C. W. Saleeby

“ Who will question that, according to this conception of education, such a thing as the higher education of women must be condemned as inadequate? No more than a man is woman a mere intellect incarnate. Her emotional nature is all-important; it is indeed the highest thing in the Universe so far as we know. The scheme of education which ignores its existence, and much more than fails to provide the best environment for it, is condemnable. ”

“ There are no principles of national welfare which can divorce us from the simple truth that we must regard every human individual as sacred from the moment of its coming into existence—and that is a long time before birth. ”

“ Gilman is on the other. Man's apparent economic independence of women is as complete a myth as women's projected economic independence of men. In the last resort, when we come down to realities, and remember that both men and women are mortal, and that unless they are replaced, everything ends, we see that the introduction of the word economic into this question simply serves to confuse thought, just as the older political economy confused thought and laid itself open to the mercilessly magnificent attacks of Ruskin. Economy is literally the law of the house or the home—where life begins. ”

“ The laws of life are such that at any given moment the entire future is absolutely at the mercy of the present. The laws of life, indeed; one might have said the law of universal causation. But so it is. There is no conceivable limit to our responsibility. We act for the moment, we act for self; but there will be no end to the consequences. When the stuff of which our bodies are made has passed through a thousand cycles, the consequences of our brief moments will still be felt. ”

“ The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply—the relations not between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind, living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live. The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be appraised and paid for in proportion to their real value, their strength or availableness for life. ”

“ Make the State, indeed!—they can make nothing but fools of themselves, and without women's assistance could not even reproduce their folly. Of course the retort to all this nonsense is that neither sex ever yet created anything without the other. Every human act and achievement is the product of both sexes. When some friend of the past assures us that women should not vote because they cannot bear arms, he is of course reminded that women bear the soldiers. ”

“ There is no real reason to suppose that woman is less complex or less variable than man. She has the same title as he has to those conditions in which her particular characters, whatever they be, shall find their most complete and fruitful development. There is no more a single ideal type of woman than there is a single ideal type of man. It takes all sorts even to make a sex. It has been in the past, and always must be, a piece of gross presumption on man's part to say to woman, "Thus shalt thou be, and no other." ”

“ The answer is that the human species, like all others, displays what biologists call variation—men and women naturally differ within limits so wide that, when we consider the case of genius, we must call them incalculable, illimitable. The difference of our faces or our voices is a mere symbol of differences no less universal but vastly more important. It is these differences, in reality, that are the cause of the development of human society and of that division of labour upon which it depends. ”

“ At any rate, to those who worship and live for the past, we may offer this alternative: let them work for what will be. Perhaps the reward will be as real as any that the worship of what is not can offer. And, reward or no reward, it is something to have an ideal, something to believe that earth may become heavenly, and that, in some real sense which we can dimly perceive, we may be part—must be part, indeed—of that great day which is in our keeping, and which it is our privilege to have some share in shaping. ”

“ Given the world as it is, the conditions of marriage as they are, the economic position of woman, the power of prudery, and the conventional supposition that babies occur by providential dispensation, we must act as if we really made the assumption that human parenthood, until the moment of birth, is as irresponsible as any sequence of events in the atmosphere or the world of electrons. But we who are thinking in front for humanity must make no such assumption. ”

“ Men are to be heard who say that this is all nonsense; that it is natural for women to surrender themselves, that motherhood is a splendid reward, and that they are handsomely paid as well in material things. But how many men would be willing to marry on the conditions with which marriage is offered to a woman? How many men would be willing to surrender their possession of themselves to an owner for life, so that at no future hour can they have the right to privacy? ”

“ But when motherhood is concerned the monetary question becomes worthy of the adjective economic, so often prostituted, for the making of future life depends upon the provision of adequate means. The whole essence of motherhood is that it is a dedication of the present to the future. Every mother is in the position of the inventor or the poet or the musician for whose work the present makes no demand and no payment. The future is being served, but the future is not there to pay. The rights of mothers are the rights of the future, and its claims upon the present. ”

“ Yet again, a man likes not only to be mothered but he likes to play the father. Let his wife be a daughter to him; let her be capable of shrinking, so to say, into small space, becoming little and confident and appealing and calling forth every protective impulse of her husband's nature.
To one who knew nothing of human nature it might sound as if we were asking more of womanhood than is within its capacity. But many a man and many a woman will know better. The right kind of woman can be and is mother, wife and daughter to her husband ”

“ Whom Nature has made different, man has no business to make or even to desire similar. The world wants all the powers of all the individuals of either sex. On the other hand, no good can come of the attempt to distort the development of those powers or to seek conformity to any type. Much of the evil of the past has arisen from the limitation of woman to practically one profession. Even should it be incomparably the best, in general, it is by no means necessarily the best, or even good at all, for every individual. Men are to be heard saying, "A woman ought to be a wife and mother." ”

“ Only because sometimes we must put up with second bests can we approve of higher education for women other than those of the anomalous semi-feminine type to which we have referred. At present we must accept it as an unfortunate necessity imposed upon us by economic conditions. So long as society is based economically, or rather uneconomically, upon the disastrous principles which so constantly mean the sacrifice of the future to the present, so long, I suppose, will it be impossible that every fully feminine woman shall find a livelihood without some sacrifice of her womanhood. ”

“ Then man and woman can begin together to bring up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In it the completed man—the superman—will be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day. ”

