Radiant Motherhood/Chapter 17

"The nation that first finds a practical reconciliation between science and idealism is likely to take the front place among the peoples of the world."

Dean Inge: Outspoken Essays.

BABY's rights are fundamental. They are:

To be wanted.

To be loved before birth as well as after birth.

To be given a body untainted by any heritable disease, uncontaminated by any of the racial poisons.

To be fed on the food that nature supplies, or, if that fails, the very nearest substitute that can be discovered.

To have fresh air to breathe; to play in the sunshine with his limbs free in the air; to crawl about on sweet clean grass.

When he is good, to do what baby wants to do and not what his parents want; for instance, to sleep most of his time, not to sit up ​and crow in response to having his cheeks pinched or his sides tickled.

When he is naughty, to do what his parents want and not what he wants to be made to understand the "law of the jungle." From his earliest days he must be disciplined in relation to the great physical facts of existence, to which he will always hereafter have to bow. The sooner he comprehends this, the better for his future.

Most young mothers, even those who have had the advantage of highly trained maternity nurses to assist them at first, later require authoritative advice about how to treat the baby for whom they have given so much, and to whom they wish to give every possible advantage. Many books give advice to the young mother and to these she may turn. I do not wish to duplicate what they say, but advise every one who has an infant, even if they think they know all about the best method of bringing it up, to possess a copy of Dr. Truby King's Baby and How to Rear It for reference. It is the most practical, sensible and best illustrated book of its kind.

There is, therefore, on the subject of baby's material rights not very much more that I need to say, but there is one elementary right very generally overlooked, and that is the right to love in anticipation.

​Baby's right to be wanted is an individual right which is of racial importance. No human being should be brought into the world unless his parents desire to take on the responsibility of that new life which must, for so long, be dependent upon them.

Far too many of the present inhabitants of this earth who are not wanted because of their inferiority, were children who came to reluctant, perhaps horror-stricken, mothers. To this fact, I trace very largely the mental and physical aberrations which are to-day so prevalent; to this also I trace the bitterness, the unrest, the spirit of strife and malignity which seem to be without precedent in the world at present [see also The Control of Parenthood, final section, and, for the remedy, my book, Wise Parenthood, both published by Putnam].

The warped and destructive impulse of revolution which is sweeping over so many people at present must have its roots in some deep wrong.

Revolution is not a natural activity for human beings. Though the revolutionary impulse has swept through sections of humanity many times in its history, it is essentially unnatural, an indication of warping and poisoning, and a cause of further and perhaps irreparable damage.

Happy people do not indulge in revolution. Happy people with a deep sense of underlying ​contentment and satisfaction in life may yet strive ardently to improve and beautify everything round them. They strive in the same direction as the main current of life—that is the growth and unfolding of ever increasing beauty. The revolutionaries—bitter, soured and profoundly unhappy—pit their strength against the normal stream of life and destroy, break down and rob. Too long humanity has had to endure such outbreaks owing to its general blindness and lack of understanding of their causes.

Until the scientific spirit of profound inquiry into fundamental causes becomes general even in a small section of the community, superficial and apparently obvious explanations are accepted to account for results which really arise from profound and secret springs.

The "divine discontent" which has impelled humanity forward along the path of constructive progress is a very different thing from the bitter discontent which leads to revolutionary and destructive outbursts. The village blacksmith of the well-known song, using his healthy muscles on hard, useful work which gives him a deep physical satisfaction, may feel the former and help forward the stream of progress in his village.

The aim of reformers to-day should be to provide for every one neither ease nor comfort, nor high wages nor short hours, but the deeper necessities of a full and contented life, bodies ​able to respond with satisfaction to the strain of hard work performed under conditions which satisfy the mind in the most fundamental way of all—the deep, sub-conscious satisfaction which is given by the sweet smell of earth, by fresh air and sunshine, and green things around one.

We draw from all these things some subtle ingredient without which our natures are weakened so that a further strain sends them awry. To-day we are so deeply involved with the hydra-headed monster of the revolutionary spirit that there does not seem time to deal with it radically, to attempt to understand it, and consequently to conquer it for ever. Even now, when for the first time humanity is on a large scale beginning to tackle fundamental problems, I have seen no indication that the source of revolution is being sought for in the right place.

What is the source of revolution?

The revolutionaries through the ages, feeling themselves jar with their surroundings, have been ensnared by the nearest obvious things, the happier surrounding of others. These they have endeavoured to snatch at and destroy, thinking thereby to improve their own and their comrades' lot. Their deductions, though profoundly false, have appeared even obviously right to many.

External grievances are what the revolutionary is out to avenge: external benefits are what ​he is out to gain. Generally this is expressed in terms of higher wages, a share, or all, of the capital of those supposed to be better off, or the material possessions of others. These are the things that nearly all strikers and revolutionaries are upsetting the world to get, thinking—perhaps sincerely—that these things will give them the happiness for which, consciously or unconsciously, they yearn. The truth is, however, that it is a much more intimate thing than money or possessions which they need. They need new bodies and new hearts.

Most of the revolutionaries I have met are people who have been warped or stunted in their own personal growth. One sees upon their minds or bodies the marks and scars of dwarfing, stunting or lack of balance. They have known wretchedness both in themselves and in their families far more intimate and penetrating than that of mere poverty.

