. This value also belongs
to the group of values which Dean Inge supports, despite his apparent
enthusiasm about Eugenics,[11] and is among the greatest causes of
modern degeneracy. When once you admit the principle that it is noble
and virtuous to sacrifice the greater for the less, the desirable for
the undesirable, the corn for the weeds, the god for the mob, you
necessarily invite the condition which we find around us to-day.
Everything that is best in the nation, all those elements on which the
successful survival of our race depends, are being penalized and
sacrificed for the sake of the defective, the lunatic, the crippled, the
incurable, the half-witted, and the blind. Honours are acquired not for
promoting the multiplication of the sound and hale, but for promoting
the comfort, ease, and daily welfare of the physiologically and
spiritually hopeless. This value must go. Its disappearance will clear
the air. So long, however, as one sound family in England continues to
be penalized even to the extent of only sixpence a year in order to
support humanity’s wreckage and rubbish, we shall continue to be
sacrificing the greater to the less. This absurd and degenerate value
must be transvalued into the following: _It is noble and virtuous to
sacrifice the less for the greater, the rubbish for the precious._ When
once this transvaluation has been effected, we shall begin to ascend.
Footnote 11:
Another instance of his astonishing confusion of thought.
Thirdly, we shall recognize the error of our modern conception of
masculinity. We shall try to forget the Great War, which at present
tempts us to think highly of ourselves; and we shall endeavour to
understand that to limit the notion of masculinity to proficiency in
sports and bravery in war is to overlook a whole catalogue of masculine
virtues without which degeneration can hardly fail to overtake us in
spite of all our games and our feats of arms. This limitation of the
idea of manliness to proficiency in sport and bravery in war is
acceptable to women, because it makes for a breed of men who are easily
led and still more easily misled; but it is fatal to civilization. We
shall learn to expect of the manly man not only courage and proficiency
in sport, but also will-power, leadership, mastery over the mysteries of
life, and not Puritanical funk in their presence, intelligence
sufficient to overshadow any female brain that is placed alongside of
him (a feature notoriously absent both in the average soldier and in the
average sportsman, or at least, if not absent in, not essential to), and
clarity and decision regarding every problem that it concerns him to
understand—in fact, a man whose presence alone makes the claim of sexual
equality a manifest and transparent absurdity.
Nothing less should satisfy us; for we shall always remember that it was
the man who possesses merely courage and proficiency at sport that is
responsible not only for all our present muddle, but also for Feminism.
Here again, therefore, we shall recast our values, and, hard as it may
seem, discipline ourselves to a new outlook. Nothing else can save the
world and nothing else can put woman back in her place—which is only
another way of saving the world. Every other remedy is quackery. The
highest type of this kind of manly man is the ruler who gives us a new
order and a new goal; while even the lowest type is the husband who
fills a woman’s life and whom she finds it a joy to obey and no
indignity, no hardship to serve. Without this kind of man in large
numbers in our midst, the world cannot fail to go hopelessly astray, and
it will be our principal object henceforth to discover not only how he
can be restored to us, but how it is that, during the last hundred
years, we have failed to produce him in England. This is the only kind
of scientific research that can possibly be fruitful of good results at
the present juncture, and it is the first direction in which we shall
turn our remaining energy. Nor need we be deterred by the journalistic
scoffers who will tell us that we are in search of that mythical monster
the Superman, for we have no such highfalutin’ schemes. The men we wish
to rear again have already been reared once before in these islands, and
history records their lives. They are not a magic fantasy, but a
possible reality. They are not demi-gods, but mortals. And we ourselves,
who claim that they are indispensable for the salvation of modern
humanity, do not hope for them as a race of Supermen, but merely as the
leaders of a Masculine Renaissance.
With regard to the world these leaders will create, and to the position
of women in that world, while we cannot safely foretell what they will
do, we venture to suggest the following:
We may expect a total and complete exposure of the shallowness,
impracticability, and danger to national survival of Democracy as we now
understand it, and therefore the evanescence of democratic forms of
government. The great suffering and chaos to which such forms of
government lead will probably leave a deep impression upon the soul of
humanity, and this impression will help the leaders of the Masculine
Renaissance to remodel the national life without having recourse to the
discredited and preposterous vote.
We may expect a revival of agriculture and craftsmanship, because one of
the first things to be done is to arrest the dry-rot in spirit and body,
which industrial and urban conditions have brought about under the sway
of the body-despising values. Men will learn to respect themselves once
more, and this they can do only by expressing their highest impulses in
their work. They will become agriculturists and craftsmen again, because
this is the only way by which they can recover their dignity, their lost
faculties, and their vanished health.
