CHAPTER I
A RETROSPECT
THE POSITION OF WOMEN BEFORE THE GREAT EUROPEAN WAR

As I set out to write yet another book on Woman, I find it necessary first to decide whether the primary interest should rest in the eternal instincts, passions and typical character of womanhood, or in women’s actions and characters as affected by the unusual conditions of the time in which my work is undertaken. It is a decision by no means so simple as it would seem.

Always the realisation of what is immediately before us tends by its vivid nearness to give an over-estimation of its significance. But to read life in this way is to understand very little. Something must be done to clear our vision so that we may take a wider view. The present, after all, is but the day at which the past and the future meet.

Yet there are times when some overwhelming event so sharply changes the present as to obscure all the shining wonder of life. And at no period in history has this been more true than it has been in Europe in the last two years. Nowhere and never in the world can there have been a period of deeper or more rapid change. War came upon us without warning, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky; and in a day the outlook of life was changed.

Now, this thought of surprising and quick-coming change brings me to something it is necessary for me to say. My book should have been begun many months back, at the very beginning of the war. But here I have to make a confession. The war caused in my mind a confusion that for some time left me extremely uncertain upon many things about which hitherto I have been sure. It has been a war of miracles in so far as it has made real much that seemed outside the world of possibility. Our sluggard imaginations have been stirred by an appeal that has aroused many primitive emotions.

I recall the opening sentence in the last book that I wrote on Woman.[1] “The twentieth century is the age of Woman. Some day, it may be, it will be looked back upon as the golden age—the dawn, some say, of feminine civilisation.”

Now, as I read this statement, which, when I wrote it, I felt to be true, it appears so wrong as to be almost ridiculous. That sort of dream is over.

What a fantastic picture it was that Suffrage militancy made for itself before the outbreak of the war. We pictured a golden age which was to come with the self-assertion of women; an age in which most of those problems that have vexed mankind from the dawn of history were to be solved automatically by a series of quick penny-in-the-slot reforms, that would follow on the splendour and superiority of woman’s rule. Militants, aflame for the reformation of man, discussed prostitution, the White Slave traffic, and all sex problems with a zeal that was partly pathological and partly the result of a Utopian dream.

Then, at the most crucial hour in the history of women’s struggle for power and political recognition, all this dream was arrested. In the stress of war, the promise of an accumulating betterment was swept down, even as a too-bright dawn that passes into storm; the ugly aspects of life sprang upon us with intensifying urgency. Yes, the sudden events of war seemed, for women, to have blotted out the present and the past, and to have made all action uncertain.

So it is always when life is stirred at its depths. The change was almost staggering. Women have had to learn many new and strange lessons; they are more changed than perhaps they themselves know.

There had come a time when, without any preparation, we women were brought back to the primitive conception of the relative position of the two sexes. Military organisation and battle afford the grand opportunity for the superior force capacity of the male. Again man was the fighter, the protector of woman and the home. And at once his power became a reality. The striking and praise-demanding work was done by men. And at the first violent change there seemed to be nothing for women beyond the patience of waiting and the service of sacrifice. Later, women have been called to step in to take the places of men, and there has been work for them to do of all kinds and in ever-increasing amount. But of this work, and the new conditions that have thereby arisen, I propose to speak in the next chapter. Here I am considering only the events that rushed upon women at the oncoming of war. And inevitably they were pushed aside into obscurity; they had to be content with unnoticed work that not infrequently was futile.

It is hard to step so suddenly out of the limelight. And women were acutely aware of this change in their prospects, and many of them expressed the situation with engaging frankness. Let me give a small illustration. I had occasion in the late summer of 1914, a few weeks after the war had started, to visit a friend. Some months had passed since I had previously seen her. At that time she was actively engaged in the suffrage campaign. Now, I found her knitting woollen comforters for the soldiers, and she was knitting them very badly. I expressed my surprise. Her answer to me was, “It is all that there is to do.” She then added this significant statement, “We women have had to learn our place.”

There was, of course, exaggeration in her remark. But it does, I believe, picture what happened in the thoughts of many women with the sudden ceasing of their active struggle for political recognition. It was a state of resigned surprise.

And may it not be that women had need of some lesson?

