Woman and Womanhood | Page 7

chosen for fatherhood than are fit for it, and if the standard is to be raised, selection must be more rigorous and exclusive, as it could not be if every girl were taught that, unmarried, she fails of her destiny. The higher the standard which, on eugenic principles, natural or acquired, women exact of the men they marry, the more certainly will many women remain unmarried.
But I believe that the principles here set forth are able to show us how such women may remain feminine, and may discharge characteristically feminine functions in society, even though physical motherhood be denied them. The racial importance of physical motherhood cannot be exaggerated, because it determines, as we have seen, not less than half the natural composition of future generations. But its individual importance can easily be over-estimated, and that is an error which I have specially sought to avoid in this book, which is certainly an attempt to call or recall women to motherhood. It is not as if physical motherhood were the whole of human motherhood. Racially, it is the substantial whole; individually, it is but a part of the whole, and a smaller fraction in our species than in any humbler form of life. Everyone knows maiden aunts who are better, more valuable, completer mothers in every non-physical way than the actual mothers of their nephews and nieces. This is woman's wonderful prerogative, that, in virtue of her psyche, she can realize herself, and serve others, on feminine lines, and without a pang of regret or a hint anywhere of failure, even though she forego physical motherhood. This book, therefore, is a plea not only for Motherhood but for Foster-Motherhood--that is, Motherhood all-but-physical. In time to come the great professions of nursing and teaching will more and more engage and satisfy the lives and the powers of Virgin-Mothers without number. Let no woman prove herself so ignorant or contemptuous of great things as to suggest that these are functions beneath the dignity of her complete womanhood.
But many a young girl, passing from her finishing-school--which has perhaps not quite succeeded, despite its best efforts, in finishing her womanhood--and coming under the influence of some of our modern champions of womanhood, might well be excused for throwing such a book as this from her, scorning to admit the glorious conditions which declare that woman is more for the Future than for the Present, and that if the Future is to be safeguarded, or even to be, they must not be transgressed. I have watched young girls, wearing the beautiful colours which have been captured by one section of the suffrage movement, asking their way to headquarters for instructions as to procedure, and I have wondered whether, in twenty years, they will look back wholly with content at the consequences. Some time ago the illustrated papers provided us with photographs of a person, originally female, "born to be love visible," as Ruskin says, who had mastered jiu-jitsu for suffragette purposes, and was to be seen throwing various hapless men about a room. And only the day before I write, the papers have given us a realistic account of a demonstration by an ardent advocate of woman, the chief item of which was that, on the approach of a burly policeman to seize her, she--if the pronouns be not too definite in their sex--fell upon her back and adroitly received the constabulary "wind" upon her upraised foot, thereby working much havoc. No one would assert that the woman's movement is responsible for the production of such people; no reasonable person would assert that their adherence condemns it; but we are rightly entitled to be concerned lest the rising generation of womanhood be misled by such disgusting examples.
Nothing will be said which militates for a moment against the possibility that a woman may be womanly and yet in her later years, when so many women combine their best health and vigour with experience and wisdom, might replace many hundredweight of male legislators upon the benches of the House of Commons, to the immense advantage of the nation. If our present purpose were medical in the ordinary sense, the reader would come to a chapter on the climacteric, dealing with the nervous and other risks and disabilities of that period, and notably including a warning as to the importance of attending promptly to certain local symptoms which may possibly herald grave disease. An abundance of books on such subjects is to be had, and my purpose is not to add to their number. Yet the climacteric has a special interest for us because the special case of those women who have passed it is constantly ignored in our discussions of the woman question--which is not exclusively concerned with the destiny of girls and the claims of feminine