Radiant Motherhood/Chapter 14

"To leave in the world a creature better than its parent, this is the purpose of right motherhood."

Charlotte Gilman: Women and Economics.

ON the power of the mother directly to influence her child while it is still un- born, diametrically opposite opinions have been expressed, and without exaggeration I think one may safely say that the tendency of biological science has been to scout the idea as "old wives' tales" and incredible superstition. Fortunate indeed it is that though our immature and often blundering science has in many ways permeated and influenced our lives, yet this denial of profound truth by those incapable of handling it in the true terms of science, has not entirely barred this avenue of power to the mother. Fortunately there are innumerable children who owe their physical and spiritual well-being to the profound racial knowledge still dormant in the true woman. ​As I said when I touched upon this question in Married Love:—

Yet all the wisest mothers whom I know vary only in the degree of their belief in this power of the mother. All are agreed in believing that the spiritual and mental condition and environment of the mother does profoundly affect the character and spiritual powers of the child.

Alfred Russel Wallace, the great naturalist and co-discoverer with Darwin of the principle of Evolution, was in many respects a pioneer of unusual foresight and penetrating observation, who thought that the transmission of mental influence from the mother to the child was neither impossible nor even very improbable. In 1893 he published a long letter detailing cases, which he prefaced by saying:—

The popular belief that prenatal influences on the mother affect the offspring physically, producing moles and other birth-marks, and even malformations of a more or less serious character, is said to be entirely unsupported by any trustworthy facts, and it is also rejected by physiologists on theoretical grounds. But I am not aware that the question of purely mental effects arising from prenatal mental influences on the mother has been separately studied. Our ignorance of the causes, or at least of the whole series of causes, that determine individual character is so great, that such transmission of mental influences will hardly be held to be impossible or even very improbable. It is one of those questions on which our minds should remain open, and on which we should be ready to ​receive and discuss whatever evidence is available; and should a primâ facie case be made out, seek for confirmation by some form of experiment or observation, which is perhaps less difficult than at first sight it may appear to be.

In one of the works of George or Andrew Combe, I remember a reference to a case in which the character of a child appeared to have been modified by the prenatal reading of its mother, and the author, if I mistake not, accepted the result as probable, if not demonstrated. I think, therefore, that it will be advisable to make public some interesting cases of such modification of character which have been sent me by an Australian lady in consequence of reading my recent articles on the question whether acquired characters are inherited. The value of these cases depends on their differential character. Two mothers state that in each of their children (three in one case and four in the other) the character of the child very distinctly indicated the prenatal occupations and mental interests of the mother, though at the time they were manifested in the child they had ceased to occupy the parent, so that the result cannot be explained by imitation. The second mother referred to by my correspondent only gives cases observed in other families which do not go beyond ordinary heredity.

. . . Changes in mode of life and in intellectual occupation are so frequent among all classes that materials must exist for determining whether such changes during the prenatal period have any influence on the character of the offspring. The present communication may perhaps induce ladies who have undergone such changes, and who have large families, to state whether they can trace any corresponding effect on the character of their children.—Nature, August 24 1893, pp. 389, 390.

Yet this suggestive pronouncement of the ​world-famous naturalist has never been seriously followed up by scientists.

I think the time is now ripe for a definite statement that: The view that the pregnant woman can and does influence the mental states of the future child is to-day a scientific hypothesis which may be shortly proved. I make this definite statement, in conjunction with the cognate and illuminating facts from other fields of research, a few of which are discussed in the following pages.

That our mental states can affect, not only our spirits and our points of view, but actually the physical structure of our bodies, is demonstrable in a hundred different ways, and appears either to be proved or merely suggested according to the bias and temperament of the one to whom the demonstration is made. But there is one at least of these physical correlations which can be demonstrated with scientific thoroughness, and which proves beyond doubt that the mental state of the mother has a reaction upon her infant even after it has severed its physical connection with her, and is a baby of a few months old. This fact is that a nursing mother who is subjected to a violent shock which results in a paroxysm of temper or of terror in her own mind, conveys the physical result of this to her infant when next she nurses it, so that the child has either an attack of indi​gestion or a fit. The effect of the mother's mental state is transmitted by the influence on the milk, the chemical composition of which is subtly altered by her nervous paroxysm, and which thus acts as a poison to the infant.

