Dora Russell

“ We are to blame in that we have not learned to bring forth our children without pain, those children whose brows bear the marks of obstetric instruments that were used to spare their mothers, and whose lips have not been laid to those inhuman mothers’ breasts. (There are no scars of war, O Jason!) Where is salvation for us, and how shall we rid us of the burden of our iniquity? We who have waxed so arrogant that we have even aspired to let science build our children outside their mothers’ bodies must humble ourselves once more and take upon us the whole duty of woman. ”

“ How old and proper people love a vigorous and god-like young male! How they look askance upon, brow-beat, and bully his equivalent in the opposite sex! Here is a community for ever starving and choking its finest women, stifling their voices in education and public life; then turning and rending the submissive residue for being what years of intimidation have made them. Let them marry, you say, and make a success of that and their children. That would be well enough but for the taboos and disabilities with which marriage is surrounded. ”

“ First and foremost, man or woman, we are human beings. There is a great deal of the work in the community which we can each do with equal ability, given equal training and opportunity. There are other tasks which we must agree to delegate to one another, and neither despise the other for performing them. Life and harmony, generosity and peace are the ideals which the best thought of feminism has set before us. We believe that States and individuals can put them into practice. Will man not pause to understand before he continues on the path of destruction and strife, cupidity and war? ”

“ To me the important task of modern [25] feminism is to accept and proclaim sex; to bury for ever the lie that has too long corrupted our society—the lie that the body is a hindrance to the mind, and sex a necessary evil to be endured for the perpetuation of our race. To understand sex—to bring to it dignity and beauty and knowledge born of science, in place of brute instinct and squalor—that is the bridge that will span the breach between Jason and Medea. ”

“ A breath of rationalism—brief, soon choked, a breath of “nature”—and so to crinolines, pantalettes, and a life still lived in terror of hell-fire, terror of parents, dread of husband, horror of the least breath of adverse public opinion. Anyone who reads the Fairchild Family must marvel that from such nerve-destroying parental tyranny and the intolerable weight of prejudice and religious superstition the nineteenth-century woman ever found the courage to rebel. ”

“ As a Labour Minister is corrupted by Court dress, so is a free woman by the marriage-contract. Nothing but our desire for children would make us endure it. We, to whom the mutual nature of sex-love is sacred, to whom a partnership involving children is of equal dignity on both sides, to whom the surrender of our whole being in love is a free gift—the highest we can bestow; who would neither bind ourselves nor others where love is non-existent ”

“ Sex, even without children and without marriage, is to them a thing of dignity, beauty, and delight. All Puritans—and most males so long as they can remember—have tried to persuade women that their part in sex is pregnancy and childbirth, and not momentary delight. As well tell a man his part is the hunting and skinning of animals for food and clothing. To enjoy and admit we enjoy, without terror or regret, is an achievement in honesty. We will go further and say that polygamy, proffered by the male as a solution to our sexless lives, is no solution at all when we are polyandrous. ”

“ Men, on the other hand, like to pretend that our assumption of intelligence and independence is but a momentary spurt in a race which must end in masculine victory and feminine submission. They admit that the great development of our freedom in body and mind has given us a serious advantage, and the more discerning among them urge their fellows to press on and catch us up. Others trundle the golden apples beseechingly, but still Atalanta runs.
I believe it to be true that the education and outlook of men is more old-fashioned than that of women reared in the freedom of feminist traditions. ”

“ Without arousing dread or horror, we should tell young women frankly the pain and agony of childbirth, and the anxiety and griefs which are the fate of every woman who is a mother by choice and therefore loves her children. Nothing whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and responsibility which they will evade. ”

“ When one reads the lamentations of would-be intelligent men about the iniquities of modern young people, chiefly those of the female sex, one cannot but laugh at their method of approach. It would seem according to them that our modern women just happened like that: no one had a part in forming their bodies or in training their minds. In so far as these people consider education or early training at all, it is to blaspheme at the sex-hating feminists who have trained modern women to dispense with their birth-right—the love of man. ”

“ Many would answer, still far too many, that their daughters were given the education of a gentlewoman and fitted to become the wives of gentlemen. This we know of old. The lady eats, drinks, digests, wears clothes, tinkles the piano, dances, sings, handles a golf-club, submits to sex, bears a child without the smallest notion of anatomy, turns from the whole thing disgusted, and probably bears no more. Whose fault? Not hers. They do not teach mothercraft or physiology in finishing schools for gentlemen’s daughters, and it is no part of the duty of gentlemen’s wives to reproduce their kind. ”

“ I have in mind, as I write, a piece of Chinese porcelain, on which the sage or poet sits with his book and long pipe; a lovely and elegant lady peeps over his shoulder, and close at hand plays an impish child. I do not think that the Chinese who conceived it expected that poet to write bad verses, or, if a sage, to compose worthless philosophy. On the contrary, to love with devotion, to be learned, to have children, are ideas which have shaped the harmony of Chinese life. ”

“ And it is they who, when they sit in conference, demand of the State the right to stem the tide of children, to endow mothers, to pension widows, to teach and tend maternity and ensure rest for pregnant and nursing women; to see that houses and schools are built, and to control and purify the food-supply. Here is the most serious problem for the mothers, and one which the middle-class politician does not touch, because for the middle-class pure and fresh food is almost always obtainable. It is for the working mother to tackle those tins. ”

