Radiant Motherhood/Chapter 16

"Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. Thou knowest how to wait.

Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower."

Tagore: Gitanjali.

WHEN all goes well and there is no accidental hastening of the birth by shock or jar which dislodges the child too soon, the birthday finds its place in the ordinary rhythm of the woman's existence. We speak generally of the "nine months" during which the child is borne by its mother, but this nine months is a fictitious number depending on our calendar months, and the developing child is actually ten lunar months within its mother. Just as the average almost universal period of the woman's rhythm has twenty-eight days cycle, so on this number of days does the circle of months leading to birth depend. Ten months of twenty-eight days each is the full period of development, at the close of which the child ​seeks its exit through birth. As a rule the day of birth corresponds to some extent, if not quite accurately, to the former rhythm of her menstrual waves.

An interesting paper containing various scientific data (not all of which are universally accepted) is to be found in the Anat Anzeiger of 1897 by Beard. What is actually the spring behind this rhythm is as yet largely unknown, but recent work on the internal secretions from the ovary such as was described by Starling in the Croonian Lecture, 1905 (who quotes Marshall and Jolly and other workers), appears to indicate that this function like so many others in our system is due to the activities of certain glands yielding internal secretions. These, penetrating the whole system, have a controlling influence upon activities remote from their source.

For the birth itself, the mother should be in experienced hands, preferably those of a highly trained and certified midwife or maternity nurse such as Queen Charlotte's or the London Hospital supplies, one who is experienced in all that has to be done in normal, healthy circumstances, and who can detect at once any necessity for specialized help. If the mother has lived rightly and wisely, dieted as I suggest and is properly formed (as, of course, should be assured through examination some time before the birth is expected), the birth should be, how​ever terrible an experience, yet one which is safely passed.

In the days which follow she will have much to endure, and instead of the peace and quietness which she expected, she will find that she has constant disturbances incidental to the nursing of one who is, in essentials, a surgical case.

Possibly due to the inconveniences involved in staying in bed, there is a tendency at present to encourage the mother to get up and at least walk about the room and be up for an hour or two within ten days or less of the date of the birth. Almost every one with whom I have come in contact, advises this, and in a certain school, particularly those who go in for what is called "Twilight Sleep," there is not only an effort to get the mother up early, but a pride on the part of the mother and her advisers when she gets up perhaps within two or three days of the birth.

Some women who have had a good many children boast of how they are up and about in ten days. I glance critically at all who tell me that, examining both their figures and their general appearance. Only one woman of all who have ever discussed this matter with me urged the entirely old-fashioned month in bed following the birth. But, and this is very important, she was the only one who, having had many children, at the same time had done most notable and arduous ​brain work, and also retained her youthful figure and general appearance.

This quite exceptional and old-fashioned advice is what I would hand on to women to-day. The modern craze for getting up quickly is absolutely wrong, and has a fundamentally deleterious effect on the general health of our women. I should go so far as to say that not only should a woman stay in bed the entire month, but that she should for two weeks longer scarcely put her foot to the ground. She may lie out of doors or on sofas, but, after a birth, she should lie about for the whole of six weeks.

This may startle my readers. I, who look so keenly into the future, who am so progressive, so modern and so desirous of the great and rapid evolution of women, to return to the old custom of our grandmothers, and demand, not only the month in bed, to ask even more, that there should be six weeks spent practically lying about all the time! Is this not an anachronism? No. It will be observed that throughout this and my other books, my advice always has a biological basis, depending on the actual structure or the history of our bodies, and there is a very profound and physiological basis for the advice I now give. It is this—that not only during the birth is the whole system of the mother to some extent jarred and shaken; she suffers in all her nerves the sudden relief from ​the strain upon her muscles and in the whole readjustment of her system an extremely profound shock, and the treatment for shock entails rest. More than that, the womb which lies centrally and is so important an organ in her body, so enormously enlarged during the last months through which the child inhabited it, returns to its permanent size slowly; its strong, muscular walls tensely contract, but this contraction which reduces its size very much in the first day or two does not complete itself, does not bring the tissues back to the size which they will afterwards permanently maintain, until six weeks have elapsed. For the whole of six weeks, therefore, the womb will be larger and heavier than normal and with a tendency to get out of place, while all the muscles of the body wall are weakened and out of condition by being so long stretched. A woman, therefore, should not put any strain on her muscles like standing or walking or taking any active exercise before the six weeks has elapsed, though she should, lying both on her back and on her face, do exercises calculated to restore the strength of these muscles and fit them to take on their work directly she rises. One exercise, particularly valuable and but little known, is to raise the diaphragm without breathing. This can be done during the six weeks in bed, but is particularly valuable on first rising and standing ​or walking. This internal pull upwards of all the organs strengthens both the internal and the outer body wall muscles. Such control deliberately and frequently exerted throughout the day does more perhaps than any one other thing to retain a slender well-formed trunk. It has also a curiously bracing and exhilarating mental effect, and as the action can be done at any time unobserved, its effect can be utilized at will. The ancient Greeks laid great stress on the value of control of the diaphragm.

