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

not along these lines that Man was destined to
emerge. Among all the mammal predecessors of Man, the male is an
imposing and important figure in the early days of courtship, but after
conception has once been secured the mother plays the chief part in the
racial life. The male must be content to forage abroad and stand on
guard when at home in the ante-chamber of the family. When she has
once been impregnated the female animal angrily rejects the caresses
she had welcomed so coquettishly before, and even in Man the place of
the 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