a continuation of the last chapter, with an attempt to suggest a remedy
“with fear and trembling take care of the heart of the people; that is the root of the matter in education—that is the highest in education.”—k’ung fu ’tzu.
it is, of course, easy to write of these evils, the difficult thing is to find the remedy. and the question i now wish to put squarely is this: where is the real root of the evil, what is wrong in our educational ideals that accounts for our failure to develop the best and happiest type of women? you may, of course, deny this, and assert that we do not fail, but that will not alter facts. i say we are creating a race of work-efficient and highly educated, but unsatisfied women, whose very independence betrays their sorrow. this is a very serious matter. it would seem that our young women have now for the first time realised their power in outside things. war has acted quickly in facilitating their economic emancipation. but i find it hard not to think that this may involve a cost which their womanhood will not bear without injury more or less profound. women are being sold to work in the same way that formerly men were sold. and though no one can know the results, i am very far from sharing the sense of satisfaction expressed by so many to-day: i fear for the girls i see in such numbers in every place of work a deadening of response to life—a further clog and degradation of womanly feeling and instincts. and as i have said again and again, my fear[352] is much deeper, because this externalisation of life is no new thing. i could add more, much more; but words—what are they in the face of facts! last week i was in conversation with a young and comely tram conductress. she was married: i asked her if she had children. she answered me: “my goodness, no!” and then added, “one doesn’t want babies on this job.” one dares not generalise too largely, yet for so long women, in this industrially blinded land, have been struggling to gain the world at the payment of losing themselves.
the young women of the new generation are full of distrust, the most demoralising of influences. by this i do not mean that they distrust themselves; they do not. what they do distrust is instinct and emotion, with a corresponding over-valuation of intellectualism and of marketable work-power; and from this distrust there has followed necessarily a breaking away from fixed standards, with a loss of any steadying ideal. this, i think, is the essential trouble, sending them very far astray from the facts of life.
look at the women you may see in all classes of society. you may see them hastening to and from their work; you may see them in the streets each evening or in every place of amusement. how many bear upon their brows this stamp of a nature unfixed of purpose, in the expression of their face as well as the body movements, in their restlessness and noisy happiness is the sign of disharmonies aroused, a nature strained and failing in the fulfilment of its functions. one feels that as women these young girls of the present generation have lost something, lost it so completely that they know no longer what they desire.
i should, however, like to make it very clear that i am[353] not disparaging women, nor do i fail to admire all they have achieved in difficult positions. there is no need to re-tell the oft-told and much praised facts of what they have done in these years since the war began. there can be no shadow of doubt as to the efficiency and value of the work of the thousands of women at present engaged in many and varied branches of labour. but what i fear is the waste of the struggle should it continue for any period of years. let us except this hard working of women as a necessary evil of warfare, demanding at the same time special protection and special provision for child-bearers. but do not let us fall into the error of regarding such conditions as in themselves good and desirable, leading, as i believe must follow, to a further obliteration of sex, with its differences and wise separation.
difficult as at present is the problem, we need to understand that we cannot afford to be wasteful of the strength of women. we are being wasteful. the physiological life even of the unmarried woman ought to handicap her in almost every kind of work. long hours of standing, the lifting of heavy weights, any kind of drain on the nervous power, cannot fail to do harm. there are days when every young girl and woman who may have to bear children, however strong, ought to release tension, to step aside from work to maintain full health. i am filled with impatience at our pretence on this question of women’s health. there is a difference between the work capacity of the woman and the work capacity of the man. sex must play a far larger part, making far stronger claims on the strength of the girl and the woman than it ever does in the lives of boys and men. it is vain to assume that because women are willing, and apparently able, to do the[354] same work now as men in the past have done, that, therefore, it is wise to allow them to do it. the price of the violent energy, so wastefully being poured out, will have to be paid. countless women and girls are using up now the nervous energy and strength of which they are merely the pilots and guardians; the health and calm of spirit which should be stored and transmitted to generations to come.
the increased activity and exertion daily demanded from child-bearers must be anti-social in its racial effects. either these girls, constantly stimulated, over-excited, and robbed of the tranquillity they need, will bear enfeebled children, or, what is more likely, through the direct premium placed on childlessness, fewer and fewer children will be born, and from this there may tend to follow a further deadening and even a crushing out of the maternal instinct. children will not be wanted.