A much more subtle and closer correlation must exist between the mother's mental states and the child when it is still not yet free and independent in the outer environment of the world but while it finds in her body its entire environment, its protection and the resources out of which it is building its own structure, while the blood and the tissues of her body form its whole world, while through them and through them alone can it obtain all its nourishment.

True, the result of the mental state of the mother which we can see is, apparently, merely the physical result on the child's digestion of the milk which has become poisoned: but to stop at this point like a jibbing mule, and to refuse to take the further step in the argument because the child is yet too young for us to understand its resulting mental states, which reason indicates must be correlated with its poisoned digestive system, is to defraud the mind of the logical conclusion of a sequence of ideas.

The argument is as follows:—

(a) The mother's intense mental experience ​and consequent nervous paroxysm has a physical result upon the composition of her milk (presumably, therefore, upon other portions of her body, though this is irrelevant for the moment);

(b) This physically altered milk has a physical effect upon the infant who shows other and more extreme forms of physical distress;

(c) This physical distress must obviously to some greater or lesser degree, affect the child's nervous system; and (which is the point where the old-fashioned will break off);

(d) Consequently the child's mental state will be affected—although it is too young to translate this into conscious forms.

Were I to make this the main thesis of my book, examples of the effect of mental states on bodily functions could be readily multiplied, and illustrations drawn from facts quoted in other connections could be found in a great number of medical works. I here bring together a few which when placed in juxtaposition offer if not proof, yet such strong support of my theme as to place it in the realm of the scientifically ascertainable. For instance, Blair Bell in The Sex Complex, 1916, says:—

Religious manias may lead to ideas which fill the patient with abhorrence of sexual intercourse, and in this way directly ​interfere with the genital functions. There is indeed no doubt whatsoever that the mind influences function just as function influences the mind; for example, it has been shown that fright leads to an immediate increase in the output of suprarenin, and we know well from constant clinical observations that hypothyroidism leads to mental depression (pp. 209 and 210).

and Havelock Ellis in The Psychology of Sex, vol. 5, 1912, says:—

We can, again, as suggested by Féré, very well believe that the maternal emotions act upon the womb and produce various kinds and degrees of pressure on the child within, so that the apparently active movements of the fetus may be really consecutive on unconscious maternal excitations. We may also believe that, as suggested by John Thomson, there are slight incoördinations in utero, a kind of developmental neurosis, produced by some slight lack of harmony of whatever origin and leading to the production of malformations. We know, finally, that, as Féré and others have repeatedly demonstrated during recent years by experiments on chickens, etc., very subtle agents, even odors, may profoundly affect embryonic development and produce deformity. But how the mother's psychic disposition can, apart from heredity, affect specifically the physical conformation or even the psychic disposition of the child within her womb must remain for the present an insoluble mystery, even if we feel disposed to conclude that in some cases such action seems to be indicated.

So also it has been found that immunity from disease may be acquired by young animals being suckled by a female which had previously become immune, the antibody to the disease being absorbed in the ingested milk.

Further argument upon these lines might well be brought forward in favour of the view that the potential mother, during the months whilst she is acting as the child's total environment in all physical ways, is also through her mental states and conditions affecting the child's ultimate mentality and artistic and spiritual powers.

This subtle control exerted over the formation of the child may be visualized as more like some effect parallel to the remote influences of the internal secretions in controlling the other organs of the body than the more mechanical picture of things visualized by the Mendelians and those who concentrate on the purely physical and material aspects of heredity as related to chromosome structure.

