Radiant Motherhood/Chapter 15

Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.

Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the brim.

No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.

Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination of joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.

Tagore: Gitanjali.

ΟNE of the great sources of disharmony in our social life is the extent of the extraordinary ignorance about ourselves which still persists. From this spring our conflicting opinions and diametrically opposed views, and also the apparently self-contradictory evidence on almost any point of fundamental importance which is brought before the public.

In no respect is there more conflict of opinion than concerning the age at which a woman ​should marry and become a mother. On the one hand, we have advocates of very early motherhood, and they point to the fact that a girl of seventeen is often already a woman and strongly sexed; they point to the hackneyed statement "that a girl matures sooner than a boy"; they point to the fine and healthy babies which very young mothers may bear and to the greater pliability and ease of birth, and these facts and their arguments may appear conclusive. On the other hand, the actual experience of many people conflicts with these apparently justified conclusions.

All the highly evolved races tend to prolong childhood and youth. All tend to replace early marriage by later marriage and parenthood to the obvious advantage of the race.

Marriage and parenthood at fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, which once were common in almost every country, are being replaced by later marriage and parenthood. As Finot 1913 says:—

A mystic chain appears to attach the age for love to the consideration enjoyed by women. In the Far East, woman is offered very young to the passion of man, and disappears from existence at the time her contemporaries are just beginning to live. Love, for this very reason, has a purely sensual stamp, degrading to man and to woman. The lengthening of the age of love elevates the dignity, and at the same time increases the longevity, of woman. Beyond the age of thirty or forty the woman, dead to love, was fit only for religion or witch​craft. Her life was shattered. Prematurely aged she went out of the living world. The prolonged summer of Saint-Martin in women will doubtless have consequences which we should be wrong to fear. There is a solidarity of ages. The cares bestowed on the child benefit the old man. The enlargement of the age of maturity allows the child longer to enjoy the years of life that are intended to form bodies and souls. . . . The sentimental life of the country has undergone similar results. Balzac, in proclaiming the right to love on the part of the woman of thirty, aroused in his contemporaries astonishment bordering on indignation. In his day, was not a man of forty-four considered an old man?^[1] Let us not forget that forty or fifty years before Balzac, a philosopher like Charles Fourier, despairing of the sentimental fate of young girls who had not found a husband before the age of . . . eighteen years, claimed for them the right to throw propriety to the winds. According to the author of the Théorie des Quatre-Mouvements,^[2] this was almost the critical age (Problems of the Sexes, transl. Jean Finot 1913).

The relative ages of husband and wife also have their influence, but should, to some extent, depend more on their physiological age than on their actual years. They should, however, not be widely different. As Saleeby says:—

The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every agggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age ​at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority—contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.

We, therefore, see that, as might have been expected, this question of the age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from the average point of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. First, for herself, the greater her husband's seniority, the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of married women. But further, the existence of widowhood is a fact of great social importance because it so often means unaided motherhood, and because, even when it does not, the abominable economic position of women in modem society bears hardly upon her. It is not necessary to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked (Woman and Womanhood, 1912).

I have observed many girls, who were in every true sense of the word girls (that is unconscious of personal sex feeling, still growing in bodily stature and still developing in internal organization) until they were nearly thirty years of age. In my opinion, the girl who is thoroughly well-balanced, with an active brain, a well-developed normally sexed body, natural artistic and social instincts is not more than a child at seventeen, and to marry her at that age or anything like it is to force her artificially, and to wither off her potentialities.

The type of woman who really counts in our modern civilization is, as a rule, not of age ​until she is nearly thirty. Not only does she not mature sooner than a boy; she matures actually later than a large number of men. I have now accumulated a wide and varied amount of evidence in favour of the view which I here propound, namely, that there is a most highly evolved type of woman in our midst. This type, which it will be agreed is the most valuable we possess, encompasses women of a wide range of potentialities; they have beautiful entirely feminine bodies, with all feminine and womanly instincts well developed, with a normal, indeed a rather strong, sex instinct and acute personal desires which tend to be concentrated on one man and one man alone. I will provisionally call this the late maturing type, for such a woman is generally incapable of real sex experience till she is about twenty-seven or thirty. I think that she is in line with the highest branch of our evolution, that she represents the present flower of human development, and that through her and her children the human race has the best hope of evolving on to still higher planes—but, and this is very important, she is not fitted for marriage until she is at least twenty-seven, probably later, her best child-bearing years may be after she is thirty-five, and her most brilliant and gifted children are likely to be born when she is about forty.