i pointed out in the earlier chapters of my book[105] that such a transformation of impulse may take place. the parental instinct is not fixed, and disuse is the swiftest way to decay. think what this must mean to the life values of the future. i believe it is not possible to estimate how far-reaching may be the results of what is now being done so quickly and so recklessly. by our absurd denials and our ignorance we shall have brought down upon us this evil—our punishment for conceiving sex in women as something too terrible to be faced in its reality.
let us understand what it is that we shall be doing. we are built up of habits just as a house is built up of bricks. and what motherhood is going to be in the future depends on our desires and our action to-day.
[355]
a sound nation has for its essential condition healthy children—yes, and many of them—and healthy mothers to bear and to rear them. we know this. but what are the facts? we find more and more young women turning away from motherhood. they are marrying in larger numbers just now, for war has turned men into heroes and this has made marriage popular. but we may not count too much on this, for no longer does marriage mean the bearing of children and the founding of a family. the wife no longer is comparable to the fruitful vine, no longer are children like olive plants about the table of the house. the blessings of the old sweet poem fail to stir our desires. babies are not wanted.
the volume of evidence and the observations made by the commissioners’ report of the national birth-rate investigation, 1916, which lies upon my desk, cannot be read without a sense of almost hopeless depression. a dark picture is revealed of men and women harried and driven by the sex instinct within them; the relation of the husband and the wife made hateful from a perpetual fear of the natural consequences of birth. the struggle is but too clearly apparent in every section of society. the evidence discloses that the prevention of conception is growing steadily and rapidly, for though it began with and, for a time, was practised only by the well-to-do, it is now spreading downwards to the poorest, amongst whom the practice of abortion has for long been extensively used. dr. mary scharlieb, whose report is, perhaps, the most interesting of all the commissioners, states that in the working classes there are five abortions to every one live birth.
what sordid facts this report reveals! what a failure it proves our life! is there any use in talking of raising[356] the birth-rate until these things are changed? is our land fit to receive the children? has not the child the right to demand from its parents that its birth shall be looked on as something more than an unfortunate mistake?
i know, of course, the difficulties which face the parents, among which economic difficulties are important, arising from the competitive capitalistic system by which all our lives are entangled. yet i feel that these considerations, though they cannot be neglected and increase the evil, alone are not responsible; that the cause lies deeper and is dependent on the desires of the mind; that apart from any economic causes, and even assuming that every child could be better born and with a happy life secured to it, there would yet be much of the problem that would remain unsolved. and what i am trying all this time to make plain is this: if we wish to get rid of the atrophy that is increasingly present in the instincts of our young women, and quicken their response to passion, with its desire for motherhood, we must first get rid of our wrong values of what is good in life and makes for enduring happiness; and to do this we must change our educational methods, the training in the home and in the school, and conditions of work that are their parent. there can be no help and no change, at least i cannot see any, except to alter our ideals. nothing else of any wide value can be done until these are changed.
in the name of common sense and of sanity let us get to the real bottom of this matter. to do anything at all we must begin at the beginning, where the wrong is started. it is absurd to go on crying out against the shirking of motherhood, while at the same time, in the education of our girls and afterwards in the arrangements we make[357] for their working life, we show a complete evasion of the function most intimately connected with motherhood. that is where the clue to the trouble lies. the whole educational system in our homes and in our schools, as well as the conditions in our workshops and houses of business, is wrong. it discourages motherhood very heavily. and the rational thing for us to do in the matter is not to grow eloquent about a declining birth-rate, or to blame women for not desiring to be mothers, but rather to make intelligent changes so as to minimise to the young the discouragement that by our teaching and our actions we have hitherto given to motherhood.
and the first step towards this must be, i am certain, to banish from the consciousness of every girl all feeling of shame, and all concealments connected with her function of menstruation. in other words, we have to face the facts of a girl’s sexual life. this is not going to be easy.
in the immediate past our attitude of hiding on these questions was due to reasons of prudishness in regard to all natural functions, and notably menstruation—the rubicon in the life of every girl, which first brings or, i ought to say, should bring, full realisation that life for her is separate and needs to take a different course from the life of the boy and the man.