The tendency in recent years in biological work has been far too much to lay stress upon the curiously mathematical laws Mendel discovered, and consequently to concentrate attention upon the physical chromosomes as containing the factors which carry hereditary qualities. Physiologists are now making an attempt to bring back into the treatment of life a more rational outlook, and nothing has con​tributed more to the scientific basis of this than the recent following up of the suggestions made so long ago as 1869 by Brown-Séquard. Since Starling named the internal secretions Hormones (see the Croonian Lecture, 1905) they have been much discussed by physiologists and some medical men (see for instance the recent work of Blair Bell, The Sex Complex, 1916 already quoted).

To form a rough mental picture of what is happening one must combine the physiological and the mechanical outlooks. One then obtains the idea that the mother is, through her mental states, affecting and to some extent controlling the production of the various internal secretions, and other more subtle and still undetected influences from various organs upon other organs, and that, in so doing she is making the environment for the various hereditary factors, in which their potentialities find it possible to develop or to be suppressed according to the circumstances which she thus creates. As is now beginning to be realized, we all have an immense number of latent potentialities, which may lie dormant and develop only under suitable circumstances.

Thus in my view the mother may actually and in every sense fundamentally influence and control the character of her child, working through the remote effects of internal secretions which play on the complex material factors of ​hereditary qualities which form the material basis of the child's potentialities.

Thus both heredity and environment have a vital part to play in building character, but greater than either is the subtler environment within the prospective mother created by her during the nine antenatal months.

Sometimes people who would otherwise like to believe that a mother has this power, are deterred by their own experience or that of others, who have, under conditions of distress and unfavourable circumstances, had children whose dispositions seem not to have suffered, but appear as sunny and happy as a child apparently conceived under more favourable circumstances. Here, however, one is immediately faced by the difficulties of accurate observation entailing a large number of data which tend to cancel out; for the mother who may personally have been below her usual standard of health and spirits while bearing the child may, nevertheless, actually be in such a good physical condition, or be a member of such a sound, healthy stock that the child's heredity was better than that of the average human being, and consequently that the child itself was provided with a healthy well-run body.

While to contrast with it and apparently to refute my thesis, there may be a mother full of the most ardent hopes and buoyant spirit, ​looking forward with supreme joy to the advent of her baby, doing all she can to give it every beautiful mental impression and physical health, whose work may yet be undone by some cruel chance, such as venereal infection, or some local malformation which has resulted in weakness in, let us say, the child's digestion. We all know how peevish mere indigestion will make anybody. Or she, the well-intentioned and outwardly well-circumstanced mother may, unknown to herself, have been battling against the cruel handicap in some racial, heritable defect in her husband; the child, therefore, may, with all her efforts, yet fail to be joyous owing to the too strong physical bias which chance or heritable disease has given it.

The existence of such apparently conflicting and contradictory individual instances in no way refutes my main thesis, which is that granted equal conditions of clean and wholesome ancestry, granted equally favourable conditions of health and nutrition for the mother during her period of carrying the child, that that child benefits and is superior to the other who has had the advantage of a happy mother's conscious effort to transmit to it a wide and generally intellectual and spiritual interest in the great and beautiful things of the world.

This fact is often illustrated in the different children of the same parents. Of children ​born under as nearly identical circumstances as may be possible within a year or two of time, the one may have a totally different disposition with totally different qualities from the other. The chance of birth, the inheritance of the innumerable possible characteristics latent in both parents might be sufficient to account for this were chance alone at work, but very often information may be obtained from the observant mother which correlates her own state while carrying the child with the after condition of the child itself.

One rather striking instance of such a correlation is by a curious chance known to me, and should be of general interest. Oscar Wilde, whose genius was sullied by terrible sex crimes, which he expiated in prison, is known to all the world as a type whose distressing perversion is a racial loss. His mother once confided to an old friend that all the time she was carrying her son Oscar, she was intensely and passionately desiring a daughter, visualizing a girl, and, so far as was possible, using all the intensity of purpose which she possessed to have a girl, and that she often in after years blamed herself bitterly, because she felt that possibly his perverted proclivities were due to some influence she might have had upon him while his tiny body was being moulded.