Personal evidence, and also facts in the in ​teresting letters sent me by my readers have brought to my knowledge the existence of an important proportion of women who are absolutely unconscious of personal localized sex feeling until they are nearly or over thirty—one woman was nearly fifty before she felt and knew the real meaning of sex union though many years married.

From outward observation of the general physique of such of these women as I have seen face to face, I may say that, as a rule, they retain their youth long; they retain also a buoyancy and vitality which, if they are properly treated, and have the good fortune to be married at the right time to the right man, may remain with them almost throughout their lives. Such women not only prolong their girlhood,. they defer their age. Such women have, of course, throughout the centuries appeared from time to time, and I fancy have generally in the past, and still often in the present, suffered acutely through marrying too young. When they marry too young they tend, by the forcing of their feelings, by the deadening through habit of their potentialities, by the trampling on the unfolded possibilities within them, to be turned artificially into a "cold type of woman."

Women now older tell me of the fact that for the first years of their married life they could give no response, but when they were ​respectively twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one or more, they began first to feel they were truly women. Young husbands have written to me of their distress that their wives (aged about twenty to twenty-three), delightful girls in every respect, seemed utterly incapable of any response in the marital orgasm. Sometimes this depends on her conformation, but such an incapacity I often attribute to the girl's marriage being premature. When she is twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps her internal development will be complete, and she will then be ripe for the full enjoyment of marriage: but if instead of a considerate husband she marries one who merely uses her, she stands little chance ever of knowing the proper relation of wifehood and motherhood.

These facts which I could vary with details from individual experiences, in my opinion, indicate a profound truth in the development of the human race. It is this: not only do the higher races of human beings have a prolonged childhood and youth, but the most highly evolved, mentally, physically and racially, of our girls have not finished their potential growth into maturity until they are in the neighbourhood of thirty years of age.

Does this then mean that all marriage should be deferred till so late? By no means, nor is the above conclusion any reflection on the type of girl who ripens much more quickly. I ​fully recognize that from the point of view of their sex potentialities some girls are complete women at seventeen or eighteen, and that they may then be very strongly sexed indeed. Such women should marry young.

The marked differentiation of type of these very notably different women can be traced through many other aspects of their lives. I consider, for instance, the type of whom I spoke in Chapter XII (who has a natural desire for union, representing the highest and most complex human union, the union of three) belongs very frequently to the late maturing and the most highly evolved form of femininity.

It should be recognized that there are among us not only different races, but that in the same stock, sometimes in the same family of apparently no specially mixed ancestry, we may find one or more members of the late maturing, others of the early maturing type. Sometimes of two sisters, the elder may perhaps be still in mind a girl while her younger sister is a woman, as can be observed by any one with a large circle of acquaintances. It would be well, I think, if humanity, whose proper study is mankind, were at least to know themselves sufficiently well to realize the existence of such different types, and their possible potential value as well as their differing needs. The energy at present wasted in the acrid statement ​of conflicting views would be so much better spent on the careful recording and recognizing of varying types.

The advice to marry young, which is in every respect socially wise and physiologically correct for some, should not be hurled indiscriminately at all women, because for the late maturing such advice is socially disadvantageous and physiologically wrong.

I am now ready to consider the question of the proper age for motherhood about which an immense variety of opinion is expressed. The general tendency has been, even in the last few years, to raise the age at which a girl may marry, and to raise the age which the medical profession advises as the earliest suitable for motherhood. But still one often hears of elders, whom one would in other respects like to follow, advising the early bearing of children.

Now I should like every potential parent to consider what type of child they want. Do they want to secure healthy, jolly little animals with no more brains than are sufficient to see them creditably through life? If so, let them have their children very early. Such healthy sound people with no special gifts are valuable, and there is much work in the world for them to to do. On the other hand, do they want to take the risk for their child of a possibly less robust body, but with the possibility, indeed, in ​healthy families, almost the certainty, of an immensely greater brain power, and a more strongly developed temperament? Then let them have their children late. And if a man desires to have a child who may become one of the master minds whose discoveries, whose artistic creations, whose ruling power stamps itself upon the memory of our race, whose name is handed down the ages, then let the father who desires such a child mate himself with the long-young late-maturing type of woman I have just described, and let her bear that child some time between the age of thirty-five and forty-five.