this truth has been disliked so much that in practice it has been disregarded. the wrong is started early and is continued throughout the sexual life. the real controlling force in the education of the girl is the mother; and motherhood has failed. girls, with an almost criminal neglect, have been left without any wise preparation for the first menstruation, upon the regular establishment of which function their health in the future must depend.[358] many girls, being seriously frightened or stirred to rebellion and anger, have done foolish actions, and through neglected hygiene evil is begun that never can be undone. this is no over-statement. the first few menstruations have a far greater influence not only on the body, but also on the brain and the soul of a girl than do those that follow later when the sexual health is better established. every mother and teacher ought to know and heed this.
at best, and even when instructed by their mothers, girls have been taught to regard this function as a troublesome illness that must be suffered with patience; such a view, of course, being a relic of the supposed curse laid upon the woman’s sex. nor can it be said that even to-day there is any improvement when quite different ideals prevail regarding woman’s place and her vocation. for the new emancipation has brought with it a false view that girls should be educated in the same way as boys, and should be brought up in the pretence that it is right and possible for them to work and play at all times like boys and to be as independent of their sexual life as boys can afford to be.
now, it does not need much imagination to understand the harm of such teaching. the menstrual function—which really marks the sex of the girl and fits her for motherhood—is ignored as if its occurrence were of no importance. and such an attitude of dislike and hiding necessarily causes a feeling of shame, more or less deep according to the temperament of the girl. from the very first sex is presented in the shape of something to be despised and desperately fought against, something secret and disgusting. even at this early stage disharmony enters into the young and sensitive soul.
some girls revolt in the very depths of their being, while[359] the common feelings aroused are expressed by such words as aversion and dislike, anger and shame. do you not see now the harm that is done? how sadly we are sowing for the future. for what can be the result except to teach our girls a shameful disrespect for themselves. what wonder is there that many girls are stirred to rebellion which takes the outward form of resolutely ignoring their monthly periods, and the fact that they are girls. and the immediate result is a general lowering in the standard of sexual health.
i shall be told that this is not true. but i am writing of what i know. menstruation is a perfectly natural function and every girl should be taught so to regard it. but at its start it does exercise a very disturbing effect on the whole system and character. and the folly that pretends that in these early years special care is not required at the monthly periods cannot be too strongly condemned. for the harm is deeper and further reaching than the physical hurt, though certainly in our folly we are making invalids of the future mothers of the race. harm in many cases is done to the after sex expression; harm which probably is never recognised, and about which the ordinary parent and teacher are densely ignorant and optimistic. how little do we consider the consequences of our acts? i say there is no limit and no end to the evil that we are permitting. and the most fearful thing about it is that it all seems so wantonly needless.
the always difficult passage of the girl into the woman is alarming only to the girl who knows nothing about herself and her sexual life. just as far as she understands does recoil and resentment and shame become needless. rightly taught, she will learn to regard her special function,[360] not as something to be hidden and ignored, but as the sign of the changes that now are taking place in her body—healthy natural changes that will fit her one day for love and wifehood and motherhood. then, indeed, her shame and her aversion will be converted into pride. understanding, she will have a fitting reverence for herself. she will now know why she is under certain restrictions, and has at the times of her monthly periods to refrain from overwork and all strain, and to give up some pleasures and excitements; she will do this gladly in order that her development into womanhood may be without pain, healthy and complete.
i believe firmly that this change in our attitude to menstruation—a change that will emphasise its importance to health and its connection with fit motherhood—a change that must start at the beginning of the girl’s conscious sexual life, is absolutely necessary to the development of a higher motherhood. at least, if it does not come, i can have no hope at all. you cannot gather fruit from a tree that is unhealthy at its root. and you cannot have glad motherhood while you start out by despising the function most sacredly connected with motherhood. we must understand this. until we do understand it, and then act in the practical way that will cause us to change our teaching to all young girls, we shall find women in ever-increasing numbers turning away from motherhood, and wasting in external things the realities of love and life.
how can healthy womanhood be possible within the limits and wrong ideals of our present system, and how can they fail to give rise to continuous restlessness? i declare once more and plainly that we are raising a generation of girls—those with whom the duties of wifehood and motherhood[361] should reside—who have instincts atrophied by dull studies, to be followed by deadening work. i hold that this is a matter of the gravest concern, not only for women and men and their individual happiness in union one with the other, but is also what will decide the future of this land and empire.