We can also expect that science instead of concentrating, as now, upon
providing us with ever more efficient extra-corporeal equipment such as
wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes, etc., and more and more substitutes and
aids for our defective bodies, will turn its research in the direction
of restoring to man bodily perfection and to _extending the range of his
faculties_. It will probe the mystery of powers like clairvoyance, and
direct healing (such as that effected by the laying on of hands from
time immemorial); it will discover the mechanism (if any) behind
telepathy and behind the peculiar magnetism of cultivated will-power,
and discover an educational technique by which these properties and
powers may become more general, more efficient, and more far-reaching.
It will seek the method behind the laws of heredity, and establish
principles whereby family and stock qualities may be brought to
perfection. It will also sift the mass of evidence and facts collected
by modern science, in order to co-ordinate the data, and establish lines
of proper conduct and legitimate aspiration. Finally, it will aim at
co-ordinating religious and naturalistic truths up to date, with the
view of offering to mankind a new faith, and a new metaphysic, purged of
the sick and degenerate elements of former religions.
Recognizing that æstheticism is an essential part of terrestrial life,
the possession and expression of beauty will no longer be relegated to
certain sections of the community, but will be made a part of the
national life. The Puritanical prejudice against beauty and its lure
will be exploded, and beauty will be cultivated in the human body as an
indispensable factor in a happy life. The old Puritanical belief that it
is possible to have a beautiful soul, a beautiful character, and a
beautiful mind in an ugly body with evil-smelling breath, will have to
be recognized for what it is—that is, merely a _credo_ for the comfort
of repulsive people.
Meanwhile large hypertrophied cities and towns will tend to disappear,
and the population will be thinned by rigorous selection at birth.
Abnormal, crippled, defective, incurable, and undesirable people will no
longer be allowed to grow up. Their uselessness and their danger as a
burden and an eye-sore will be recognized. The old belief in the extreme
sacredness of every human creature, irrespective of bodily and mental
perfection, will vanish, in order to make way for a valuation based on
quality of mind and body. This gradual elimination of the undesirable
dregs of humanity with all the physiological botchedness they stand for,
will clear the air, and relieve coming generations of many heavy
burdens. The energy, spare wealth, and spare time of the community, will
then be devoted to the desirable, and the magnificent mansions which are
now distributed all over the country, for the housing of human monsters,
will be converted into palaces for people of promise.
The regeneration of man will immediately transform woman and her
position; because, while her contempt for the male will vanish, she will
recover both physically and spiritually that lost joy of _looking up_ to
her mate. Through the mastery he will introduce, her present very
justifiable anxiety about the world will tend to disappear, and the
serenity of a dependent existence will be restored to her. Her life
through being filled by a mate sufficiently versatile to supply her not
only with offspring, but also with every possible interest, will
gradually lose the feverish restlessness of the modern woman, who is
seeking constantly to forget the void both in her heart and in her
existence; and in time she will learn to measure at their proper worth
the vanities which now supply her with but a poor substitute for her
former bliss.
With these changes, women’s claim to equality with men will gradually
cease to be heard of. Here and there it may still continue to be raised
in some quarters; but, the moment its absurdity is made everywhere
visible to the very eye of onlookers, it will necessarily die down. It
is merely the fact that the claim is not _manifestly_ absurd to-day that
lends it for the time being a certain fatal plausibility.
But, before woman is sound enough in body and mind to give birth to this
new breed of masculine sons, and to rear them herself, she will undergo
many transformations, and learn to look at life from a very different
standpoint. In the first place she will regenerate her own body before
it is too late, and recover the ease, if not the ecstasy of old, in all
her functions. She will learn to despise herself if she wears glasses,
if she has false or bad teeth, if she cannot function without scientific
aids, and if she cannot suckle her child. She will perceive the boastful
levity of the present generation of women who concern themselves more
and more with highfalutin’ interests and matters of the soul, when all
the while they are not masters of their bodies. She will see that a
workman who wished to leave his bench and his tools in order to try to
master high finance when he had not yet mastered his trade, would very
justly become an object of derision, and that modern women, with their
feverish interest in every new-fangled creed and power, are also objects
of derision, because all the while their bodies grow more and more out
of hand.
Helped by her men of science, she will apply herself to the task of
discovering that mode of life and that diet which will restore to her
normal and easy functioning in her digestive system; that mode of life
and diet during gestation which will restore to her the joy of
childbirth—a joy that has probably not been known to mankind for
thousands of years—and, without losing heart over her initial failures,
she will persevere until the necessary discoveries are made.
