Marie Carmichael Stopes

“ With all the passion for children, with the protective chivalrous feeling towards his wife which a well born and well knit man instinctively feels, through all the joy of fatherhood that is coming and the delight in its accomplishment, there must run a thread of intense distress at his own helplessness to help. With every consideration that the most resourceful man can think of towards his wife, with every helpful, tender, encouraging, supporting thing that he can do, how little is his share during all these months in the burden of the coming parenthood. ”

“ To a pair of lovers who have delighted in their bodily beauty, as all natural and healthy and well formed young people should do, this period, when the loveliness of the woman is at its very height, and when the man can feel that he has contributed to its perfection, must be a time of very special entrancement. That it is something from within his most sacred being that has added this glow and radiance in perfecting the rounded form of the body that he adored in its virginal grace, must give a man with artistic and poetic potentialities an all too brief but never to be forgotten experience. ”

“ It is hovering so close at hand that it is actually within reach of those who to-day are in their young maturity; we, at present in the flesh may link hands with grandchildren belonging to a generation so [217] wonderful, so endowed, and so improved out of recognition that the miseries and the depravity of human nature, to-day so wide-spread, may appear like a black and hideous memory of the past, as incredible to them as the habits of cannibals are to us.
An ideal too distant, too remote, may interest the dreamer and the reformer possibly, but it cannot inspire a whole nation. ”

“ It is my prayer that I may present such a racial ideal, not only to my own people but to humanity. It is my prayer that I may live to see in the generation of my grandchildren a humanity from which almost all the most blackening and distressing elements have been eliminated, and in which the vernal bodily beauty and unsullied spiritual power of those then growing up will surpass anything that we know to-day except among the rare and gifted few. ”

“ Her delight should be to picture a tiny laughing messenger from God, thinly veiled so that its sex is hidden; the figure of a child a few years old, still full of divine innocence and radiant possibilities. Happy hours of bodily rest may be spent picturing it in a thousand beautiful actions dancing in the sunlight, a contagious centre of joy in the whole world around them. On such an idea of delight she may lavish every day invigorating thoughts and wonderful dreams ”

“ A similar blind parenthood, but in addition coerced, has for many thousands of years been characteristic of a large portion of the human race. Even to-day motherhood is too often blind: the young girl delighting in herself and the fairness of her own body, conscious of the power she wields in social life as a beautiful and attractive creature whom older people pet and please and young men place upon a pedestal, is urged by this natural self-centred delight into accepting through flattery the enjoyment of herself by some chosen mate ”

“ To the man who has any biological knowledge, all the wonderful processes of the growth of the unseen embryo, leading up to birth, are full of amazed wonder. If a man knows, as all should in these days (see my book, Married Love, for information about the fundamental processes of mating) how minute is the single sperm cell from which his growing child takes its rise, the immensity of the results of the activity of that tiny cell appear indeed stupendous. ”

“ The torturing agony of birth might so easily have been averted by Nature had the construction of our bodies differed but very slightly from those which we to-day possess in common with most of the higher animals. The human baby when the hour comes for it to sever its connection from its mother, and as an independent individual to venture into the open air of the world, has to make its way through the arched gateway of bone fixed and set by the mother’s own requirements as a frame to her own structure. ”

“ This is the piteous plight of the majority of our citizens to-day, for so many live in towns.
Alas, that there are physical facts which all must face of a type which makes one feel that Nature is cruel in her treatment of us. When two young, beautiful and ardently happy beings are embarking upon the greatest work for the community which they can do, with a desire to create further beautiful and happy lives, it seems indeed an ironic and wanton mistake that there should be distressing physical experiences for both of them to endure. ”

“ I have read the majority of those books, and I write this one because of their failure to touch on the profoundest essentials in a way which will truly help the healthy and sensitive type of young people. The healthy, normal and happy in my mind’s vision are the standard of the race: those who to-day to some extent foreshadow the strength and beauty of bodily and mental equipment which will become a commonplace when all have risen to their standard, and it is for them that I feel it imperative to add this one more book to the long list of books advising the young mother. ”

“ Perhaps in lovers’ talk and exquisite whispers they have spoken of this great deed on which they are embarking, and each has voiced that intense yearning which filled them to see another “with your eyes, your hair, your smile,” living and radiant. The lovers dream that they will be repeated in others of their own creation, always young, running through the ages which culminate in the golden glories of the millenium. ”

