Facts And Fictions Of Life Part 9

And where do all these lunatics and criminals come from? From educated mothers? from mothers who are in even a small and limited sense allowed to own themselves, to think for themselves, control their own lives? Not at all. They are the mothers whose lives belong to their men, as this learned doctor, who objects to the higher education of women, argues that all wives should.

Maternity is an awful power, and I repeat that it strikes back at the race, with a blind, fierce, far-reaching force, in revenge for its subject status. Dr. Arthur MacDonald, in his "Criminology," says: "The intellectual physiognomy shows an inferiority in criminals, and when in an exceptional way there is a superiority, it is rather in the nature of cunning and shrewdness.... Poverty, misery and organic debility are not infrequently the cause of crime."

Who is likely to transmit "organic debility?" The mother of many children or of few? Who is likely to stamp a child with low intellectual physiognomy? The mother who is educated or she who is the willing or unwilling subordinate in life's benefits?

Again he says: "Every asymmetry is not necessarily a defect of cerebral development, for, as suggested above, under the influence of education defects of function can be corrected, covered up or eradicated." Can this be true of criminals and not of normal women?

Again he says: "When we consider the early surroundings, unhygienic conditions, alcoholic parents, etc., of the criminal, where he may begin vice as soon as consciousness awakes, malformation, due to neglect and rough treatment, are not surprising. Yet the criminal malformations may be frequently due to osteological conditions. But here still hereditary influence and surrounding conditions in early life exert their power."

Benedikt says: "To suppose that an atypically constructed brain can function normally is out of the question."

So long as motherhood is kept ignorant, dependent and subject in status just that long will heredity avenge the outrage upon her womanhood, upon her personality, upon her individual right to a dignified, personal, equal human status, by striking telling blows on the race.

But let me return to the arguments of the author of "Higher Education and Woman's Sphere," since he represents all the reactionary thought on this topic and because he ignores utterly, as do all of his fellows, woman's duty to herself and her awful power for good or evil upon the race, according as she makes herself a dignified, developed, educated and independent individuality first and a function of maternity second.

It seems to me that in discussing no other question in life is there so little logical reasoning and so much arbitrary dogmatism as in the ones which are usually embraced under "woman's sphere." In the first place, it is a.s.sumed that because women are mothers they are nothing else; that because this is her sphere she can have, should have, no other.

Men are fathers. That is their sphere, therefore they should not be mentally developed, legally and politically emanc.i.p.ated, socially civilized or economically independent. This would appear to most men, doubtless, as a somewhat absurd proposition. It appears so to me, but it is not one whit less absurd when applied to women. Yet this is constantly done. Because women are mothers is the very reason why they should be developed mentally and physically and socially to their highest possible capacity. The old theory that a teacher was good enough for a primary cla.s.s if she knew the "A B C's" and little else has long since been exploded. A high degree of intellectual capacity and a broad mental grasp are more important in those who have the training and molding of small children than if the children were older. The younger the mind the less capable it is to guide itself intelligently and therefore the more important is it that the guide be both wise and well informed. In a college, if the professor is only a little wiser than his cla.s.s it does not make so much difference. In a post-graduate course it makes even less, for here all are supposed to be somewhat mature. Each has within himself an intelligent guide, a reasoner, a questioner and one to answer questions.

With little children the one who has them in charge most closely must be all this and more. She must understand the proportions and relations of things and wherein they touch--the bearing and trend of mental and physical phenomena. She must furnish self-poise to the nervous child and stimulus to the phlegmatic one. She must be able to read signs and interpret indications in the mental and moral, as well as in the physical being of those within her care. All this she must be able to do readily and with apparent unconsciousness if she is best fitted to deal with and develop small children. More than this, she must be not only able to detect wants but have the wisdom to guide, to stimulate, to restrain, to develop the plastic creature in her keeping. If she had the wisdom of the fabled G.o.ds and the self-poise of the Milo she would not be too well equipped for bearing and educating the race in her keeping.