In the curious phases witnessed before the war, in that struggle which was but a more violent expression of the eternal effort at adjustment between the sexes, there were many strange signs to give pause and fear to all who think. Women did not, as I believe, realise the possible results of their sex rebellion. They did not sufficiently distinguish between those limitations and hardships which could comparatively easily be removed and those limitations and hardships which are due to the nature of their sex. Old traditions, without any discrimination, were cast aside in a violent seeking, and women broke out in unexpected ways, to fight nervously, carelessly, yet hungrily, as if they were trying to force the pace of progress.

Women are possessed of great elasticity and cleverness; they are, and possibly will always remain, more imitative than creative. And from this follows a very real danger, plainly arising from the quick feminine receptiveness which is at once the strength of women as well as the cause of their pitiable weakness. In every direction the new independence and work capacity of woman was proved in following and imitating men. Thus it was easy for women to externalise their life in every way, and to gain success in many different kinds of work. But the question has never been—could women do this, or do that, kind of work? rather it is—what work is it most worth while for them to do?

Wounded by the narrowness of their lives, women spent immense energy out of which much that is good has been gained. Much that was false has crumbled into ruins, but also much that was fine. What was wanting most was this: the complete absence in the entire programme of reform of any kind of feminine idealism.

Did women forget? I think that they did. The realm of woman was still splendid, still vast. Why, then, this rage against all restrictions? Why this continuous effort to obliterate the wise differences of sex?

In their violent seeking for life, women were ready to spend all to gain something which may well prove to be absolutely unnecessary to them. And to many it must have seemed that they wasted the whole of themselves only to lose something within themselves. There was much heroic fighting. Women robbed life for the sake of what they believed was freedom; yet may it not prove that they have been in love with that which is unattainable for women?

The demand of woman to “live her own life” brought, as it seems to some of us, a slavery not less strong or less evil than that from which an escape was sought. Women, however unconsciously, were suppressing themselves in new ways, and still doing things alien to themselves. This restless seeking was but a further foolish forgetting of the truth that the only freedom worth having is the freedom to be one’s self. All that women had promised themselves in a new order of existence must depend on their acceptance of the responsibilities and limitations of their womanhood. And by this I mean a full and glad acceptance of those physical facts of their organic constitution which make them unlike men, and should limit their capacity for many kinds of work. It can never be anything but foolishness to attempt to break down the real differences between the two sexes.

This may be a hard saying to some women: I believe that it is true.

It is necessary to emphasise this fact again, and yet again, because it is the almost complete disregard by women of their own sexual nature and its special needs that is the grave evil that is robbing us of life; this was also the inherent weakness in the Women’s Movement, which, so far from fulfilling the promise of its earlier period, had ceased, even before war brought us back to realities, to exert any widely representative or serious influence.

The predilection for wild pranks, which in this country marked the later efforts of women to gain political recognition, may, I think, be traced back to causes bent on crushing and levelling the sex characteristics. Women had not sufficiently valued themselves, and thus they ceased to care to be essentially feminine. Instead there was an insatiable desire to enjoy experience, arising from lack of disciplined culture and from excess of energy and idleness. It is manifest that militancy gave to women excitement and occupation.

And this avidity to know and feel and shine, to establish new contacts with life and affairs, was coupled also with that deeper seeking of the spirit which has robbed peace from the modern woman. Possibly such defects are essential to such a movement, a mere destructive phase in the process of renewing—a clearing of the ground. But the way to gain freedom is long and toilsome; it is a way that permits of no such energetic short cuts as the militant Suffragists would have achieved. Mixed up with all that was fine in their movement was an infinity of glitter and tinsel, vanity and restlessness. There was present always an intense and theatrical egotism, a yearning to make an impression and force applause at any cost.

There was, of course, another side—a side which most gladly I acknowledge. No movement that was founded merely on excitement would have overcome difficulties as the Suffrage movement did, nor could its members have worked and suffered as they did for a common end. There was always much even in the most mistaken militancy that was generous, ardent and wholesome. But these useful qualities were deformed by a want of proportion and sanity; by feelings run riot that made women impatient of all restraints, overweeningly sure of themselves, and incapable of facing troublesome facts or foreseeing the most certain consequences of their own actions. There is nothing here that should surprise us.