but few among us understand the destruction that is working in our midst. we do not recognise the symptoms that mark the disharmony in the lives of the great majority of the girls and young women of the present generation. war has but increased the mischief. independence in material things has given triumph to that rebellion which our mistaken training and wrong ideal had started long ago smouldering in the souls of our daughters. to-day youth is in demand; the young girl can fill every place. and youth has risen fearlessly and splendidly to every opportunity, but so quickly as not to have time to consider how much is being trampled underfoot. the danger of speed—the filling of every moment of time, always a mistake made by women—has been intensified by the war. the war race has provided the opportunity to live riotously and wastefully.
of course, it is we of the older generation—the mothers—who are to blame. we have left our daughters in a dangerous position; we did not see where modern education, with its effort to obliterate sex, must inevitably lead.
education may be either a most helpful or a most dangerous process. and what is most to be feared is the shut-in instincts that tend to twist the nature from its simple fulfilment. there is something essentially harmful in any failure or wrong expression of a special function. now, we have insisted upon repressions, and what we believed to[362] be a high moral and efficient working character for girls, not knowing that what we so mistakenly were straining for was really something very like an entire absence of any kind of womanly character. the real nature of girls is wild, and our fears have been very great. and for this reason have we held that the nakedness of the adolescent’s new-born womanhood must be clothed with conventionalities and draped with culture.
it is this fear of sex that directs our educational system: there is too much drill and too much strain. girls’ schools are governed too much, for girls need, not less, but more liberty than boys. the teachers are dull and narrow in their own outlook and in their experience of life; they are not trained to understand the needs of adolescent girls, only to teach them facts that as a rule are of no real service; they do not trouble to train the inner and hidden instincts that really form character, they do not even look for them; they reck nothing of early development or late, of the presence of strong passion or its absence; they have no kind of understanding of the unceasing action of sex, forcing its expression in unconscious acts, which alone give the clue to character; of all this (the only knowledge that matters) the teachers are profoundly ignorant; but they measure out girl-humanity for the conventional standard of efficiency like a dressmaker measures out her material with a yard measure. there is no thought, at least none is betrayed, that the school is a preparation for living. no kind of training is given for the part the girls will have to play in the life of sex for their own health and happiness and the regeneration of the race. the sexual life is persistently ignored.
i recall reading somewhere—i do not remember the exact[363] connection—how an official of a college for girls was questioned by a visitor as to the advantage gained by the students in their after life from a university training. she answered: “one third of the students profit by it, another third gain some little good, while the remaining third are failures.” “and what becomes of the failures?” was the question asked, while the answer given was this: “oh, they marry!” now, i do not know if this excellent story can be accepted as a fact, but it does point to a contempt for marriage and its duties—a contempt for woman’s sex and for her own work—which i believe is present in the thought and attitude, even if not acknowledged openly, among the majority of educationalists. this is a very serious matter.
the remedy, then, has to begin in our schools. we must control education with a finer sense of its value to life. and to do this we must accept the extreme importance of sex, and guard those differences which separate the girl from the boy.
as a first movement of reform, i would recommend one to three years’ rest from the usual school work for every girl, during the period when her sexual life is becoming established. this is not, of course, to advocate idleness. i am not upholding any form of invalidism for girls; the adolescent always should have plenty of healthy occupation, but that is a far different thing from the strain of the ordinary school course, foolishly arranged for girls on the same lines as that for boys, and without any regard to the important function of menstruation. there should be attached to every school for girls a special class for adolescents, and this should be the most important class in the school. at the onset of puberty the girls would enter this class, in which they would stay for two years or longer.[364] the sexual life would not be, as now it is, ignored; rather the chief work of the school would be the healthy establishment of the menstrual function, upon which the future well-being of the girl depends, and to the interests of which everything else should for a time be secondary.
there must be a new valuation of education, with an entire change of attitude, which will make possible more openness between the teacher and her pupils. the difficulties here will, i know, be great. if the mothers do not know how to help their daughters, and usually they do not; if the girls do not know how to help themselves, and dumb and untaught they are helpless, the task of the teachers cannot fail to be hard. and especially will this be the case wherever the mother has failed in her duty and a girl has received no kind of sexual training in the home.