But more than this the ideal mother should know and be. She must have love too loyal and sense of obligation too profound to recklessly bring into the world children she cannot properly endow or care for. It does not appear to occur to the physicians and politicians who discuss this question that it may be due to other causes than incapacity that the educated women are the mothers of fewer children than are the "ideal wives and mothers" of whom they speak in their arguments against her higher education--the squaws of the Kaffirs and Black-feet Indian women, who "devote but a few hours to the completion of this act of nature," as our doctor felicitously expresses it. It is no doubt true that habits of civilization do tend to make the dangers of motherhood greater. So do they tend to render men less st.u.r.dy--less perfect animals. A Kaffir or an Indian buck would not find it necessary to stay at home from his office, for example, because of a broken arm, or a gun shot wound in the leg. He would tramp st.u.r.dily through the forest, and sleep in the jungle with an arrow imbedded in his flesh. He would sit stolidly down on a log and cut it out of himself with a scalping-knife. Yet n.o.body would think it a desirable thing for a member of the Union League club to stop on his way up Fifth avenue and attend to his own surgery on the sidewalk.

They would expect him to faint, and to be "carried tenderly into the nearest drug store" and a doctor would be sent for. He would be put under the influence of an anaesthetic drug during the operation, and carefully nursed for weeks afterward by his devoted wife, and intelligent physician. Then if he pulled through it would be heralded far and wide as because of his "magnificent physique, his pluck and the excellent treatment he received." Well now, is he a less "manly man"

than is the Kaffir or the Indian buck? Is he a less desirable husband and father? Is he "deteriorating in his sphere?" The fact is, the more sensitive men have become to pain, whether it be mental or physical, the more manly have they grown, the more nearly fitted to be the fathers of a race of men and women who are not mere brutes. The race does not need the brute type any longer. It has already too many mere human animals to deal with--in its asylums, almshouses, prisons and impoverished districts.

This world is in no danger of suffering from a lack of children, the cry has always been "over population" and even in our new country the wail has begun. Not more children, but a better kind of children is what is needed. Who will be likely to furnish these? The ideal "squaw wife" or the educated woman, who knows that her obligation to her child begins before it is born, and does not end even with her death, for she must leave it the heritage of a good name, an earnest life, a n.o.ble example, even after she is gone.

If by "being unfitted for the sphere of wife and mother" it is meant that this sphere is truly that of a mere animal--a healthy animal--if in order to be an ideal wife to civilized man, woman should remain a savage; if to be a mother to an intellectually advancing race she need not even comprehend the advance, then truly are these arguments against her higher education and intellectual development logical.

But even then they are not fair. Why? Simply because she has not been consulted as to her choice in the matter. The argument is still based on the tremendous a.s.sumption that man's happiness, man's desires, man's wishes, man's rights, are the sum total of all desire, all right, all freedom, all happiness and all justice. It omits two tremendous equations--that of the woman herself and that of her offspring, who will have a right to demand of her how she dared equip him so badly for the life into which she has taken the liberty to bring him. To demand of her how she dared equip herself so ill for her self-imposed task of creator of a human soul!

Up to the present time woman's moral responsibility in heredity has been below the point of zero, for the reason that she has had no voice in her own control nor in that of her children. With the present knowledge of heredity she who permits herself to become a mother without having demanded and obtained (1) her own freedom from s.e.x dominion and (2) fair and free conditions of development for herself and her child, will commit a crime against herself, against her child and against the race.

But the learned doctor deplores the fact that educated women are bringing fewer children into the world, and argues that, this being the case, it shows that education is not within woman's sphere. Now, if a man does not choose to become the father of ten or twelve children n.o.body on earth feels called upon to criticise him as not properly filling his sphere--as out of his proper sphere--in case he prefers to spend more of his time on mental development and progress than upon irresponsible physical indulgence and paternity. If he makes up his mind that he cannot or does not wish to become responsible for the mental and physical endowment and well-being of more than one or two children, or of none, n.o.body says that his "college training unfitted him for the holy position of husband and father, which is his sphere." Perhaps the college training may have a good deal to do with it in the sense that with his developed mind and wider information, his sense of right and of personal obligation to the unborn has tended in that direction. We do not often notice a vast degree of self discipline of this nature in the uneducated, whether it be man or woman, but is this a reason for deprecating intellectual training for our boys? Why then for the girls?

It appears to me that it is one of the greatest possible arguments in favor of higher education for women, unless, indeed, it is desirable to be mere Kaffirs, both male and female, which has its strong points.

