Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 | Page 6

father at the birth of his child is not a notably dignified or comfortable one. Nature accords the male but a secondary and comparatively humble place in the home, the breeding-place of the race; he may compensate himself if he will, by seeking adventure and renown in the world outside. The mother is the child's supreme parent, and during the period from conception to birth the hygiene of the future man can only be affected by influences which work through her.
Fundamental and elementary as is the fact of the predominant position of the mother in relation to the life of the race, incontestable as it must seem to all those who have traversed the volumes of these Studies up to the present point, it must be admitted that it has sometimes been forgotten or ignored. In the great ages of humanity it has indeed been accepted as a central and sacred fact. In classic Rome at one period the house of the pregnant woman was adorned with garlands, and in Athens it was an inviolable sanctuary where even the criminal might find shelter. Even amid the mixed influences of the exuberantly vital times which preceded the outburst of the Renaissance, the ideally beautiful woman, as pictures still show, was the pregnant woman. But it has not always been so. At the present time, for instance, there can be no doubt that we are but beginning to emerge from a period during which this fact was often disputed and denied, both in theory and in practice, even by women themselves. This was notably the case both in England and America, and it is probably owing in large part to the unfortunate infatuation which led women in these lands to follow after masculine ideals that at the present moment the inspirations of progress in women's movements come mainly to-day from the women of other lands. Motherhood and the future of the race were systematically belittled. Paternity is but a mere incident, it was argued, in man's life: why should maternity be more than a mere incident in woman's life? In England, by a curiously perverted form of sexual attraction, women were so fascinated by the glamour that surrounded men that they desired to suppress or forget all the facts of organic constitution which made them unlike men, counting their glory as their shame, and sought the same education as men, the same occupations as men, even the same sports. As we know, there was at the origin an element of rightness in this impulse.[2] It was absolutely right in so far as it was a claim for freedom from artificial restriction, and a demand for economic independence. But it became mischievous and absurd when it developed into a passion for doing, in all respects, the same things as men do; how mischievous and how absurd we may realize if we imagine men developing a passion to imitate the ways and avocations of women. Freedom is only good when it is a freedom to follow the laws of one's own nature; it ceases to be freedom when it becomes a slavish attempt to imitate others, and would be disastrous if it could be successful.[3]
At the present day this movement on the theoretical side has ceased to possess any representatives who exert serious influence. Yet its practical results are still prominently exhibited in England and the other countries in which it has been felt. Infantile mortality is enormous, and in England at all events is only beginning to show a tendency to diminish; motherhood is without dignity, and the vitality of mothers is speedily crushed, so that often they cannot so much as suckle their infants; ignorant girl-mothers give their infants potatoes and gin; on every hand we are told of the evidence of degeneracy in the race, or if not in the race, at all events, in the young individuals of to-day.
It would be out of place, and would lead us too far, to discuss here these various practical outcomes of the foolish attempt to belittle the immense racial importance of motherhood. It is enough here to touch on the one point of the excess of infantile mortality.
In England--which is not from the social point of view in a very much worse condition than most countries, for in Austria and Russia the infant mortality is higher still, though in Australia and New Zealand much lower, but still excessive--more than one-fourth of the total number of deaths every year is of infants under one year of age. In the opinion of medical officers of health who are in the best position to form an opinion, about one-half of this mortality, roughly speaking, is absolutely preventable. Moreover, it is doubtful whether there is any real movement of decrease in this mortality; during the past half