i know of what i am writing here, and how real is the prejudice that will have to be overcome. in my own school i was met with this trouble again and again. the girls resented any mention of their menstrual function, and expressed often real anger and disgust when i required them to tell me the dates of their monthly periods, so that i might see they had extra food, more rest, and lighter studies. the answer that usually was given to me was this: “my mother never wanted me to tell her; i took no notice when i was at home.” what an unconscious indictment of the mothers! often it was after long and patient effort only that i gained my way, and brought my girls to speak to me naturally about this function. i had the very hardest work to free their thoughts from the deeply implanted feelings of shame and disgust: in many cases i failed altogether, and i cannot, indeed, be sure that i ever[365] fully succeeded. of course, my failures were the result of harm that had been done much earlier in the home.
it was at this time of my life, now long years ago, when these considerations were forced upon my attention by my failures with my elder pupils, that i was first led to desire special classes for girls to enter at the age of puberty, where the life, the work, and the aims were separate and quite different from the ordinary school. it is so much easier to do the wise thing, if what you are doing is a matter of course, and not something you start for yourself.
i am convinced of the value that would be gained for life from the plan i am advocating. i would begin with these special classes, but i want more than that to be done. a much better course would be that separate adolescent schools should be provided, preferably in the country, where all work as well as play could be done out of doors. all girls would enter before the commencement of puberty, and would stay in one of these special adolescent schools for two or three years or longer. the work would be organised entirely to meet the needs of the individual girl; there must be no set courses of study, no hide-bound rules, and above all no examinations to be crammed for. in my opinion, which was formed from my own experience in my school, girls should do hardly any steady work for one year before and two years after puberty; they cannot, i am certain, work continuously without peril. mental overwork or any kind of strain destroys the nervous resistance and tends to that irritable weakness which makes the rankest ground for all sexual ill health, and may work to establish evil habits in ways not yet openly recognised. the kind of work done should be chosen by the girl herself;[366] there should be far more opportunity for rest and for play, and, while guarding against opportunities for harmful idleness, any kind of mental or bodily strain must be avoided. hard study, if this is necessary, will come later at the close of this special school period. but i plead for all girls during the difficult time of their metamorphosis from the girl to the woman to leave them much more largely than we do at present to nature and to themselves.
the adolescent girl often is thought to be lazy, and when called upon to work she shows an exasperating dulness and inattention. this is a natural condition when the girl is passing through the langour of physical growth; she is overcome, not by listlessness, but by the strain of her awakening senses, and the inattention of the mind is, as a rule, but a symptom of the mysterious and difficult maturing of the brain. the apparent apathy is not real: all the girl’s power, all energy of body and mind is being consumed by the overwhelming force of the half-conscious life of instincts that are ripening within. the young girl for the first time feels, though very rarely does she understand, the power of her nature stirring her soul. and any seeming backwardness in studies during these years, as should be known by the wise teacher, leads afterwards to finer progress, if only the right opportunity of unstrained development is given. but it is this harmony of growth that we have been disturbing as with persistent zeal we have educated from the outside. little wonder that we have failed. i have spoken before of the wide difference that is present between the nature of the boy and that of the girl, and though i speak with hesitation on a question that is too complex to permit dogmatic assertions, the boy has, i think, a much more healthy and conscious knowledge of[367] himself; a girl understands herself less, and has a very dim notion of the motives of her conduct. this leads to very certain danger. the thoughts of most girls are occupied with vague and romantic longings, much heightened by the nonsense written on love in the books girls are allowed to read, stories from which every hint of wholesome reality has been omitted. such false feelings, dominating the girl’s mind at the time of the adolescent crisis, work grave evil.
while always thinking of love most girls know almost nothing of what love really is; and certainly the strain of any sudden chance investigation of the physical facts of sex is a very near danger.
that is one reason why, in a previous section, i have urged so strongly that sexual enlightenment be given to the girl while she is still at the age when sex has no strong personal significance.
