Feminism and Sex-Extinction Part 13

We complain that Nature, in place of making our bodies of cast iron, so to speak, makes them, on the contrary, vulnerable at every point. The reason is, surely, that the less we are const.i.tuted like cast iron--the more vital and complex, intelligent and responsive, our tissues are, accordingly--the more conducive to change and advance (because the more sensitively re-active to subtler and psychical stimuli) they are likewise. We cannot be, at the same time, hardy and obtuse, yet exquisitely sensitive. Living tissue-cells are characterised, beyond all other developments, by a range of contrasting abilities. An arm serves as softest cus.h.i.+on for a child's head, or, by stiffening of its muscles, becomes rigid as steel. An eye that sees for miles will focus to a pin-point. But being, as we are, still in the making, our tissues necessarily have limitations--and the defects, accordingly, of both their sets of qualities. High sensitiveness of function is necessarily attended by corresponding complexity and delicacy of structure. Such structural delicacy obliges us to adapt environment to its complexities.

It is thus an incentive to progress.

It obliges us, as well, to moderate our activities, and, by thus restricting the output of our cruder powers, our resources are husbanded and directed into higher channels.

The purpose of the complex differentiations which handicap the adolescent girl is obvious. The curving bones, the expanding pelvis, the rounded contours, the inhibited muscles, the languors and recurring disabilities, are designed to restrict activity, physical and mental.

Physicists tell us that the Conservation of Motion and the Conservation of Energy are one and the same thing. This must be true, as well, of _Vital_ Energy. The conservation of Vital Activity subtends the Conservation of Vital resources. The new developments are by no means incidental merely to the new processes; they are an integral part of The Plan. In half-closing the doors on avenues of active output, Nature conserves the Woman-powers for more intrinsic use. Every brain and body-cell is raised thereby to higher levels both of const.i.tution and of function.

As stored _mechanical_ energy becomes transformed into the higher form of _electrical_ energy, so the power stored in Woman's anabolic cells is raised to higher evolutionary forms. Thus she becomes fitted to be mother of the Child--the blossom of the Race. Her part in the child will contain the inherence of these new higher evolutionary values, as the father's part in it will contain the inherence of the concrete powers he has developed. And while her body spontaneously raises all its issues in order to fit her to be a Mother, so it develops powers and functions adapting her to serve as soft environment, physical and attributal, for the rearing of her child.

All this complex differentiation and evolution are designed, as well, to adapt woman for the love-pa.s.sion, and to draw and bind her mate to her.

And Nature has so cunningly interwoven the two plans and the two developments that, for the most part, those physical traits and emotional attributes which best qualify for motherhood most potently attract and closely attach the woman's mate to her.

Woman is "_une malade_," because, throughout the more than thirty years of her potential maternity, she suffers periodically those which, biologically speaking, are _minor childbirths_; each entailing a cycle of complex physiological processes, with more or less considerable const.i.tutional and nervous stress, debility and incapacitation. Nature exacts from her this recurring toll to Life and to the Race, not only to preserve in her, in healthful and efficient function, the power and mechanism of actual child-bearing, but (only second in importance) perpetually to recruit her emotional womanhood and wifehood.

When girls in course of developing the maternal function, with all its attendant psychical implications, are strained by athletics, by over-culture or industrial exhaustion, the vital resources are so diverted from the evolution of this function as to cause incapacitation in them, partial or complete, for wifehood, and for the bearing of sound and fine offspring. Sterilisation, absolute or partial, is induced; with dwarfed structure, blighted emotions and warped instincts. Even in women who have developed normally, disease or atrophy of reproductive organs may follow const.i.tutional strain or undue effort.

Toll to Life, in genesis of potential lives, is exacted likewise from the male. It is a reflex in him of the vital maternal function, inherent in his Woman-side. And this perpetual Life-tax upon his energies so reduces these as to temper his physical and nervous activities and his bent for individuation, and thus inhibits him from squandering his whole potential of Life-power in volitional output. Thus is preserved in him that normal proportion between Individuation and Perpetuation which Herbert Spencer describes as existing in inverse ratio to one another.

Thus also is preserved in him the normal mental balance between the Male and the Female departments of his dual brain. Men muscularly or intellectually overactive become lopsided and ineffective; restless and wasteful of their forces, chill and sterile of temperament; having lost that fine fructifying calm wherein creative potential is engendered for concrete achievement; having lost also that equipoise of faculty whereon mental and moral stability depend.