In many cases, perhaps in all, emotion is the sole and strong guide of our actions. At least, I am sure this is true of women. What we do is to invent reasons to justify acts to which we are impelled by some emotion arising from an instinctive need. I do not see how this can be avoided, nor do I at all regard it in itself as evil. Reason by itself too often is an excuse for doing nothing; it is the excuse of all those who take infinite care not to see in case they may come to feel. Reason alone never does anything; it is too reasonable. The necessary thing is first to feel. And the only possible method of guiding emotion is to realise its force and to use it successfully; not to take cover fearfully in avoidance of feeling.

There is, indeed, a very deep reason for this human need for emotion. The springs of our actions may be traced back in almost all cases to certain excitements arising from some need or desire of whose existence in ourselves we are in nine cases out of ten quite unconscious, but which (unless dammed up when the fear of an escape is always great and imminent) will find an expression in characteristic instinctive acts. And the most forcible human excitements are fear and anger: these exercise an energising influence on body and mind often leading to the accomplishment of quite extraordinary acts. Periods of intense excitement will yield a consciousness of overwhelming strength, so that the individual reaches a state of self-forgetfulness in which almost anything may be done. Almost every one must at some time have experienced this super-strength. And what is important to note is that at an opportunity for exercising these emotions, the most peaceable people have felt the stir of the primitive instincts of hate and fear, of anger and the desire to destroy and to hurt. They have developed—often to their own surprise—the destructive capacities of the fight-loving, danger-braving animal. And when such emotions seize on individuals in groups, their effect is greatly intensified and is felt by many who would be only slightly susceptible to such emotions when isolated.

This explains, I believe, the surprising revolt of women and how it was they broke out in such unexpected ways. There is in the sex an immense and unrecognised capacity for adventure, due to the surplus of energy unused that was so painfully present in the lives of many women, and to the expression of which the narrowness of their lives had afforded little opportunity. The danger here was strong for women, because in their lives, to a far greater extent than in the lives of men, there had been so many dammed-up channels of emotion. It is the things they might not do that had mattered for women, and not the things they had been allowed to do. Then the fever of this anger caught hold of them, and they became conscious of an obscure travail in their souls. Here, indeed, were causes of unrest; here were the first shadows of some subtle decay.

The suffrage movement was a search—yes, a wild search—for something to bridge the gap, for something to do that mattered, something to open the gates to adventure. The militant revolt to many women proved an exciting game. This may appear strange; but what I want you to mark is that such violence was a necessary thing for women. They felt impelled to get into their lives something that meant movement, excitement, joy, and the stinging of adventure.

And they have been happy.

To many people, and especially to men, it seemed that in adopting militancy women were departing entirely from their womanhood. But it is just here they were mistaken; they did not grasp the fact that women had felt injured, and that this injury aroused in them an excitement of anger forcing wild action. Women, too, I think, have not themselves understood the real causes of their actions. It was impossible to follow the procession of excuses by which the militant apologists attempted to justify their often senseless outrages on the law without realising how erroneously they comprehended their own movement. They honestly thought that they were espousing the cause of Woman’s freedom; it never struck them that they were not working for this, at least that this was not the motive which impelled their actions of violence. They did not know that they were taking the quickest way to fill lives left empty, and to express in action the clamorous excitement that surged within them. It is never easy for women to be quite honest even to themselves.

Manifestly this violent seeking was but an outgrowth of woman’s fierce race-protecting passion; an unconscious expression of that instinct to give life which rules not only in the body but in the spirit of woman. Many women fought without truly wanting to fight, and merely because their deep hidden instincts demanded something on which to expend themselves.

There was in the Suffrage movement a wise policy of action. And this using of women’s stored-up energy, however wastefully it may have been expended, inflamed in them a gladness that made easy all their payments of imprisonment, of forcible feeding, and even of death. In militancy women gained an object and a satisfaction: they were the centre of something that depended on them. Their movement, with all its absurdities, was a live thing in their hands. Thus the members gave to the cause their labour and their enthusiasm, and, because they had given it so much, they came to love it. Their energetic organisation came to stand above them like a big, greedy child, grabbing at anything and everything. It robbed from them the flying hours of life, little by little devouring them. But in so doing new fuel was thrown on the dead flames of women’s passions. For they gained that for which they were seeking. A new, strange opportunity for sacrifice was here, supplying the need which, however unrecognised and denied, is the fundamental desire of woman. This was the joy that was gained by the Suffrage martyrs—something vivifying, flooding dead lives with colour, action and emotion. Yes, these women yielded themselves to their movement with joy, just as a woman yields herself to her lover that she may give life to his child.