the importance of early knowledge is not sufficiently recognised. if from childhood there has been frankness between the girl and her mother, and they have spoken together openly of sex and the facts of birth, it will certainly have happened that the chief emphasis in the mother’s instruction will have been placed upon the relation between the child and herself.[106] such teaching may well prove a great safeguard. the personal, or “pleasure,” element in sex will in this way not be too soon forced and stamped on the girl’s consciousness; it will be, as it should, deferred until the age of passion comes. even[368] then the result of the earlier teaching will be present to direct the desires. love and marriage will not be divorced entirely from the thought of motherhood, as so disastrously happens with many girls to-day.
it is a question i must leave, though it is one on which much more might be said. for i believe we have here a further explanation of the triumph of the egoistical sexual desires over the parental instincts of sacrifice. i am altogether convinced of the deep and wide-reaching harm that is done, in ways that have never yet been recognised, from the sexual ignorance of girls and our shameful concealments and untrue education. and i have felt often that the brutal frankness of boys in sex matters, bad as certainly it sometimes is in its after coarsening effect, in many ways is better in its results than the confused silence and sentiment with which most girls are surrounded; it is, at least, in nearer touch with the facts of life.
i have had considerable experience with adolescent girls. i am sure that their thoughts are more occupied with sex than they know themselves, or is recognised by the adults who are with them. i am speaking here of the normal girl in whom the sexual impulse takes definite form during the early years of puberty. it will need all our wisdom and patience to be able to help the girl now, if we have left her in the darkness of her soul before. she is suffering the anguish of youth, reaching out for the unknown ideal, which she cannot grasp, cannot even distinguish or conceive. there are, of course, other types of girls—girls of delicate and sensitive temperament in whom sexual development for long may be delayed. this may be due to various causes, but is most frequently a result of excessive mental strain from over-pressure or unsuitable[369] work at the onset of puberty, tending to de-normalise the sex-life.
now, to some parents and teachers, not understanding the results, it may seem that this is an end to be desired, and that such a postponement of the sex-life to the years when the girl is older will be a safeguard against evils. this, i believe, is a mistake. the sex feelings are not absent but hidden, and the result too often is a profound melancholy and a dull heaviness which may continue to spoil life. and when the time comes, as come it must, and the long-repressed feelings force an expression, the sex-strain is often very great, and troubles frequently arise that could not have happened except for our interference with the right process of nature.
of course, whatever we do, we must expect often to fail. we are not dealing with anything that can be fixed; and our methods as well as our success must vary with each individual girl. it is this personal element that has not been considered. and this is why there is such need for a higher and different standard in our schools, and of more knowledge and understanding on the part of all who are connected with the training of girls. i know of nothing that can prepare the girl but the early teaching of the mother, but i think in the later adolescent years it is the wise teacher who can better carry on the work.
the task of the educator ought to be plain: to encourage all girls in their natural reaching out for experience and knowledge of themselves, not to smother all that is individual in them under set lessons, necessary perhaps and helpful at other periods of growth, but now i am certain harmful, dulling the character with falsehood and the bodies with constraints, and wearying the minds with overstrain[370] through long hours of drudgery into a dull acceptance.
the worst influence of the school is its isolation from life. consciousness, not instruction, should be the aim of education. yet in all directions our girls have been led and forced into following material consciousness, and, at the same time, they have increasingly lost consciousness of themselves. realisation of one’s own being—how to produce this by means of education—that is the question. what answer are we going to give?
such a rest period in specially adapted schools as i am here advocating would serve not only to establish the health of adolescent girls and fit them for vigorous womanhood, it would, as i believe, change their ideal and remake life. in such surroundings fitted to their own needs, and with a different valuation of the future set before them, they would have a truer sense of self-consciousness; they would come to understand in quite a new way the responsibilities and high glory of being women.
the difficulties, of course, are numerous. and, first of all, it will not be easy to find the right teachers for these adolescent schools. they will need to be specially trained; but training alone will not serve. the teachers must have had a much wider experience of life than is usual to women; they ought to have genius and a passionate love of children: they need to be mothers in spirit.
necessarily, the expense of such teachers and of these special schools, which should be established in great numbers and with no thought of sparing the cost, will be heavy. it will be thought, i know, by many that this fact alone makes the plan impracticable. i can answer only, that any expenditure that will produce fit and glad mothers[371] for the future is an expense that will be met by a wise nation.