“ The man of science is false to his creed and his cause if he declares that there is any order of knowledge or any kind of power which were better unknown or unavailable. For many years past we have been told that the power to control parenthood is wicked, flying in the face of providence, interfering with the order of Nature—as if every act worthy of the human name were not an interference with the order of Nature, as Nature is conceived by fools ”

“ The still, small voice of the unborn51 declares our responsibility. There may be no reward. What does reward mean? Who rewards the sun, or the rain, or the oak, or the tigress? But there is the doing of one's work in the world, the serving of the highest and most real purpose that may be revealed to us. That is to be oneself, to fulfil one's destiny, to be a part of the universe, and worthy to be such a part. ”

“ On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing children of the care of a mother.
"I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman ... I recognize fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. ”

“ In general it is true that, the more we learn of the characters and histories of living beings, the more importance we attach to nature or birth and the less to nurture or environment, vastly important though the latter be. Thus to the student of heredity nothing could well seem more improbable, at any rate amongst the higher animals, than that characters so profound as those of sex should be determined by nurture. He simply cannot but believe that the sex of the individual is as inborn as his backbone, and as incapable of being created by varying conditions of nurture. ”

“ But a Eugenic Feminism, for which I try to show the warrant in the study of woman's nature, would indeed be the cause of man, and should enlist the whole heart and head of every man who has them to offer. For here is a principle which benefits men to the whole immeasurable extent involved in decreeing that the best women must be the wives. "The best women for our wives!" is not a bad demand from men's point of view, and it is assuredly the best possible for the sake of the future. ”

“ In this whole matter of the care and culture of motherhood—which is, verily, the prime condition, too often forgotten, of the care and culture of childhood—we have to do what we can, when and as we can. We live in a society where mankind, held individually responsible for all other acts whatsoever, is held entirely irresponsible for the act of parenthood which, being more momentous than any other, ought to be held more responsible than any other. Marriage, the precedent condition of most parenthood, is thus regarded as the concern of the individuals and the present. ”

“ Boys to-day are taught by each other, and by those who give them what they call "smut jaws," that what exists for fatherhood, and thus for the whole destiny of mankind, is "smut." When such blasphemies pass for the best pedagogic wisdom, to preach parenthood as the goal of all worthy education is to run the risk of being looked upon as ridiculous. But the time will come when the hideous Empire-wrecking Imperialisms of the present are forgotten, and when we have a new Patriotism—which suggests, first and foremost, as that word well may, the duty of fatherhood ”

“ Some of us find that it needs constant self-chastening and bracing up of the judgment to retain our belief in the cause of woman's suffrage, of the justice and desirability of which we are convinced, assaulted as we almost daily are by the unnatural, unfeminine, almost inhuman blindness of many of its advocates.
We have constantly to remind ourselves that our immediate concern and duty are not with the world as it might be, or ought to be, or will be, but with the world as it is. There are many good arguments, admirably adapted to an imaginary world, why the marriage age should be increased. ”

“ Further, words like these will stand on record, and may be remembered when there has been achieved that slow but irresistible education of public opinion, to which some few have devoted themselves, and of which the triumph is as certain as the triumph of all truth was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. To the many charges against alcohol made by the champions of life in the past, let there be added that on which all students of venereal diseases are agreed—that it is the most potent ally of the most loathsome evils that afflict mankind. ”

“ An instinct, I know, is an instinct; of which a main character is that its exercise shall be independent of any knowledge as to its purpose. We eat because we like eating, rather than because we have reckoned that so many calories are required for a body of such and such a weight, in such and such conditions of temperature and pressure. It is not natural, so to say, just because man is in a sense rather more than natural, that we should be provident and serious, self-conscious, and philosophic, in dealing with our fundamental instincts. ”

“ If we believe that the sexes are mutually dependent and, in the long run, can neither be injured nor befriended apart, we shall be prepared to expect that the chief enemy of civilized mankind is no less inimical to women than to men. So long as it was supposed that drinking merely injured the drinker, and so long as the drinkers were almost entirely men, it could be argued by persons sufficiently foolish that indulgence in alcohol was a male vice or delight which really did not concern women at all—if men choose to drink or to smoke or to bet or to play games, what business is that of women? ”

“ Any woman of nice feeling is very much concerned to keep up appearances in the matter of her marriage. A few or none may guess her secret, but whatever we see, it is what we do not see—no matter how close our friendship may be—that determines the success or failure of marriage. The moments that really count are just those which we do not witness, and such moments are many in married life, or should be. If the marriage is what it ought to be, there is a vital communion, grave and gay, which occupies every available part of life. ”

“ If you create that which will last forever, but which makes no appeal to the transient tastes of the moment, you may starve and die and rot, because the future, for which you work, cannot reward you. Life is so constructed that only in our own day, and not always now, is the mother—even Nature's own supreme organ of the future—rewarded for her maternal sacrifice. Nature does not trouble about the fate of the present, because she is always pressing on and pressing on towards something more, higher, better. The present, the individual, are but the organs46 of her purpose. ”

“ But most literary people are so busy writing that they have no time to read, and they forget these sayings of the immortal dead. Yet that is just a saying which directly bears upon the present contention. We must be very careful lest we insult and outrage girlhood with our physiology, not that physiology is either insolent or outrageous, but that girlhood is girlhood. It is the "breath and finer spirit" of our knowledge of sex and parenthood that we must seek to impart to her. Poetry is its vehicle, and the time will come when we shall consciously use it for that great purpose. ”