How often one hears some version of the phrase "Yes, it is so sad, poor, dear Lord So-and-So, a charming man, but no brains at all; his younger brother such a brilliant man; but that is always the way, the eldest sons in the aristocracy do seem to get the gift of property balanced by the lack of brains." Now I enquire, and I should like my readers to enquire, into the secret of this phenomenon, which is by no means universal, but is sufficiently common to be endorsed. In my opinion, the interpretation of this fact is that the earlier children were born when the mother was still too young to endow them with brains, particularly if the mother was one of the gifted and cultivated women of the late-maturing type.

​This also leads me to consider another generality which is frequently used as an argument by those who oppose conscious and deliberate parenthood. Some people say that by the direct control of the size of the family to a small limited number which the parents definitely desire, we would be eliminating genius from our midst, and their argument runs: Look at Nelson, he was a fifth son; look at Sir Walter Scott, he was a third son; and so on. This to the uncritical seems conclusive, and many people of great capacity, ideals and heart, who otherwise would be wholly on my side in my claim that every child born shall be deliberately desired, and that all other conceptions shall be consciously prevented, are swayed by this argument and say: "Yes, your position would be obviously the right one for the race if it were not that later children are so often the better." I turn, therefore, to a consideration of the life histories of these men's mothers. Why was Nelson the genius of his family? Because his mother was too young to bear geniuses at the time she was bearing her elder children. But this is not yet a sufficiently accurate consideration of the subject; I want to know also of which type the mother was, for, in my opinion, the right age for the parenthood of a woman depends also on the type to which she belongs, whether the early maturing or the late maturing. If ​she knows herself to be the latter, after it is patent, as it must become patent to every one once the idea is placed before them, that such women are in our midst, then that woman and her husband should usually defer parenthood until she has reached at least thirty years of age. If this were done, then not the fourth, fifth or seventh but the first child would stand a very great chance of being a world leader, a powerful mind, perhaps even a genius. First children have been geniuses (Sir Isaac Newton was an only child); all depends on the age, the conscious desire, the general type and the surrounding conditions during prenatal state of her infant, of the mother who bears him and the father from whom he also inherits potentialities.

A few investigations bearing on the effect of the parent's age have been published by the Eugenics Society and some individuals, but none of these appear to me to be of any value, for none take into account the necessary data concerning the type of the mother which I here point out, and in all the calculations crude errors occur.

The best woman, with comparatively few exceptions, is already and will still more in the future be the woman who, out of a long, healthy and vitally active life, is called upon to spend but a comparatively small proportion of her years in an exclusive subservience to motherhood. ​A woman should have eighty to ninety active years of life; if she bears three or perhaps four children, she will, even if she gives up all her normal activities during the later months of pregnancy and the earlier of nursing, still have cut out of her life but a very small proportion of its total. She should, indeed, after she once is a mother, always devote a proportion of her energies to the necessary supervision of her children's growth and education, but with the increasing number of schools and specialists, nurses, teachers and instructors of all sorts, the individual mother has much less of the purely physical labour of her children than formerly. That this is not only so, but is approved by the State can be seen at once by imagining a working class mother insisting on keeping her child at home all day under her personal supervision—the School Inspector would step in and take the child from her for a certain number of hours every day. But this book is primarily for middle and upper class women, and for them motherhood increasingly should mean a widening of their interests and occupations.

The counter-idea still expressed, even by leading doctors and others, is that the whole capability of the individual mother should be devoted solely to contributing to her children. This is exemplified in the recent statement of Blair Bell: "A normal woman, therefore, would ​not exploit her capabilities for individual gain, but for the benefit of her descendants." This view is a false one and is based on a narrow vision.

This pictures an endless chain of fruitless lives all looking ever to some supreme future consummation which never materializes. By means of this perpetual sinking of woman's personality in a mistaken interpretation of her duty to the race, every generation is sacrificed The result has not been productive of good, happiness or beauty for the majority. No; the individual woman, normal or better than the average, should use her intellect for her individual gain in creative work; not only because of its value to the age and community in which she lives, but also for the inheritance she may thus give her children and so that when her children are grown up they may find in their mother not only the kind attendant of their youth, but their equal in achievement. With a woman of capacities perhaps still exceptional, but by no means so rare as some men writers would like to pretend, the pursuit of her work or profession and honourable achievement in it is not at all incompatible with but is highly beneficial to her motherhood. As Charlotte Gilman says:—

No, the maternal sacrifice theory will not bear examination. ​As a sex specialized to reproduction, giving up all personal activity, all honest independence, all useful and progressive economic service for her glorious consecration to the uses of maternity, the human female has little to show in the way of results which can justify her position. Neither by the enormous percentage of children lost by death nor the low average health of those who survive, neither physical nor mental progress, give any proof to race advantage from the maternal sacrifice.—Women and Economics.