i would urge that this question be approached from a practical attitude. on all sides concern is being felt at the decline in the birth-rate, which has fallen one-third in the last thirty-five years. the royal commission that i have referred to already has made its investigation and issued its report. much has been written on the problem, and many guesses made as to the vaguely understood causes. the economists find all the evil in economic conditions; the religious say that it is our morality that is at fault. many are the remedies suggested, a few of which are practical and good. and so urgent is the matter felt to be, now that war with its destruction of life is teaching us a little more the value of life, that changes, long called for, but hitherto seemingly unattainable, shortly may be made in our divorce and marriage laws. the sharp and cruel line drawn between the married and the unmarried mother will at last waver and break on its rotten supports. already the saving of child life has become a matter of such urgent need that much necessary reform is being accomplished. there is little doubt that these valuable movements will go on.
yet, i think, we are failing to attack the real cause, and unless we do attack it there, right at the beginning, we shall go on as we usually do, experimenting in this way and in that, doing one thing and leaving another undone, and we shall only tinker and fuss and then wonder why we fail. blind and fools! we fail, and shall go on failing, because we do not educate our girls and act in life in such a way as will encourage motherhood.
i have put out my idea: i have tried to be as explicit as[372] possible in suggesting the remedy. i am conscious now of opposition that will be raised. i shall be told that my plan, which seems so simple, of educating girls to be women is not practicable. and then i shall be reminded of the immense surplus of women in this country who are unable to marry and live a full and healthy life—a surplus large before the war, enormously greater now.[107]
let me state at once that i am very far indeed from forgetting this great host of enforced celibate women. i have spoken more than once in my book about them, and i am not now concerned with their position. what i want is to save the future. many girls and women to-day are finding their work and the fresh excitements of independence sufficient to gladden life. they do not claim pity; yet this satisfaction that women are feeling is the danger that threatens the future. it is just because these women, whose desires will be fixed on work and away from motherhood, must be here among us, in every place, especially in our schools and in our factories—everywhere in contact with youth—that i am pleading with all the power that i have for a quite changed training for the young girls of the coming generation of women. i fear greatly the influence that i believe must grow up if industrial values of what is good in life are unchecked, and the desire of women is turned more from motherhood and the life that matters to the outside details of existence.
life must be re-shaped, and the first step is the perception of an idea. we want belief, for life must have a structure—the scaffolding on which we may build. and each individual woman among us may not be trusted to[373] make her own structure—to convey and carry whatever it may be that she desires. such selfishness makes any permanent building impossible. that is why in this generation we have lost our ideal.
the previous age fixed its attention on the reform of injustice in the outward relations of men and women, on the regulation of capital and labour, on the equality of the sexes and the improvement of the conditions of life—efforts which culminated naturally in socialism. my work is one dealing essentially with an attitude towards life. i would protest against the want of respect for the ultimate emotional aspects of life, the love of man for woman and of woman for her child—a want of respect which makes it impossible to tell a young girl openly the reason why she must not over-exert herself at the time of her monthly periods. i confess to little patience with this effort to escape sex. everything connected with birth and maternity has to be hidden and mentioned only in whispers. we have forced the attention of girls away from motherhood, fixing their desires on work and independence. obedient and inexperienced, they have followed our guiding. we have taught them to regard the physical attraction which they ought to feel towards men as not nice, thereby associating in their young minds all sexual feelings without distinction as not nice. we have left them ignorant that sex feelings may be good or bad according to their associations. harmful emotional repression has been inevitable, with a result in the after years of distaste for motherhood and passionate marriage. we have made love unclean and separated it from their lives. and, where love is not, all else is barren. i must speak strongly, for very great is the evil we are countenancing.
[374]
the attitude of woman herself is the deep secret of this question; and by attitude i mean something more than the desire of the individual girl or woman, i mean the collective spirit in which life is approached. that is where we have been wanting. we, the mothers and teachers of this last generation of women, have failed to grasp life and all that it means.
what we have most dreaded in education is sex. we can control this attitude only in our schools. emancipation can come through a regaining of consciousness. get this right—let our girls feel that their education because they are women is the most important work of the nation, more, not less important, than is the education of their brothers, and the rest will follow.
we have by our whole attitude shown the most coarse lack of understanding of the needs of girls. instruction has been the sole effort of our schools. this has hampered the perfection of life. our daughters have but accepted and abandoned their bodies and their souls to the rollers of that crushing machine we have called education.