And then all this audacious, hardly understood movement was brought to an end by war. Militarism put a swift close to militancy. As far as women were concerned, their hope of forcing political recognition fell to confusion. The war came like a great shadow across the whole bright complex problem of the future. So much was this so that writing of militancy now feels almost like referring to a forgotten event that happened in the very far past. It would be easy to pass over the whole Suffrage movement in silence. And, indeed, I should have done this if I did not believe that its inner effect on women had been more lasting than the outward gain.

I wish to emphasise the change that came to women in the period immediately before the war. The Suffrage movement was a collective movement in which the individual had to win honour in self-forgetfulness and in group work. And this co-operation for the gaining of the Vote carried with it also a co-operation of service and a great development of mutual helpfulness. And from this it has followed very directly that many women have turned their backs for ever on petty interests and disloyalties to one another, and have recovered a quite fresh sense of honourable emulations and loyalty.

This concord and unity in duty had much the same quality of joy that sends the soldier to face death. It stirred something very deep in women’s nature. Militancy brought a rare chance of happiness: it made women aware of their souls. Through it they first found escape from the deadness of sterile lives and gave up separate little aims that made conflicts between woman and woman. The petty strifes of no issue and no importance were changed into one struggle that must be won; and by expanding from an existence of aimlessness and stagnation into one of common purpose and advance, women gained the chance they were seeking of adventure and sacrifice for body and spirit. No wonder, then, that they gave themselves up to a great holiday of the emotions. This may have expressed itself basely in the wrecking of property and much that was useless, but it was not all base. In the lives of numberless women it has meant something much more than hatred and vanity, or self-deceiving work.

Militancy has been a great as well as a very little thing. As a movement it was foolish and morally perverse, no doubt, but its members were morally passionate. The disorder of purpose, the spectacle of wasted effort and folly, which filled many of us with anger—all this did bring gladness and liberation of spirit to the women themselves. They felt that their fighting was noble and glorious, which it was not, but they felt this with a power that came from the perverse conviction of their whole nature. And we shall need a conviction as passionate as this, but not perverse, before women can in the same way be won again to an equal passion of sacrifice and service.

And this very rapture of escape from an aimless existence was in itself the sign of the failure in women’s lives, a proof that there was, indeed, something to be escaped from. We may not claim more than this for the Suffrage movement.

War, such war as is now loose upon the world, came to accomplish its miracles, acting swiftly and almost without women knowing what was being done. The reality of life and of death has shaken up everything, and the quick pressure of events is changing all the conditions of life.

Let us try to see a little more clearly.

It has been a common mistake that amongst civilised peoples intellectual views and peace interests have superseded the primitive fighting instincts. But the cultural period in which wars have been exceptional and peace the normal state has been short, and is, indeed, only a span when compared with the long history when men had to fight in order to live. This violence was a necessary phase in human, as in all animal, development. War is only an organised and specialised replacement of this indiscriminate and blind struggle for life. It is probable that the instinct of battle was once for all developed and fixed; and the question arises, as to whether we shall ever get far away from this deeply rooted stimulus to action. It may even be a condition of life that we should not get too far away from it.

We have had a striking example of the enthusiasm and interest evoked by situations of conflict and danger, in the intense and primitive emotions revived in all of us by the war. War is the thunder and voice of the trumpet without which the wisest moral and political ideas never attract sufficient attention to lead to difficult action. For the world will not listen to a truth until bloodshed and violence have awakened its sluggard imagination.

And in these new circumstances we all, women as well as men, have been caught by a powerful excitement. The war has us in its grip, there is no other thought, no other remedy, no other interest. In many ways war is the most uniting of all forces. We are all joined in one work of service and co-operation. No man or woman can turn away, skulk in the individual garden of their own petty interests, because they do not want to be bothered. Something fresh has come, something that had to come, and all that went before is changed.

