Woman and the New Race | Page 4

the historian has almost universally fallen.
It is also a common error among sociologists. It is the fashion
nowadays, for instance, to explain all social unrest in terms of
economic conditions. This is a valuable working theory and has done
much to awaken men to their injustice toward one another, but it
ignores the forces within humanity which drive it to revolt. It is these
forces, rather than the conditions upon which they react, that are the
important factors. Conditions change, but the animating force goes on
forever.
So, too, with woman's struggle for emancipation. Women in all lands
and all ages have instinctively desired family limitation. Usually this
desire has been laid to economic pressure. Frequently the pressure has
existed, but the driving force behind woman's aspiration toward
freedom has lain deeper. It has asserted itself among the rich and
among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been
manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and
abortion.

The only term sufficiently comprehensive to define this motive power
of woman's nature is the feminine spirit. That spirit manifests itself
most frequently in motherhood, but it is greater than maternity. Woman
herself, all that she is, all that she has ever been, all that she may be, is
but the outworking of this inner spiritual urge. Given free play, this
supreme law of her nature asserts itself in beneficent ways; interfered
with, it becomes destructive. Only when we understand this can we
comprehend the efforts of the feminine spirit to liberate itself.
When the outworking of this force within her is hampered by the
bearing and the care of too many children, woman rebels. Hence it is
that, from time immemorial, she has sought some form of family
limitation. When she has not employed such measures consciously, she
has done so instinctively. Where laws, customs and religious
restrictions do not prevent, she has recourse to contraceptives.
Otherwise, she resorts to child abandonment, abortion and infanticide,
or resigns herself hopelessly to enforced maternity.
These violent means of freeing herself from the chains of her own
reproductivity have been most in evidence where economic conditions
have made the care of children even more of a burden than it would
otherwise have been. But, whether in the luxurious home of the
Athenian, the poverty-ridden dwelling of the Chinese, or the crude hut
of the primitive Australian savage, the woman whose development has
been interfered with by the bearing and rearing of children has tried
desperately, frantically, too often in vain, to take and hold her freedom.
Individual men have sometimes acquiesced in these violent measures,
but in the mass they have opposed. By law, by religious canons, by
public opinion, by penalties ranging all the way from ostracism to
beheading, they have sought to crush this effort. Neither threat of hell
nor the infliction of physical punishment has availed. Women have
deceived and dared, resisted and defied the power of church and state.
Quietly, desperately, consciously, they have marched to the gates of
death to gain the liberty which the feminine spirit has desired.
In savage life as well as in barbarism and civilization has woman's
instinctive urge to freedom and a wider development asserted itself in

an effort, successful or otherwise, to curtail her family.
"The custom of infanticide prevails or has prevailed," says Westermark
in his monumental work, _The Origin and Development of the Moral
Idea_, "not only in the savage world but among the semi-civilized and
civilized races."
With the savage mother, family limitation ran largely to infanticide,
although that practice was frequently accompanied by abortion as a
tribal means. As McLennan says in his "Studies in Ancient History,"
infanticide was formerly very common among the savages of New
Zealand, and "it was generally perpetrated by the mother." He notes
much the same state of affairs among the primitive Australians, except
that abortion was also frequently employed. In numerous North
American Indian tribes, he says, infanticide and abortion were not
uncommon, and the Indians of Central America were found by him "to
have gone to extremes in the use of abortives."
When a traveller reproached the women of one of the South American
Indian tribes for the practice of infanticide, McLennan says he was met
by the retort, "Men have no business to meddle with women's affairs."
McLennan ventures the opinion that the practice of abortion so widely
noted among Indians in the Western Hemisphere, "must have
supervened on a practice of infanticide."
Similar practices have been found to prevail wherever historians have
dug deep into the life of savage people. Infanticide, at least, was
practiced by African tribes, by the primitive peoples of Japan, India and
Western Europe, as well as in China, and in early Greece and Rome.
The ancient Hebrews are sometimes pointed out as