The Life-tax levied on the male is incomparably less, however, than that exacted of the female.

IV

It is because of their _anabolic_ mode of tissue-cells, less wasteful upon the material plane, that girls and women normally require less food than boys and men do. Notwithstanding that their bodies are more highly nourished than are those of males. Healthy young women continue to be plump and pretty, healthful and active on bread-and-b.u.t.ter, fruits and sweetmeats. While mannish women, whose physiology has deteriorated to the _katabolic_, disruptive and forceful, male mode, possess frequently the hungry appet.i.tes of men; not only for food but for drink. And yet withal, they are lean and for the most part plain, and poorly nourished.

With the wane in her of the _anabolic_ mode of cellular conservation, and the release thereby of vital resources which, sealed up in her tissue-cells at adolescence, remain invested in organisation during her years of possible motherhood, woman in whom s.e.x is not highly developed reverts more or less (as does the const.i.tutionally-deteriorated oyster) to the masculine type. She lapses to a _katabolic_ metabolism.

At middle-age, accordingly, provided she be still healthy, she derives a considerable accession of energy, physical and intellectual. Now for the first time relieved of the Life-tax upon her resources, her powers are released from bond, and become more fully available for individuation and personal activity.

At the same time, with this conversion of const.i.tutional investment to the form of current and available energy, there occurs a proportional--sometimes a very signal--impoverishment of organisation; and, after a phase of recrudescent emotionalism, a cooling and thinning of pa.s.sional feeling. Because such realisation of invested vital capital is inevitably the precursor of decline. Thenceforward her cells, no longer sustaining their high evolutionary states, generate more of concrete energy, and endow her with increased powers of action. But their conditional deterioration is manifest in general deterioration of physique, of looks, and frequently of health.

Not seldom, indeed, when her const.i.tutional reserves had been previously depleted by over-expenditure, physical or mental, the cell-deterioration of this epoch lapses to serious disease or disability; to rheumatism, gout, cancer or other perverted forms.

With the const.i.tutional and biological changes come psychical changes too. In women in whom s.e.x is not highly-specialised, middle-age entails, with its quasi-masculine physical phase, quasi-masculine mental traits.

They may become strenuous and combative, sometimes difficult and domineering. Perhaps they attach themselves to political and ethical "anti"-movements, as arena for their new combativeness, their augmented intellection, and increased physical activity.

In the most womanly of women also (as in men at a later epoch) there occurs at this period a natural transposition of the parental traits of Altruism and Chivalry to the impersonal plane; moving them to mother and father the world in general, by way of Charity, Philanthropy, Reform.

V

Is it not waste of power and faculty, is asked, for able and cultured women to permit their development, physical and mental, to adapt to the simple requirements of a nursery?

Uncultured and more or less brainless women of an inferior cla.s.s, it is said, should be adequate, surely, to cope with the minds and the needs of these immature beings.

Immature they are, in truth. But they are nevertheless strangely complex; exquisitely sensitive. And they are men and women in the making--or the marring. Behind the eyes of any child that looks at you in dumb and wistful impotence to express itself, to defend itself, to provide and to care for itself, may lie the mind, in bud, of a Shakespeare, of a Newton, of a Sh.e.l.ley; of a Florence Nightingale, a Mrs. Somerville, a Charlotte Bronte.

How the most ordinary child, indeed, of cultured parents suffers acutely in feeling, and deteriorates in mind and character under the regime of blundering rebuffs, scoldings and misapprehensions, he meets at every turn in the nursery ruled by a crude, hard woman of the labouring cla.s.ses!

How, when they have grown older in years but are still only young in understanding, all youth suffers from the shallow motherhood that was kind, maybe, and helpful to it in its childhood, but fails it utterly in the stress and difficulties of its teens!

True motherhood is the greatest of the Creative Arts; Mother-craft, the most vital and complex of the Sciences. Life has never received more than a t.i.the of that which Nature destined for it, owing to lack of mother-nurture. Genius has never fruited to full bloom and potence, because the mothers have so seldom realised the greatness of their task.

Nearly all the records of childhood that writers have given us are annals of bewildered mental suffering and of moral torture, which have left their evil mark in injured health or warped mentality--not seldom in both.