We see thus that war has brought to all of us a succession of disturbing revelations of reality. And the lesson has come most severely on those whose lives have been most unreal. Here is a force against which there is no argument. We are involved in a struggle of the most momentous dimensions. No one as yet can mark the limits of destruction, and in the harshness of the war’s lesson the struggle of women for sex mastery at once became uninteresting.

For hundreds of centuries and myriads of generations the life of fighting has gone on for men. But women’s opportunity waits upon leisure and peace. The savagery of war brings the two sexes back to primitive values. And the truth is forced upon us; we realise the gulf which lies between the man and the woman.

All our days we women have been denying this separation, and, enslaved by male ideals, have sought to break through the barriers of sex. We have been pursuing power, wrapping ourselves up in one garment after another, calling these coverings romance, adventure, work, individual development, and what not; now we have come in our hearts to know the falsity of it all. Somewhere in the confusion of war stark facts awaited us. We had to face life as a reality, not as theories, or movements, or sex development.

For many of us women the lesson has been sharp and sudden. War leapt upon us as it were a beast out of some hidden darkness; leapt upon us, holding us powerless, tearing our illusions into shreds with its blood-stained claws.

And on a sudden women were held by a new, quick-striking, absolute realisation of the truth. They had not seen it nor felt like this before. But this beast of war crouching in front of them said to women, “Always I have been beside you waiting for this hour. I have waited for a long time. You have struggled; you have fought; you have played; you have come to think yourselves important in strange ways, meddling in all the affairs of the world. This you have done, and you have learnt much of the means of life, but you have everything yet to re-learn about life itself.

“In all your struggles for political recognition and in all your work reality has not touched you. You have feared to be yourselves. You have been ashamed of your sexual differentiation. You have gathered power around you to pretend that you were the same as men, your strength as their strength, that your work was the same as their work. You have mocked at those qualities that were your own, that set you apart from men, denying your womanhood. You have suffered. But you will not suffer less by any such efforts to escape. Who can wonder that you have been dissatisfied? For you have wasted in haste the power that is your own. And conscious of, though not understanding, the want in your own lives, you have been deeply conscious of the discords in the rest of the world. The instinct of motherhood has been strong within you, and wasted, it has not ceased to torment you.

“You have gained excitement and applause, much work you have done and had many triumphs. It has seemed a big thing. Yet, after all, has the gain been worth the payment? Have women indeed escaped from their prison? Think, do you not know deep in your hearts that its bars have not been broken?”

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER II
THE POSITION OF WOMEN AS AFFECTED BY THE WAR

CHAPTER II
THE POSITION OF WOMEN AS AFFECTED BY THE WAR

I have spoken in the last chapter of the changes that came in the thoughts and attention of women in the first few months of the war. We saw how war spoke with a more powerful voice, and the women who had been snatching at power felt the quickening of a quite new spirit of humbleness. That uplifting was the great opportunity. Women discovered something stronger and more important than themselves.

Our inquiry now is this: What has happened since then? what fresh conditions is war developing or likely to develop? And first it is well to note the strange power of war to stir us into action. Two years ago it would have seemed impossible to feed the hungry and clothe the ragged and to turn all the wasters and slackers into vigorous heroes. Now these things have been done; and much that in peace time seemed a far-off possibility has become a present fact.

War has a terribly effective way of dealing not only with men but with their problems. And one result is that a quite new interest is being taken in motherhood and child welfare.

England can no longer afford to be wasteful of the lives of her citizens. She has been wasteful in the past, and her new mood of caring must be made a conviction and a purpose.

As a result of this world war there has been and will continue to be an immense sacrifice of men, much in excess of any wars in the past history of nations, and it is evident that every belligerent country must lose from her best male stock; and it is not only the physically fittest, but the mentally and morally fittest, that are sacrificed.

For years to come the birth rates will be lowered throughout the greater part of Europe. In our own land the situation is one that must give fear. Our death rate has been very high in numbers and in quality, while at the same time our birth rate has been the lowest on record. Even the civilian death rate has risen; and, worst and most menacing of all, the infantile mortality rate has risen two per thousand above the average of the last two years.

