Woman and the New Race | Page 6

"This woman determined to do her utmost to elevate
her sex. The one method of culture open to women at that time was
poetry. There was no other form of literature, and accordingly she
systematically trained her pupils to be poets, and to weave into the
verse the noblest maxims of the intellect and the deepest emotions of
the heart. Young pupils with richly endowed minds flocked to her from
all countries and formed a kind of Woman's College.
"There can be no doubt that these young women were impelled to seek
the society of Sappho from disgust with the low drudgery and
monotonous routine to which woman's life was sacrificed, and they
were anxious to rise to something nobler and better."
Can there be any doubt that the unfortunate "citizen wives" of Athens,
bound by law to their homes, envied the brilliant careers of the
"stranger women," and sought all possible means of freedom? And can
there be any doubt that they acquiesced in the practice of infanticide as
a means to that end? Otherwise, how could the custom of destroying
infants have been so thoroughly embedded in the jurisprudence, the
thought and the very core of Athenian civilization?
As to the Spartan women, Aristotle says that they ruled their husbands
and owned two-fifths of the land. Surely, had they not approved of
infanticide for some very strong reasons of their own, they would have
abolished it.
Athens and Sparta must be regarded as giving very strong indications
that the Grecian women not only approved of family limitation by the
destruction of unwanted children, but that at least part of their motive
was personal freedom.
In Rome, an avowedly militaristic nation, living by conquest of weaker
states, all sound children were saved. But the weakly or deformed were
drowned. Says Seneca: "We destroy monstrous births, and we also
drown our children if they are born weakly or unnaturally formed."
Wives of Romans, however, were relieved of much of the drudgery of
child rearing by the slaves which Rome took by the thousands and

brought home. Thus they were free to attain an advanced position and
to become the advisors of their husbands in politics, making and
unmaking political careers.
When we come to look into the proverbial infanticide of the Chinese,
we find the same positive indications that it grew out of the instinctive
purpose of woman to free herself from the bondage of too great
reproductivity.
"In the poorest districts of China," says Westermark, "female infants
are often destroyed by their parents immediately after their birth,
chiefly on account of poverty. Though disapproved of by educated
Chinese, the practice is treated with forbearance or indifference by the
man of the people and is acquiesced in by the mandarins."
"When seriously appealed to on the subject," says the Rev. J. Doolittle
in _Social Life of the Chinese_, "though all deprecate it as contrary to
the dictates of reason and the instincts of nature, many are ready boldly
to apologize for it and declare it to be necessary, especially in the
families of the excessively poor."
Here again the wide prevalence of the custom is the first and best proof
that women are driven by some great pressure within themselves to
accede to it. If further proof were necessary, it is afforded by the
testimony of Occidentals who have lived in China, that Chinese
midwives are extremely skillful in producing early abortion. Abortions
are not performed without the consent and usually only at the demand
of the woman.
In China, as in India, the religions of the country condemned, even as
they to-day condemn, infanticide. Both foreign and native governments
have sought to make an end of the custom. But in both countries it still
prevails. Nor are these Eastern countries substantially different from
their Western neighbors.
The record of Western Europe is summarized by Oscar Helmuth
Werner, Ph.D., in his book, _"The Unmarried Mother in German
Literature."_ "Infanticide," says Dr. Werner, "was the most common
crime in Western Europe from the Middle Ages down to the end of the
Eighteenth Century." This fact, of course, means that it was even more
largely practiced by the married than the unmarried, the married
mothers being far greater in number.
"Another problem which confronted the church," he says in another

place, "was the practice of exposure and killing of children by legal
parents." A sort of final word from Dr. Werner is this: "Infanticide by
legal parents has practically ceased in civilized countries, but abortion,
its substitute, has not."
How desperately woman desired freedom to develop herself as an
individual, apart from motherhood, is indicated by the fact that
infanticide was "the most common crime of Western Europe," in spite
of the fact that some of the most terrible punishments ever inflicted by
law