Evidence upon this subject of the power or ​otherwise of the mother to influence her coming child is wanted, and it is very difficult to obtain, partly because of the reticence of those who have been through the dim and secret mysteries of motherhood, and partly because their accuracy cannot well be tested until after the child has reached maturity. In these after years the mother is likely to be swayed by the course the child's life has taken, into unconsciously laying stress upon one or other point which may seem correlated with its after achievements.

Evidence, however, in the form of notes kept during the time the mother is carrying the child which may be compared with the child's life in later years are very valuable, and, if any readers have such with which they would entrust me, a sufficient body of such evidence might possibly be accumulated to assist materially in the formation of a strong spiritual asset in the creation of the best possible human beings.

The father who desires to influence his child must do so through the mother had clever men more generally realized this we should have heard less of the lament that clever men so often have stupid sons.

Of the more physical aspects of the mother's power to influence the form of the development of her growing child we have abundant evidence. If the mother is starved, and by starved I mean ​less the actual starvation from want of food than the subtler starvation of improper food or food lacking in the truly vital elements, then the child visibly suffers. For instance, rickets, a disease of grave racial significance to which reference has already been made (see Chapter II), is due to the lack of certain necessary elements in the food.

A simple diet, the simpler the better, is sufficient adequately to provide all the essentials of nourishment for the mother and her coming child, and much indeed may be done for the general health and beauty of the child by providing the mother with the best form of material from which the embryo may build itself. The use of foods containing large quantities of vitamine (real butter and oranges, for instance, are specially good) is very advisable. They are not only enriching in their action in assisting true assimilation of other foods, but they probably tend to make good the general drain on the mother's vitality which would naturally take place were she not amply provided with these most subtle ingredients, which, though present in such minute quantities in fresh food, are yet of incalculable value. The effect of proper and specially adapted dieting, not only on the health of the mother, but also on the beauty and general vigour of the child, is a thing which is particularly expressed by various writers who have ​followed up the early experiments on diet made by Dr. Trall.^[1]

There is also Dr. Alice Stockham's book, Tokology, to which I have previously drawn attention. Although, as I then said, it contains errors of a comparatively trivial nature such as calling carbonaceous material "carbonates," which may have been sufficient to prejudice the scientific mind against the rest of her work, it contains the profound and valuable message Mr. Rowbotham published in England in 1841, amplified, and to some extent enriched by this woman doctor's experience.

Those lovers who ardently desire their child and have a mental picture of it long before its birth may delight in speaking of it to each other as though it were, as indeed it is, alive. For this a name is required, but in order to avoid the danger suggested on page 151, it is wiser perhaps to choose the name of both a girl and a boy, the name which the child would be called by according to its sex after birth, and, while it is still unseen, to link the two together in speaking of the coming child.

Sometimes for private reasons a girl in par​ticular or a boy in particular may be desired, but the well-balanced mind of a parent, particularly of the first child, should welcome either a son or a daughter, each of whom has its peculiar charms, and neither of whom can be described as more valuable than the other. Our false estimate of boys as superior is largely due to economic conditions and the custom of male entail. This should, and of course will, be altered. It is the first child, whether boy or girl is no matter, who is "the first-born" with all that that connotes in rapture and wonder to its parents.

Owing to the fact that more boys are born than girls, there is always the greater chance of the birth of a boy than a girl. From this point of view it would appear that girls are more precious, but boys are oftener ailing and feeble and difficult to rear, so that it is perhaps well that more of them should be born than of their stronger sisters.

Throughout its coming, the little one should be thought of in such a way that it will be equally welcome whichever its sex, and thus be given the best chance of developing fully and naturally in its own way.