Put these grave facts together, and, with even a fraction of realisation of their meaning, it becomes clear that we have to face a wastage of life unparalleled in the annals of our race. What are we going to do?

Now, I am not one who believes in the advantage, or even in the possibility of any forced excess in procreative activity. Numbers are of less importance to a nation than the moral, mental, and physical superiority of its men. The wholesale waste of these qualities in war is just what must be of such enormous menace to the future. The nation that does nothing to meet this and to ensure as far as possible the superiority of the next generation of her children will gain nothing even from victory, for it will mean only defeat in the future.

The issues of life and death have by the lurid war-light been forced upon our attention. And again I ask, What are we going to do?

The answer is plain. This terrible loss of life and of the forces of life abroad in war must be made good by a more intelligent and efficient care of the young lives at home. This we must do, and we must do it quickly. It is possible for a nation by such increased care of the rising generation of its children to compensate itself for the loss of lives during the war within a comparatively short period after the close of war. Indeed, if we have the will, as we possess the means, we can make it true that because of the war there will be more people—yes, and healthier and happier—in this land of ours in ten or fifteen years’ time than if the war had never happened.

This is what we can do. Shall we do it? The answer is with women. We can, within limits, do almost what we please. There has come to us a great opportunity, and out of the gates of death itself we may snatch life.

Much waits to be done, not only in the actual saving of infantile life, but further, by providing effective and prompt remedies to all bad conditions of living, so that the health and the mental capacity and moral character of the children dependent upon these conditions, or related to them, may be raised and maintained at a right standard of efficiency. Then we have to realise that more even than this is needed, and that all our efforts will fail of their full effect unless we go further back than the child, and the problem of the mother be frankly faced. The question of infantile mortality and child welfare is really the question of motherhood. And there is now no ultimate need of the State greater, more imperative, than this of securing a more enlightened motherhood.

This need is the reason for my book. I know that the days of war are not a time suitable either for the writing or reading of long books. Yet I offer no apology, so convinced I am of the urgency of this matter of saving motherhood that I had to write.

The object of my book is twofold. First, to put forward a fresh plea for assigning that high value to motherhood in practice which at present it receives only in words. This would ensure at once right conditions for all mothers and all children; it would also serve better than anything else to do away with many age-old mistakes, misunderstandings and disorder. In the second place (or rather in connection with all that is said), I wish to set forth what seem to me to be the chief causes that hitherto have hindered motherhood and bound my sex from the full enjoyment of life; and to suggest that the reason of this bondage is not, as is so often stated, the aggressive selfishness of men, but is due much more to women’s own actions, to their absurdly wrong education and entire misunderstanding of the sexual life; a misunderstanding which has decided the direction in which they believed the freedom they have been so ardently, yet wastefully seeking, was to be found.

So that we may understand our present failures better, I have attempted to seek causes and to suggest reasons. My inquiry reaches back before human parenthood and examines the parental instinct in its making; it shows the way and for what reason this instinct of caring for the young became fixed and stronger in the mother than in the father. It sets out from this beginning, and, after a short chapter on primitive motherhood, passes to the consideration of women and the home, marriage as it affects parenthood, the unmarried mother and sexual relationships outside of marriage, as well as other allied questions. It tries to offer a practical solution to some of the problems involved, in particular the problem of education and new ideals of conduct and sexual health for all girls. It recommends a revolution in our schools and methods of training; changes that must, as I believe, be made, unless we are prepared to accept as inevitable the decay of motherhood, as well as an increasing failure of happiness in marriage, with its resulting antagonism between sex and sex.

But to return to this present introductory chapter. I have upon my study table two documents. The one is that from which I have taken the quotation placed before this opening section of my book. It is the Annual Report for 1914,[2] of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education. The second consists of two pamphlets on the Health of Munition Workers, treating of the Hours of Work and Employment of Women, both prepared by the command of Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, and published in connection with the important illustrated Report, which shows and explains all the numerous and different engineering operations on which women are now engaged in munition work. The object of the Report is to attract more women workers; but it is with the two pamphlets I am concerned. For the present, however, I shall leave them, returning to them later in order to show how closely they are connected with the other Report, which treats of infant mortality, child disease and neglect, and all the wastage of motherhood. It is on the shameful significance of the facts given in this Report that we must now fix our attention.