That, they may answer, is an external grievance which has been imposed upon them by society. In effect they say: "Society has starved us, given us bad conditions." Thus they foster a grievance against "society" in their minds. One bitter leader said to me:—

I was one of fourteen children, and my mother had only a little three-roomed cottage near Glasgow. We nearly starved when I was young. I know what the poor suffer at the hands of society.

​But it was not society that put fourteen children into that cottage; it was the mother herself. Her own ignorance, helpless ignorance perhaps, was the source of her children's misery. The most for which society can be blamed concerning that family is in tolerating such a plague-spot of ignorance in its midst. Nor is this pestilential ignorance by any means only confined to the financially poor.

This country, and nearly all the world, has innumerable homes in which the seed of revolution is sown in myriads of minds from the moment they are conceived. Revolted, horrorstricken mothers bear children whose coming birth they fear.

A starved, stunted outlook is stamped upon their brains and bodies in the most intimate manner before they come into the world, so oriented towards it that they must run counter to the healthy, happy constructive stream of human life.

What wonder at the rotten conditions of our population when these are common experiences of the mothers of our race:—

For fifteen years I was in a very poor state of health owing to continual pregnancy. As soon as I was over one trouble it was started all over again.^[1]

​Again:—

During pregnancy I suffered much. When at the end of ten years I determined that this state of things should not go on any longer.

Again:—

My grandmother had twenty children. Only eight lived to about fourteen years; only two to a good old age.

Again:—

I cannot tell you all my sufferings during the time of motherhood. I thought, like hundreds of women to-day, that it was only natural, and that you had to bear it. I had three children and one miscarriage in three years.

Need I go on?

There lies the real root of revolution.

The secret revolt and bitterness which permeates every fibre of the unwillingly pregnant and suffering mothers has been finding its expression in the lives and deeds of their children. We have been breeding revolutionaries through the ages and at an increasing rate since the crowding into cities began, and women were forced to bear children beyond their strength and desires in increasingly unnatural conditions.

Also since women have heard rumours that ​such enslaved motherhood is not necessary, that the wise know a way of keeping their motherhood voluntary, the revolt in the mother has become conscious with consequent injury to the child.

Increasingly, the first of baby's rights is to be wanted.

Concerning baby's right to be fed on the food that nature supplies, or if that fails on the very nearest substitute that can be discovered, there are to-day so many who urge that an infant shall be fed by its own mother, that it is perhaps needless to repeat arguments so impressive. Nevertheless, perhaps it is as well to remind young mothers of two or three of the most vital facts. The first is that no artificial substitute, however perfectly prepared and chemically analysed, can possibly give those very subtle constituents which are found in the mother's own milk and which vary from individual to individual. These probably are in the nature of the vitamines now so well known in fresh food, but they are something more specifically individual than can be scientifically detected. The fresh milk of its own mother has a peculiar value to the child which is greater than that of any foster mother.

For this reason alone, were it the only one, every young mother should nurse her own baby if possible; but, on the other hand, to-day ​it not infrequently happens that the mother may have an apparent flow of milk, quite sufficient for the infant in quantity, but that milk may be devoid of the necessary supply of fat or sugars or some other ingredient for complete nutriment. When this is so, it is often wisest to allow the mother to nurse the child partly and to supplement its diet by other milk.

Various schools of doctors and maternity nurses have differed even on this matter, but it is quite obvious that if the actual food value of the mother's milk is below a certain point then the added value of its individual vitamine-like qualities will not wholly compensate for the loss of actual nourishment.

Among baby's rights, I should perhaps also make it clear that there is his right that he should not be used as a bulwark between his mother and another baby in a way which is sometimes recommended so that a mother may go on nursing her infant for a very long time, sometimes even into its second year, in the hope that this nursing may prevent her conceiving again. Such a course of action is very harmful both to the child and to her and should never be followed. Such a practice is, of course, much less common in this country (except among aliens) than it is abroad where I have seen healthy children of even three or four years of age nursing upon their mother's knees.

​In these days, perhaps it is hardly necessary to accentuate baby's other rights since the century of the child dawned a generation ago. To-day it is perhaps almost more important to accentuate the rights of others who exist in the neighbourhood of a baby. But on the other hand if one looks penetratingly at the whole problem of character development, one sees that among baby's rights is its right to be trained from the very first so that its life shall be as little hindered by friction as may be possible: that it should be taught the elementary rules of conduct and necessary conformity with the hard material facts of existence from the very first. A wise nurse's or mother's training from the earliest weeks of infancy may make or mar a future man's or woman's chance of getting on in the world and making a success of their lives, by making or marring the character, the capacity to obey, the formation of regular and hygienic habits and the realization of the physical facts of the world.

The ancient Greeks taught their youth to reverence that which was beneath them, that which was around them, and that which was above them. In my opinion this right of youth to be placed in its proper orientation in relation to the world has been neglected of late. We are suffering from the wayward revolt from an earlier and perhaps harsher type of mistake, that ​of too greatly controlling and thwarting the child's impulses. We must maintain a just balance and return to the due mean in which the right of a child, not only to be well born but well trained, is universally recognized.