“ We draw from all these things some subtle ingredient without which our natures are weakened so that a further strain sends them awry. To-day we are so deeply involved with the hydra-headed monster of the revolutionary spirit that there does not seem time to deal with it radically, to attempt to understand it, and consequently to conquer it for ever. Even now, when for the first time humanity is on a large scale beginning to tackle fundamental problems, I have seen no indication that the source of revolution is being sought for in the right place. ”

“ The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man’s age [149] at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority—contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation. ”

“ If, therefore, the woman who is becoming a mother, and who is supporting a second life, feels the need of union with her husband it is, I maintain, an indication that her nature is calling out for something not only legitimate but positively beneficial and required, and that it should be not only a man’s privilege, but his delight, to unite with his wife at such a time and under such circumstances. ”

“ Yet such is the limitation of our powers of creation. And underneath the intense passion of love and all its rich dreams of beauty is the slow building, chemically molecule by molecule, biologically cell by cell, against obstacles the surmounting of which seems a superhuman feat.
Lovers who are parents give to each other the supremest material gift in the world, a material embodiment of celestial dreams which itself has the further power of vital creation. ”

“ As this time approaches and is upon her, the young mother-to-be must concentrate all her conscious thought on the beauty of the future. She must forget the present and its cruel distortions and live in the months and years that are to come when she will have with her another life and lovely form to which she has given origin. ”

“ To-day, alas, many women cannot find the perfect and sensitive mate their hearts desire and they hope in any marriage to get children which will mitigate the consequent loneliness of their lives. Sometimes they may, to some extent, succeed, but far less often than they imagine, for that strange and still but little understood force “heredity” steps in, and the son of the tolerated father may grow infinitely more like his physical father than he is like the dear delight his mother dreamed he might be. ”

“ When I consider the evidence which I have before me, which is almost exclusively from the very best type of women, and when I observe that the most generally perfected, and finest women of my acquaintance, and they in particular, desire occasional moderate intercourse during pregnancy, I feel that one has a guide to what is best for the race. In these women and the conduct which their needs inspire, we have an indication of the truest and highest standard of all. ”

“ Happy people do not indulge in revolution. Happy people with a deep sense of underlying [174] contentment and satisfaction in life may yet strive ardently to improve and beautify everything round them. They strive in the same direction as the main current of life—that is the growth and unfolding of ever increasing beauty. The revolutionaries—bitter, soured and profoundly unhappy—pit their strength against the normal stream of life and destroy, break down and rob. Too long humanity has had to endure such outbreaks owing to its general blindness and lack of understanding of their causes. ”

“ The infectiousness of disease, the contagion of destructive and horrible bacterial germs have be [220] come a commonplace in our social consciousness, and we have forgotten, and our artists have in recent years tended ever more and more to forget that the highest form of art should also be infectious. Goodness, beauty and prophetic vision have as strong a contagious quality as disease if they are embodied in a form rendered vital by the mating of truth and beauty.
To overcome mere ignorance in others is, therefore, by no means a hopeless task, and it is the valiant work of the artist-prophet. ”

“ Before the hour of birth is reached, however, the young mother-to-be, if she is neither instructed nor helped by the wisdom of her elders, may have already endured much that it will distress and dismay her lover and husband to observe, and much more which she, being a woman, will endure without allowing him to perceive, although she may be so frightened that it may be hard indeed for her not to cry out in her bewildered pain. How much of this distress and pain is essentially “natural,” how much is the artificial result of our mode of living and our ignorance of Nature’s laws? ”

“ In my opinion, undoubtedly the ideal way of spending the earlier months of coming parenthood is in the form of an extended honeymoon, in which the couple travelling slowly should follow the guide of seasonal beauty or should visit place after place of historic interest or natural charm so that the mother’s mind should be fed and stimulated by historic memories, by the exquisite freshness of nature, and the grandeur of man’s artistic achievements. ”

“ The reform, the one central reform, which will make all the others of avail and make their work successful is the endowing of motherhood, not with money but with the knowledge of her own power.
For the power of a mother, consciously exerted in the voluntary procreation and joyous bearing of her children is the greatest power in the world. ”

“ I, who look so keenly into the future, who am so progressive, so modern and so desirous of the great and rapid evolution of women, to return to the old custom of our grandmothers, and demand, not only the month in bed, to ask even more, that there should be six weeks spent practically lying about all the time! ”