It would be difficult to find a more complete condemnation of motherhood. The Report is full of condemning facts. For, let us not disguise it from ourselves that, in spite of much that has been done, many efforts and real improvements, motherhood remains very evil; about the lives of little children lurk cruelties, disease, dirt, and neglect that ought not to be permitted.

Let me take one group of facts from this Report; facts that cry out to us all how urgently wrong things are. In the year 1914, 92,166 children died in England and Wales under one year of age. Think of the wanton wastage: in every thousand children born one hundred and five have died. Their number of the year’s toll of new lives reaches close up to the recorded deaths for the first fifteen months of war![3] And the evil does not end here, for the bad conditions which kill these babies act also in maiming and disabling, or at least in lowering the health standard, of many of the children who live, and thus add to the number of those who die in the early years of childhood, or survive only with enfeebled bodies and defective minds. And, further, no account is taken here of the lives that are lost before birth takes place: I mean the still births and abortions, the ante-natal deaths of which no record is kept. Our tendency is to assume that life begins at the birth, whereas the life of each child starts at the moment of its conception. Thus the birth rate is really the survival from the conception rate. And the destruction of life before birth from adverse ante-natal conditions is probably larger than the death rate in the first post-natal year.

You will see that the problem is sufficiently grave. And this unnecessary waste—for it is unnecessary—is going on every year, and will go on until we begin to feel it strongly enough to take action to prevent it. It can be prevented. The chief causes of infant mortality are briefly two—

(1) Poor physique of the mother or inheritable disease in one or other parent, causing premature births with weakened constitutions and congenital defects in the children.

(2) Ignorance of mothers in appropriate infant care and low standard of home life; bad feeding and insanitary conditions are accountable for the greater number of child deaths.

We find the infantile death rate is much higher in urban communities than it is in rural England. It is well to give a table to show this—

Consider the reason for this difference in the death rates—114 deaths per 1000 in the great towns, 104 in the smaller towns, and 93 in the country districts. Does not this prove that children are killed by the conditions into which they are born. It is obvious that urbanisation, with all that it means of unhealthy living, with factory work and the employment of women, exerts a profound effect on the lives and health of little children.

A portion of infant and child mortality represents, I well know, the removal from life of diseased children who ought never to have been born, and would not have been born under different sexual conditions, for this, above all, is a question of instructed motherhood. I am not forgetting this side of the problem. But these children, doomed to death from the time they are conceived, represent a fraction only of our infant mortality. The vast majority of babies are born healthy; it is we who kill them. Though the fact of the falling birth rate is being shouted aloud with an ever-increasing fear and insistence, the plain, simple fact is neglected; it is absurd to go on having more babies if we can’t first care enough to keep alive the babies that we have. There are still too many births for our civilisation to look after; we are still unfit to be trusted with a rising birth rate.[4]

Let us consider now how our neglect acts on the children who fight through the first years of infancy. I can take a few facts only chosen almost at hazard from the mass of similar evidence in the Educational Report. In London, out of 294,000 children medically examined, 101,000 or nearly half, were found to be in need of treatment. In England and Wales 391,352 children of school age were medically attended. A summary of the returns shows a wide prevalence of verminous uncleanness, the percentage being 18.1 per cent. for the heads and 11.8 per cent. for the bodies of the children. Again the figures show unclean conditions to be most prevalent in the towns, in some instances the percentage rising as high as thirty unclean children out of each hundred children examined. I ask you to think what this implies.

The nutrition of the children is equally bad, the different counties varying in percentage between five and twenty. Stockton-on-Tees has the unenviable distinction of standing the highest—thirty out of each hundred of its children showing signs of malnutrition. The same Report shows the fatal prevalence among the children of rickets, eye disease, discharging ears, and diseases of the throat and nose.[5] The proportion of defective teeth is higher than any malady and often exceeds seventy and eighty per cent. of the school entrants.