Kaffirs are healthier, hardier, more irresponsibly, happily brutal. They have few nervous moments, I fancy, over the future good of wife or child or friend. Their sense of obligation does not keep them awake nights.

They are neither afraid nor ashamed to create helpless human beings simply to furnish targets for another tribe. They have not even a glimmer of the thought--still embryonic, indeed, in civilized man--that the woman whose life is risked, and the child upon whom life is thrust unasked, are of the least consideration in the matter. These have no rights which the Kaffir lord is bound to respect. I fancy if he were asked a question on the subject he would look at you in stupid, silent wonder, if he did not ask: "What have they got to do with it? I am the race. What she and my children are for is to look after me, to make me comfortable, to be my inferiors, for my glory." Most likely he would be so stupidly unequal to even the shadow of a thought not purely egotistic that he could not even formulate such preposterous questions and self-evident statements as these. But his civilized brother does it for him--so why complain?*

* The report of the marriage of another educated and refined white woman to a full-blooded Sioux Indian shows the species of lunacy that attacks those who make a hobby of Indian education. The woman who has cast in her lot with an Indian, whose savagery is only veneered with civilized manners, will repent of her act, as all her sisters in misery have done before her. As a husband the American Indian is not a model, for even long training among white people fails to uproot his native idea that a woman is simply provided to bear him children and to do hard work which is beneath his dignity.-- N. Y. Press. June, 1893.

Now, suppose a woman would prefer to enjoy her mental capabilities to the full and develop these rather than to be the mother of a large brood; suppose she thinks she should be a developed woman first before daring to become a mother, whose right is it to object? If men prefer Kaffir wives there is a large a.s.sortment on hand. Squaws, both white and red, are to be had for the asking.

Whose right is it to decide that all women shall be squaws in mental development, in social position, in legal status and in political and economic relations, if all women do not choose to be such? Has a woman not the right to be a human being and count one in the economy of life before she is a mother---quite aside from her maternal capabilities? If not, when and where did she forfeit that right? When and where did _man_ get his? Every man has and maintains the right to be a man first--a unit, a responsible human being; after that--aside from it--he may, if he choose, become also a husband and a father. Is it not more than possible that the whole human race has been dwarfed and r.e.t.a.r.ded and hampered in its upward struggle because of this unaccountable effort to climb one side at a time, because brute force and phenomenal egotism have always refused to place humanity on terms of equal opportunity and leave nature alone?

We are constantly informed that those who insist on equal opportunities, on equal status before the law for women are making an effort to subvert nature; that nature has done this and that and the other thing with and for women. Well if she has, then she will take care of the results in an open field. She does not need special, restrictive laws placed on the s.e.x that she has already put under the ban of inferiority. If the superior s.e.x cannot still more than hold its own without putting a high protective tariff on itself then how can it claim to be the superior s.e.x? Nature has managed very well with the lower animals, giving them equal surroundings and opportunities. That nature is not allowed to manage for women is the very point we object to. Men have made all sorts of laws for and about women that are not made for and about men. Why not make laws and make them apply to the human being, leaving the s.e.x of that human being out of the question? It is the special, restrictive, unnatural s.e.x provisions in the laws and in the conditions of life that are objected to. No woman objects to nature's decree that she is a potential mother any more than men object to her decree that they are potential fathers.

It is the fact that men insist that women are this and nothing more--which nature did not say--to which women object. Nowhere else in nature does the male claim all of the other avenues of life as his special s.e.x privilege, except alone the one which he cannot perform--that of maternity. The s.e.xes stand on an exact equality as to opportunity until we come to man. The brain of each is developed to the extent of its capacity. The freedom and opportunity for food and pleasure are enjoyed by the s.e.xes alike. When the desire for maternity is strong upon her is the only time that the female brute animal ever becomes a mother. She decides when she is a mere mother, and when she is an animal with all the rights and privileges of her genus. With the human race alone is one-half governed upon the theory, and its opportunities fitted to the idea, that the female is never a unit, never a human being, never a person, but that she is simply, solely and only a potential mother, whose one "sphere" even then is to be controlled and regulated as to time, place and conditions--not by nature, not by herself, as with the lower animals, but by the other half of the race, which holds itself as first human, individual, and with rights, duties, privileges and ambitions pertaining to him as such. His s.e.x relation, his potential paternity, is truly his "sphere" also, but that it is his whole sphere he has never dreamed. There are women who look at life the same way, for the other half of humanity, and decline to read nature's teachings--are unable to read them--in any other way.