all of us are responsible, for our thoughts and our desires affect the universe and our neighbours. neither can any repentance that may come late, nor any wailings of dismay, stop the consequences of our sinning follies.
i cannot lay too much stress on this sense of women’s desire, for it is this that will direct action in the future. if we cannot have a fundamental change of desire, a fresh view of what is a sane, complete and profitable life; if we cannot cease from our fears of sex; if we cannot alter the ideals we place before girls and work a revolution in the practice of our education, we shall do no good. there will be endless talk of advancement—of higher motherhood, of[375] economic emancipation and freedom in marriage; there will also be continued tinkering legislation, with many timid experiments in mother-training and child-rearing, and underneath the spirit of motherhood will be dying, dying all the time.
but the unbeliever will cry out: all this is utterly impossible; this is the old clog and degradation for women, limiting her to the single function of her sex. my answer is this. even so it was from the beginning of time. nature has so planned it, fixing the maternal instinct deep in the mother, and claiming from her the payment that must be given. woman can only bow before the throne of life. she is entrusted with life’s supreme mission, that of transmitting the sacred torch of life to future generations. she belongs not to herself but to posterity. she must not squander her gift. she must store her energy that she may give life to her child.
woman, all-containing, universal—how should she be limited to herself? this is my deepest belief.
woman is the giver, the interpreter. freedom for her never can be identified with self-assertion. great elementary truths to-day have acquired an intensified significance. oppression stretches like a rod over the earth, the world is ploughed with swords and reaped in blood. the echoes of slaughter reach from land to land. the cataclysm, with its immense appeal to terror and love and hate and pity, has acted to stir us profoundly and quicken our response to the emotional aspects of life. old prejudices are rooted up; institutions are in the melting-pot. a people habitually resistant to emotion, we have been awakened to reality. i cannot doubt that we shall profit. we were occupied in intellectual pleasures and energies, but[376] now our souls have been harrowed. this is the great opportunity if we have the will to use it.
fear has been in us the folly irredeemable, planted like seeds of the wild weeds among our wheat. even in our childhood doubt has slept with us in our cradles, as verily we have been conceived in sin, being born without passionate joy. and this disharmony has followed us up and down in the home; doubt was our schoolfellow, ever following our steps in our work and in our play, until fear has become our perpetual companion. i see the past, the present and the future existing all at once before me, and i know that as soon as fear is conquered redemption is ready.
then no longer will the blessings of the psalmist be changed by our faithless folly into cursing, but again the wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of the house and the children like olive plants around the table. behold, thus shall the woman and the man be blessed together, and they shall see good all the days of their life.
but this regeneration will come only through the creation of our wills. without unceasing desire nothing can be done. desire is action. if you leave off desiring salvation you are lost.
i tell you no virtue can be found apart from our desires. life is the struggle everlasting, unceasing sacrifice, constant aspiration.
what is the secret, if it is not love?
the spirit of life is love triumphant, the immortal force which incites the struggle, makes glad the sacrifice, which stirs the desire to achieve. and the law of love is as easy to state as it is difficult to apply: it is the transforming of the will which says “mine” into the will which[377] says “thine.” it is a law that can be comprehended only by living it.
i shall be called old-fashioned. yet, perhaps, after all, i see further, deeper, and more surely than those who call me so.
the union of the man and the woman cleaving to each other can be the wonder of life. marriage should be a blessing of the senses, a kindling of the spirit, a mutual surrender, and a new creation.
creation is not accomplished; it is continuous and unceasing, and in its work every living thing has its share, destroying and creating.
what is it that i desire? what is it that i expect? what is the change of whose coming i feel as assured as of the rising of to-morrow’s sun?
i look for a regeneration of woman’s instincts through consciousness. she, who has conquered the world, will then renounce the world. the old corruption will be swept away. woman is the keeper of redemption; it is her work to lead man back to the gate of his being.
we are waiting in pain for the new liberation. love alters everything, it melts the whole world and makes it afresh. love is the sun of our spirits and the wind.
is there, indeed, this glad hope of things changing? changing? they have got to change. the weeds of our mistakes have so grown up that they are choking us. yes, whether from inside or from out, i do not know yet, but there is change and awakening coming. motherhood will triumph. life is going to be made new before long.
the end