The home, with all the intuitive wisdoms, the powers and sympathies and the maternal ministry of a true mother, is indispensable to the nurture of Individualism, and thereby to the evolution of human character and faculty.

The true home is the temple of the soul. Souls are exquisitely sensitive, infinitely shy. And only in the warm and fostering atmosphere of kindred beings do they find courage to unfold in living attribute. Every home should be a unique environment, pre-eminently specialised and adapted to the evolution of the young and tender nursling-individualities shaping in it. To uproot these prematurely from their native soil and transplant them in an alien one, is to blight nascent talent and to warp character. For the reason that it necessitates too early individuation, with precocious development of self-protective and other qualities of worldly expedience.

To plant out the s.h.i.+vering, exquisitely sensitive seedling, the human Babe, in the chill, communal atmosphere of a Creche or other inst.i.tution, is as inhuman a social crime as it is an inhuman social crime to defraud its mother of her highest evolutionary impulse and function in the nurture of her little one--a responsibility she has incurred, a privilege she has earned by right of her maternity.

In her nursery, the mind of woman opens new windows of illumination, glimpses new vistas of thought and emotion, higher and lovelier apprehensions of the profounder meanings of Life. In her nursery, her eyes learn tenderness, her voice sweet modulation, her speech new purity and fondness.

In good and happy homes where young persons, in place of being banished to schools, grow up in the natural bracing and inspiring atmosphere of parental influence and affection, s.e.x evolves new issues, in those attractions and sympathies of its Contrasting Traits which are evoked by the relations of mother and son, of father and daughter, of brother and sister.

Under modern conditions, in which children and young persons renew intermittent acquaintance merely with parents and brothers and sisters during brief holiday visits--returning home, with every added term of absence, more and more strangers to their kin, their personalities and interests increasingly detached from those of the home circle--such potent and inspiring developments of s.e.x are vanis.h.i.+ng.

A wide gulf, truly, separates from their fathers these modern self-centred, self-opinionated young sportswomen and over-academised girls. The charming filial relation, engendering new and tender s.e.x-amenities in the daughter's hero-wors.h.i.+p and reliance on the manhood of her sire, in the father's protective chivalry and recruital of his youth in the company and interests of his young daughter, is waning toward extinction. The vast majority of fathers feel dismally constrained, indeed, and out of countenance in the presence of their girls--so smart and sophisticated, so superior, critical and self-sufficing are our latter-day school and college-maidens. For the most part, their own daughters are the last among womenkind to whom men turn, to reap something of the freshness and fairness of the younger generation they have sown and laboured for.

While the up-to-date mother aspires to no higher or more beautiful place in her boy's life and affections than that of "good chum!"

CHAPTER III

THE EXTINCTION OF s.e.x IN ADOLESCENCE

"We may outrun, By violent swiftness, that which we run at, And lose by over-running."

_Shakespeare._

I

How now, in detail, does the Feminist creed lend itself to the biological developments and indications of Nature described in the last chapter?

Unfortunately, as already intimated, it ignores, violently combats at every turn, and only too frequently wholly frustrates them.

Feminist leaders have shown themselves deplorably indifferent alike to biological and to sociological law. Losing sight of the truth that the intrinsic and eternal function of Humanity is Parenthood--and more particularly Motherhood--they have made, all along the line, not for the true emanc.i.p.ation of woman but for her commercialisation, merely.

The economic viewpoint has obsessed them wholly. Not to free woman from disabilities under which her womanhood, her wifehood, and her motherhood were suffering, but to convert her powers into industrial and marketable commodities has been the aim. That higher ideals are bound up with economics, is true. The rights of honest self-support and adequate wage, leading to kindlier, healthier and happier life-conditions, are, by improving const.i.tution and character, important a.s.sets on the side of Evolution. But by far the most urgent and important consideration in economics, as these affect women, is the fundamental biological principle that, because their greatest of all values lie in their evolutionary and racial endowments, rather than in their concrete and commercial efficiencies, the s.e.x requires and is ent.i.tled to such more lenient and privileged social and industrial adjustments as admit of due quota of its vital resources, physical and mental, remaining conserved in the potential. In place of these being differentiated and expended to the degree natural to man, and exacted of him by his prescribed role in progress.