But aside from all this the doctor first claims that it is the intellectual development which cripples maternal capabilities and then he proceeds to give the reasons for the poor health of girls, which turn out to be bad ventilation in their schools, unwholesome sanitary conditions, injudicious or insufficient nourishment or physical and mental habits, and a lack of intelligent mothers and teachers, who dress and train the girls unhealthfully and in vitiated surroundings. How would boys fare under like conditions? Would the doctor say that it was the intellectual training which wrecked the health of the boys or would he say that it was the absurd conditions under which they got their training? Would he advise less mental work or less vile air; fewer studies or better light; more healthful clothing and food and exercise, or that the boys go homeland devote themselves to the sphere nature marked out for them--paternity?

Again the doctor appears to confuse society women with college women. As a rule they are totally distinct cla.s.ses. The mere society woman who--so the doctor says--"wrecks her health in rounds of pleasure and bears sickly children or none," is, in nine cases out of ten, the exact opposite of the intellectual woman--the college-bred girl--who has learned before she leaves college the value of health and the obligation to herself and others to be well. It is true that certain of the fas.h.i.+onable schools which fit girls for society and for nothing else on earth call their girls educated; but, since no one else does, it were futile to confuse the two cla.s.ses. The mere society girl, as a rule, is, so far as real mental development and higher education and capacity to think logically, are concerned, as truly a squaw as if she wore blanket and feathers. Indeed, this is what she does wear mentally. She should be a perfect wife for the men who wish wives to be physical and not mental companions; she would be second only to the Kaffir women in that she wears a trifle more clothing.

But even in her case, would it not be wise to infer that she has not necessarily physically incapacitated herself for maternity by her frivolous life, so much as that she does not care for children, and would find them troublesome to a brain, which holds nothing more serious and valuable than jewels and reception dates? And, if she did reproduce her kind, would this world be benefited? Why this constant cry for more children in a world crushed by the weight of sorrow, suffering and wrong to those already here? Until children can be born into better conditions let us be thankful that there is one cla.s.s of women too narrowly selfish and another cla.s.s too full of the sense of obligation to add very rapidly to this bee hive of misery and discontent and wrong.

The world needs healthier, wiser, truer children, not more of them, and until mothers are both educated and rank before the law as human beings, they will never be able to give that kind to the world. Just so long as men must get their brains from the proscribed s.e.x, just that long will their minds remain an "infant industry" and be in need of a high protective tariff in the shape of restrictive laws on women to s.h.i.+eld men from equal compet.i.tion in a fair field as and with human units. The laws of heredity are as inflexible as death. Invariable, they are not; but so surely as there is a family likeness in faces, there are hereditary reasons for crime, for insanity, for disease, for mental and for moral imbecility, and women owe it to themselves, and to the world which they populate, not to allow themselves to be made either the unwilling, or the supine, transmitters or creators of a mentally, morally or physically dwarfed or distorted progeny.

While reading the proof for this book, this interesting article comes to me from Germany and shows how thoroughly the false basis of thought is being undermined, in other countries than our own. H. H. G.

"There has been so much discussion concerning the physical and mental differences between men and women, and the representatives of social science have expressed so many contradictory opinions regarding this question, that I feel it my duty, as a physiologist, to give my opinion on this important matter. Several fathers of the Church have entirely denied that woman has a soul. The canonists write: 'Woman is not formed after the image of G.o.d; and many philosophers in the same manner have considered women of small consequence. In a discourse 'concerning the education and culture of women,' Prof Sergi has followed the lead of this pessimistic school. The differences between the s.e.xes, to which Prof. Sergi lias called attention, are doubtless significant for anthropology and physiology but, in my opinion, do not depend on the original condition of woman, but are caused by the barriers which have been raised by society regarding her destiny. In order to obtain an unprejudiced judgment, we must free woman from the yoke which man has placed upon her. We must observe her in the natural position, where she represents a particular language in the zoological scale. The ladies must now pardon me if I compare them with the lower animals, for in this way I can the better exalt them.