We should note that insufficient or unsuitable food is the chief cause of malnutrition and illness in children, and investigations seem to show that wrong feeding is the more prevalent. Thus Dr. Gould, writing of the children he examined in Bolton, says, “it is obvious that defective nutrition is due to dietetic ignorance on the parents’ part or to parental neglect.” Dr. Macdonald of Northampton, reporting on 448 cases examined in 1914, corroborates this view, stating in the course of his report of adenoidal children, “Many are suffering, not from insufficiency of food (that, I think, far from common in Northampton), but from bad food and badly prepared food.” Again, Dr. Orr of Shrewsbury writes, “The subject of unsuitable food is a very important one. The women of the working classes often show a surprising ignorance of the proper methods of cooking for family requirements, a want of knowledge of the value and suitability of food stuffs, and too often a general incompetence respecting household management.”[6] I may add as corroboration an instance from my own knowledge; one that would be comic, if it were not so piteous. A party of poor workings girls were invited to a meal; they were asked what they would like to have to eat. They answered, “Bread and pickles,” and added, “Pickles are so sustaining!”

Who can doubt the greatness of the evil that is going on? I could add many more facts at least equally impressive with the few that I have given, all witnessing to weakness in the constitution of our children, to disease and dirt, and every other painful result of ignorance and neglect. And does not all this speak of unfit motherhood; of women ill-trained as women and incapacitated for their supreme duty? There is failure somewhere. We have to find out where that failure is.

For I wish to make it very clear that I am not blaming the individual mother. What I do blame are the conditions of our civilisation that have called her into being. I have before me the admirable but infinitely distressing book, Maternity: Letters from Working Women. They are the outcome of an inquiry into the condition of working-class motherhood made by the Women’s Co-operative Guild. Nothing that I can say, or that any other writer could say, can have the reality and the bitter vividness of these letters written by the women themselves. I am able to quote only scattered sentences taken from a few letters just as they come and without special selection.

(1) Mother Injured in Girlhood

“Through being left without a mother when a baby—father was a very large farmer and girls were expected to do men’s work—I, at the age of sixteen, lifted weights that deformed the pelvis bones, therefore making confinement a very difficult case. I have five fine healthy girls, but the boys have all had to have the skull-bones taken away to get them past the pelvis.… I wish more could be done to train growing girls to be more careful.”

(2) A Wage-Earning Mother

“I myself had some very hard times, as I had to go out to work in the mill. I was a weaver and we had a lot of lifting to do. My first baby was born before its time, from me lifting my piece off the loom onto my shoulder.… If I had been able to take care of myself I should not have had to suffer as I did for seven weeks before the baby was born, and for three months after, and then there was the baby suffering as well, as he was a weak little thing for a long time, and cost pounds that could have been saved had I been able to stay at home and look after myself.”

(3) A Mother’s Injury To Her Daughters

“I am very pleased to say that, having one of the best of husbands, I suffered nothing during pregnancy, only ailments of my own caused through my mother having to work in the brickyard during her pregnancy with me. That, I am sorry to say, is the cause of my own and my sister’s illness … and that thing will go on until women give up hard work during pregnancy.”

(4) Worked too Hard as a Girl

“My third child was born nine years after the second.… She lived six hours, and was convulsed from birth. The doctor’s opinion was that I had worked too hard as a girl lifting heavy weights, therefore weakening the whole system.”

(5) The Results of Poverty

“I think a great deal of suffering is caused to the mother and child during pregnancy by lack of nourishment and rest, combined with bad housing arrangements. The majority of working women before marriage have been used to standing a great deal at their work, bringing about much suffering which does not tell seriously until after marriage, particularly during pregnancy.… I believe that bad housing arrangements have a very bad effect on mothers during pregnancy. I know of streets of houses where there are large factories built, taking the whole of the daylight away from the kitchen, where the woman spends the best part of her life. On the top of this you get the continual grinding of machinery. The mother wonders what she has to live for; if there is another baby coming she hopes it will be dead when it is born. The result is she begins to take drugs.… All this tells on the woman, physically and mentally; can you wonder at women turning to drink?”

(6) Another Case of Poverty and Overwork

“The first part of my life I spent in a screw factory from six in the morning till five at night, and after tea used to do my washing and cleaning. I only left two weeks and three weeks before my first children were born. After that I took in lodgers and washing, and always worked up till an hour or so before baby was born. The results were that three of my girls suffer with their insides. None are able to have a baby. One dear boy was born ruptured on account of my previous hard work.”

(7) The Evil of Sexual Ignorance

“”