It may be argued that during the time the child was within it the womb was very much larger than it is after birth, and nevertheless then active walking exercise was recommended. Yes: but during that time the womb was supported by the increased tension on the front muscles of the body wall against which it pressed and was thus assisted in maintaining its position; but after birth, while it is so very much smaller than quite recently it has been, and, at the same time, while still much larger than normal, and more than the weakened internal muscles are prepared to support, it is no longer held firm by the tense body wall, for the body wall is now limp, crumpled and almost incapable of supporting any strain. If, therefore, the woman stands too soon, the inner organs which are again beginning to find their natural place—the long digestive tract and other organs—tend to flop downwards, to ​bulge out the still loose and strained abdominal muscles, and press the still too heavy womb out of its normal position, the position to which it must return, and must permanently take up if the woman is to have her general health maintained throughout the rest of her life. Hence, before she. sets foot to the ground she must lie the nature-decreed six weeks, and meanwhile exercise the abdominal muscles so as to prepare them to act properly.

When I see and hear of women either forced or lured or eagerly getting out of bed in ten days or a week after child birth, I wonder what will happen to all those women ten or fifteen years hence. They will be fortunate if they do not have what is now so increasingly prevalent, namely some form of displacement of the womb with all its attendant miseries of handicapped motherhood and wifehood. I maintain that it is nothing short of cruelty and criminality to allow the modern woman to get up quickly in the way she does. It may possibly be claimed by some of the foolish and hardy pioneers of getting up rapidly, that when she is a middle-aged or elderly woman she will not be suffering from the slow relaxations and displacements which result from putting pressure too soon on abdominal muscles unprepared to bear the strain. This will not make things safe for the average woman however. It is ​not realized how appalling is the prevalence of womb displacements among the lower working-class women, those who are forced by circumstances to get up in a week or ten days and go back to work. I think the modern increase in displacements in middle and upper class women is partly to be traced to the tendency to get up too soon, and also to the impatient practitioner's use of instruments to hasten a birth which would come naturally in good time. When once the perineal and inner supporting muscles have been torn, they are too often mended superficially, but inner tears are left which make the perineum an insufficient support for the womb, of which the result is its slow and gradual dropping out of place, which some years afterwards may acutely handicap the unfortunate woman.

In the name of all the fond and happy mothers that I hope the future may contain, I would urge every one who possibly can to insist on having six weeks of "lying in." This is not only in the interests of general health but of beauty. Too long have we become tolerant of the hideous formation of the body which is common in older women. We have domesticated some animals^[1] solely for our own purposes, and they are hideous indeed. Why should we ​women permit a comparable standard for ourselves? Why not insist on at least as much care as is devoted to the race-horse? Why not take a period of rest after the great effort of maternity proportionately as long as a she-wolf or tigress takes in her cave, fed by her mate while she lies about and plays with her cubs?^[2] The standard of beauty of the racing mare, of the wild tigress or she-wolf is slender and not markedly different from that of its virgin state. Such a standard, and not that of the over-taxed, man-used, domesticated animals should be that on which we women should insist.

In this connection should be mentioned one other way in which the following of Nature and obedience to her law works for good. In the next chapter I mention the baby's right to be fed by nature's food, and while the infant is nursing from its mother it stimulates contractions in the womb which very much assist in bringing it to its right size and position, and so the act of nursing benefits not only the infant but its mother.

A number of researches by various experts have been made, which proves that the womb reacts to the stimulus of suckling by the child. Pfister (Beit. z. Geb. u. Gyn., 1901, vol. v, p. 421), for instance, found that very definite contrac​tions took place during the baby's suckling, particularly for the first eight days after its birth also Temesváry (Journ. Obstet. and Gyn. Brit. Emp., 1903, vol. iii, p. 511) found that the natural involution of the womb after birth was distinctly more rapid in those who nursed their babies than in those who did not.

Prolonging the nursing period does undoubtedly not tend to increase the beauty of the woman's bosom but to deteriorate it, but, for at any rate the first few months, it is very advantageous both to the mother and to the child that she should feed it naturally. If throughout the nursing period she slings her breast properly from above, and if when the nursing period ceases she massages and treats the breast properly, it should not lose its beauty in the way which is alas, to-day, too general.

Mothers, in the self-sacrifice involved in their motherhood, too often forget their duty to remain beautiful. All youth is revolted by ugliness, consciously or unconsciously. A girl should not be indirectly taught to dread motherhood herself by seeing the wreckage her own mother has allowed it to make of her. A high demand for beauty of form by mothers is not selfishness but a racial duty.