“ Every mother with any intelligence who has reared one or more children through the first year of life and up to five years of age would admit nowadays that scientific knowledge was of more service to her than all the instinct and adoration at her command. Indeed, I believe the so-called maternal instinct in handling and understanding babies consists of habit almost imperceptibly learnt in tending the first, blossoming into a smooth instinctive unity with the coming of the second. ”

“ And I believe that the disappearance of religious and moral dualism between mind and matter—not by an oppressive victory of either, neither by rational and moral control, nor by abandonment to sensual materialism, but by a better understanding of psychology and physiology based on the discoveries of physical science—is bringing to the whole of life, but especially to sex-love, maternity, the rearing and education of children, joy and rapture and promise surpassing anything known to the purely instinctive life of the past. ”

“ It is true that neither vermin, filth, nor squalor—being equal for both—can stay the passion of sex whether now or in the past, but I do not believe in the theory that the rougher our physique the more intense our bodily delights. Health, to be sure, is essential; but health is to be secured in the modern world, not by a return to savagery, but by the use of intelligence. I believe the bodies of young people of to-day to whom fair opportunities have been given are more healthy within and without than they were in past times. ”

“ He cheats unemployed women out of their unemployment insurance more craftily and brutally than he cheats his fellow-men. Instead of realizing that the competition of women in industry and the professions is a competition of population pressure rather than of sex, he seeks by every means in his power to drive woman back to matrimonial dependence and an existence on less than half a miserably inadequate income ”

“ Young feminists to-day would be the first to admit that it would probably have paid us to go further. There never has been a period when education has trained women for the possibility of motherhood, and it is time that such training was begun. There never was a period when the education of women was completely honest, and it is time that that training was begun. What knowledge is of more vital importance to women than anatomy and physiology? ”

“ Everything is to be gained by training a woman in knowledge, courage, and physical strength, and leaving it then to her own instinct and [47] her mind to tell her that to create new human beings is worth the discomfort and the suffering which she must necessarily undergo. Those in whom the courage to create survives when choice is free and all the facts are known are those best fitted to bring children into the world, and breed in them eagerness and intrepidity. The others will only pass on fear and distaste for life from which individuals and the community suffer far too much already. ”

“ You must have in you the thought that is creation; life’s spring, and the daring of its unconquered waters—so may you transform the world and people it with gods who know no more the hates and littleness of men. ”

“ So far I have refrained from any detailed discussion of modern women and maternity because it is still necessary to make it clear that a full life of activity for women is perfectly possible and permissible without it. I am quite aware that certain religious people assert as a moral principle that the purpose of sex-love is not mutual enjoyment but the perpetuation of the race. I am also aware that militarists enjoin on women the necessity of marriage and large families as a patriotic duty. ”

“ So many of us can remember the secret conclaves with our friends when we puzzled out and pieced together what scraps of information we could glean, awakening instinct darkly supplementing this knowledge. ”

“ An instinctive life—so he thinks—is possible only in spasm, if at all, for a man with serious mental work to accomplish. If woman persists in keeping him company, then she must shoulder the burdens, tend him and care for him, and leave him alone when he doesn’t want her. It is this contempt for the natural play of instinct which eats the heart out of life for many intellectuals, men and women, of to-day. ”

“ The crime of war is bad enough: this butchery of hope and promise and human lives is one so black that the heart and mind of every woman who has borne a child should revolt against it until it is tolerated no more. It is easy to escape into an aristocratic theory of society. ”

“ But here again the way of life is not back to nature, which is impossible because we cannot at a blow destroy industrialism and the towns—but onwards, to greater knowledge. Instead of bullying the mothers and telling them it is wicked not to feed their babies at the breast, let them know how, by pre-natal care of health and strength, by diet, by deliberate nerve-control, they can feed their babies with comfort [55] and delight and without detriment to their health and the work which they must necessarily do—or even to their beauty. ”

“ Feminism led women away from the home that they might return armed and unsubdued to make marriage tolerable. [38] Women who have been free remember the horror of the approach to marriage: a barrier for most of us to free public activity; a life-long contract only to be broken in disgrace and public disgust; aunts, uncles, social duties that exasperate and are totally unnecessary; the common view that henceforward husband and wife are one and indivisible, and the wife for ever to be burdened with her husband’s duties and affairs; looks of surprise and reproach if we enjoy other male society ”

“ Had we done it after the fashion of Medea, the logical male would have been [4] angry. They gave the vote to the older women, who were deemed less rebellious. Such is the discipline of patriotism and marriage, as it is understood by most women, that the mother will sacrifice her son with a more resigned devotion than the younger woman brings to the loss of her lover. There may be more in this than discipline. If honesty of thought, speech, and action were made possible for women, it might transpire that on the average a woman’s love for her mate is more compelling than love for her offspring. ”

“ The old-fashioned mother had no lore, and her instinct was inadequate. She succeeded by luck rather than by knowledge. She adored, or disciplined; she killed by kindness or by severity and neglect. She would coddle when she should have hardened, harden when she should have coddled; she would over-feed and under-feed, or give the wrong kind of food. Since it has been the fashion for women to have minds, the books for mothers have become more scientific and our intelligent inquiries have been met by research and more adequate replies. ”

“ In exactly the same way the worker, rising in the social scale, seeks to prove himself a bourgeois. Both efforts are mistaken. Each class and sex has that to give to the common stock of achievement, knowledge, thought, which it alone can give, and robs itself and the community by inferior imitation. ”