"As objects of comparison we will observe the most intelligent and faithful animals. With regard to dogs and horses we notice little difference between either the strength or the temperament of males and females. The hunter fears the lioness more than the lion, and the same is true of tigers and panthers. Prof. Sergi, in the above-named discourse, has expressed the following condemnatory opinion: "Neither in her physical nor mental capacities has woman reached man's normal scale of development, but on an average has remained so far behind that this s.e.x seems to have come to a standstill in the general development of the race." This statement has surprised me in the highest degree. It appears to me that the marks of the human race, and the real physical characteristics which distinguish us from the animals, are feminine peculiarities. The principle has been adduced that the structure of the brain shows the abyss between man and animals. This is incorrect. There is no immeasurable difference between our brain and that of the gorilla, and the effects of the central cavities are shown only in the advancing development of the expressions of physical activity, not in their formation and character. A greater morphological difference between man and the animals is shown in the form of the pelvis. No physician, even twenty steps away, could mistake the pelvis of man for that of an anthropoid ape. The pelvis of woman is a new type which has appeared on the earth. Until now we have sought in vain for that animal which shall complete the chain between us and animals. It is striking: the narrow, high pelvis of the man is more ape-like than that of the woman. If the a.s.sertion is correct that the upright gait (on two feet) is the mark of distinction, and the n.o.blest one for man, then woman certainly possesses the advantage of a pelvis particularly suitable for upright walking.

Darwin has also demonstrated that female animals often revert to the masculine type, while the reverse seldom happens. More favorable conditions are necessary for the production of a female animal than a male, because the female embryo exhibits a greater fulness of life.

Statistics have shown that under unfavorable conditions more men than women are born; also, male animals die more easily than female.

"Several judges of the woman question who consider that the brain of woman cannot compare with that of man, add that women should not enter into emulation with men in the mental domain lest they should lose the charm of their femininity, and because they should give themselves up completely to their vocation as wife and mother. This division of the work is certainly very useful for man and has greatly a.s.sisted him to his position of power, and has Pushed woman into the background. But it is incorrect that woman loses her womanliness by cultivating her mind."

[From the Deutsche Revue.]

HEREDITY IN ITS RELATIONS TO A DOUBLE STANDARD OF MORALS

Read before the World's Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893

Ladies and Gentlemen:--As a student of Anthropology and Heredity one is sometimes compelled to make statements which seem to the thoughtless listener either too radical or too horrible to be true. If I were to a.s.sert, for example, that good men, men who have the welfare of the community at heart, men who are kind fathers and indulgent husbands, men who believe in themselves as pure, upright and good citizens, if I were to say that even such men are thorough believers in and supporters of the theory that it is right and wise to sacrifice the liberty, purity, health and life of young girls and women and, through the terrible power of heredity, to curse the race, rather than permit men and boys to suffer in their own persons the results of their own misdeeds, mistakes or crimes, I would be accused of being "morbid" and a "man hater." But let us see if the above statement is not quite within the facts.

I shall take as an ill.u.s.tration the words and arguments of a man who stands second, only, to our Chief Police officer in the largest city in the United States, and since he was permitted to present his arguments in the most widely read journals of the country it seems fitting that these opinions be dealt with as of unusual importance. All the more is this the case since they were intended to influence legislation in the interest of State-regulated vice.

Among other things he said:

"Of course there are disorderly houses, but they are more hidden, and less of that vice is flaunted, than in any other city in the world. Such places have existed since the world began and men of observation know that this fact is a safe-guard around their homes and daughters. Men of candid judgment, religious men, know, too, that they had ten thousand times rather have their live, robust boys err in this indulgence, than think of them in the places of those unfortunates on the island, whose hands are m.u.f.fled or tied behind them. This is a desperately practical question with more than a theoretical and sentimental side. It ought to be talked about and better understood among fathers.

"Thank G.o.d that vice is so hidden that Dr. Park-hurst has to get detectives to find disorderly houses, and that thousands of wives and daughters do not know even of their existence. Such horrible disclosures as were made before innocent women and girls in Dr. Parkhurst's audience do vastly more harm in arousing their curiosity and polluting their minds than a host of sin that is compelled to hide its head. When I was Captain of the Twenty-ninth Precinct, I went with Dr. Talmage on his errand for sensational information for his sermons. I know, from observation and from reports which I was careful to gather, that never in their history were the places he described as thronged by patrons, largely from Brooklyn, or so much money spent there for debauchery as after those sermons."