When once bodily normality is recovered—and this will come about much
more speedily by a change of values, and therefore by a change of taste,
than by legally enforced Eugenics—she and her mate will attach a new
value to life, and a new value to motherhood, domesticity, and marriage.
All three will appear nobler and more desirable, not only because they
have become more beautiful, and more productive of beauty, but also
because their responsibilities and annoyances _are endured for a man and
for children who make them appear thoroughly worth while_.
In Chapter II we pointed out the direction in which inquiry might
profitably be directed in order to achieve certain eminently desirable
improvements in the present conditions of childbirth. These indications
may prove to be misleading. It is possible that their application may be
disappointing. This, however, should not deter us. The ideas suggested
in Chapter II may or may not be of value; but what is important is that
inquiry should be directed towards the goal to which they point, and, if
this end be assiduously sought, it cannot fail to be reached sooner or
later. It must be obvious to all that, by persisting in our present
direction of improved artificial aids, we can never attain to anything
either good or desirable—therefore that our present direction is
manifestly wrong and hopeless.
The elimination of the bungled and the botched, and a rigorous selection
of the newly-born on qualitative lines both of mind and body, will so
much relieve the situation in all over-populated districts that early
marriages will become a possibility again. Where it is difficult,
assistance will easily be found. For where people acquire honour in
helping and promoting the best, instead of promoting and helping the
worst, the rich will seek distinction in endowing desirable people
instead of endowing wrecks, cripples, and incurables.
When once these reforms have been instituted, it will be possible to
order life on a much happier scale, particularly for women. Since males
and females are normally about equal in number, the increased prosperity
will enable most men to marry and most girls to find husbands, and the
misery of modern sexual abstinence will cease for millions of women.
But, as happiness can be permanently secured only if a nation cuts its
coat according to its cloth, careful measures will have to be taken to
keep the population within certain limits. Seeing, however, that
birth-control and contraceptive methods sacrifice the adults in order to
achieve this end, the tendency will be, in a society whose principle it
is to sacrifice the less to the greater, to proceed to some kind of
controlled and legalized infanticide. This will allow standards
governing infant-selection to be periodically revised, and will thus
lead to an improvement of the race.
Since, however, wars and the greater danger attending male pursuits are
always likely to create a preponderance of females in the community,
concubinage will be tolerated for the sake of the surplus women; but,
instead of its being a concubinage like that of to-day, which is hidden,
secret, sterile, condemned, and therefore productive of much distress
and tragedy, it will be open, tolerated, recognized, and fruitful, just
as it has been in the best civilizations of the past. There are other
and very deep reasons why some form of concubinage is essential. I have
already dealt with them elsewhere.[12] Suffice it to say here, however,
that no shame or discomfort will necessarily attach to the life of the
concubines. They will be legally recognized; they will have their social
status; and they will be protected by public opinion and by law. Nor
will they be encountered in every household. As in former societies
which have recognized them, they will be found only where their need is
felt, and where their own taste guides them to seek protection.
Footnote 12:
See _Woman: A Vindication_, pp. 172-3.
Women old enough for matrimony and older, therefore, will tend to be
withdrawn more and more from industrial, commercial, and public life,
and the old industries of the home—bread, cheese, butter, jam, and
confectionery making—will be revived, and will flourish once more. Under
the guidance of science, domestic medicine will gradually be transferred
from the doctor’s consulting-room to the kitchen and the still-room, and
there it will remain, as it always ought to have remained, and doctors
and their powers will tend to disappear. Children will be much more the
apprentices of their parents than they are at present; the duties of
education will tend to be delegated less and less to elders who are not
blood-relations; and parents will have a higher sense of their
responsibilities. Education outside the home will be regarded—at least
for boys and girls under fifteen—as a _pis aller_, more or less as we
to-day regard the various arrangements that have to be made for orphans.
Meanwhile, with improved bodies and brighter wits, women will share with
men the joy of the developed faculties which, as we have pointed out, it
will be the object of science to realize; and a richer and more eventful
intellectual and spiritual life will be led, because humanity will be
able to apply itself to the pursuit of ever loftier interests. We shall
have greater arts and greater religions, deeper thoughts and a mightier
grasp of reality; because, having mastered our bodies and solved once
more the secret of their harmonious working, we shall no longer be in
the difficult dilemma of mortals who, with neglected and badly
functioning physiques, try to anticipate here on earth the pastimes and
pursuits of the immortal world.
THE END
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_);
was in bold by is enclosed by “equal” signs (=bold=)
had extra character spacing by “plus” signs (+stretched+).
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