Now I a.s.sume that this Police Inspector is a good citizen, father, husband and man. I a.s.sume that he is sincere and earnest in his desire and efforts to suppress crime and promote--so far as he is able--the welfare of the community. I a.s.sume, in short, that he is, in intent and in fact, a loyal citizen and a conscientious officer. I have no reason to believe that he is not doing what he conceives is best and right, and yet even he is quoted as advocating the sacrifice of purity to impurity, the creating of moral and social lepers in one s.e.x in order that moral and social lepers or the ignorantly vicious of the other s.e.x may escape the results of their own mistakes or vice. It impresses me anew that such teaching, from such authority, is not only the most unfortunate that can be put before a boy but that it goes farther perhaps than anything else can to confirm in men that conditions of s.e.x mania which the Inspector says is more desirable should be cultivated by means of regularly recognized state inst.i.tutions for the utter sacrifice and death of young girls than that it should end in the wreck of the s.e.x maniac himself and in his own destruction.

But were our statesmen students of heredity, they would not need to be told that there is, there can be, no "safeguards around wives and daughters" so long as their husbands, fathers and sons are polluting the streams of life before they transmit that life itself to those who are to be "our daughters and wives."

But not going so deeply into the subject, for the moment, as to deal with its hereditary bearings; upon what principle his argument can be valid, I fail to see. Why is it better that some girl shall be sacrificed, body, mind and soul; why is it better that she shall be his victim than that he shall be his own? And then again, the problem is not solved when she is sacrificed. He has simply changed the form of his disease, and in the change, while it is possible that he has delayed for himself the day of destruction, he has, in the process, corrupted not only his victim but the social conscience, as well. Were this all perhaps it would be still thought wise to follow the advice of the Inspector--and alas, of some physicians--and continue to sacrifice under the b.e.s.t.i.a.l wheel of s.e.x power those who are from first to last prey to the conditions of social and legal environment in which they are allowed no voice.

But this is not all. The seeming "cure" is no cure at all. It is simply a postponement of the awful day for the s.e.x maniac himself and, worse than this--more terrible than this--it is the cause of the continuance of the mania not only in himself but in his children. He marries some honest girl by and by and thus a.s.sociates, with the burnt-out dregs of his life, one who would loathe him did she know his true character and his concealed but burning flame of insanely inherited, insanely indulged, b.e.s.t.i.a.lly developed disease. But he is now--under the shadow of social respectability and church sanction--to perpetuate his unfortunate mania in those who are helpless--the unborn. Heredity is not a slip-shod thing. It does not follow One parent and one alone. The children of a father who "sowed his wild oats" by the method prescribed by the Inspector (and alas, by social custom) are as truly his victims as is the pariah of humanity who is to be quarantined in some given locality, made a social leper and a physical wreck that he, personally, may be neither the one nor the other. But nature is a terrible antagonist. She bides her time and when she strikes she does not forget to strike a harder, wider-reaching, more terrible blow than can be compa.s.sed by a single individuality or a single generation. This is the lesson that, so far, we have absolutely refused to learn. I do not hesitate to take issue with the Inspector, therefore, and say that it is far better for society, far better for the fathers of unfortunate victims of s.e.x mania, far better for the victim himself that he be "on the Island with hands m.u.f.fled or tied behind him," where death to one will end the misery to all, than that by applying the remedy which the Inspector recommends, the result should be, as it is, a future generation of s.e.x maniacs, scrofulous, epileptic or simply const.i.tutionally undermined weaklings.

The boys who are encouraged to "sow their wild oats" and taught that it is safe to do so under State regulation should hear the reports of some of the students of hereditary traits, conditions and developments. There is to-day in an asylum not so far from the Inspector's own door but that its records are easy of access, one victim of this pernicious theory whose history runs thus: He was a gentleman of good social, financial and mental surroundings. He was a "young man about town." He possessed, (perhaps it was an hereditary trait) more consciousness of the fact that he was a male animal than that he was an intelligent, self-respecting human being who had no moral right to degrade another human being for his gratification, while he a.s.sumed to still retain a higher and safer plane than his companions in vice. He was, in brief, no better and no worse than many young fellows who--alas, that they are so taught by men who believe themselves good and honorable--"turn out to be good family men."