First Principles : Part 5

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 5 of 28)

Some time ago the illustrated papers provided us with photographs of a person, originally female, "born to be love visible," as Ruskin says, who had mastered jiu-jitsu for suffragette purposes, and was to be seen throwing various hapless men about a room. And only the day before I write, the papers have given us a realistic account of a demonstration by an ardent advocate of woman, the chief item of which was that, on the approach of a burly policeman to seize her, she - if the pronouns be not too definite in their gender - fell upon her back and adroitly received the constabulary "wind" upon her upraised foot, thereby working much havoc. No one would assert that the woman's movement is responsible for the production of such people; no reasonable person would assert that their adherence condemns it; but we are rightly entitled to be concerned lest the rising generation of womanhood be misled by such disgusting examples.

Nothing will be said which militates for a moment against the possibility that a woman may be womanly and yet in her later years, when so many women combine their best health and vigor with experience and wisdom, might replace many hundredweight of male legislators upon the benches of the House of Commons, to the immense advantage of the nation. If our present purpose were medical in the ordinary sense, the reader would come to a chapter on the climacteric, dealing with the nervous and other risks and disabilities of that period, and notably including a warning as to the importance of attending promptly to certain local symptoms which may possibly herald grave disease. An abundance of books on such subjects is to be had, and my purpose is not to add to their number.

Yet the climacteric has a special interest for us because the special case of those women who have passed it is constantly ignored in our discussions of the woman question - which is not exclusively concerned with the destiny of girls and the claims of feminine adolescence to the vote. The work of Lord Lister, and the advances of obstetrics and gynecology, largely dependent thereon, are increasing the naturally large number of women at these later ages - naturally large because women live longer than men. At this stage the whole case is changed. The eugenic criterion no longer applies. But though the woman is past motherhood, she is still a woman, and by no means past foster-motherhood.

Though her psychological characters are somewhat modified, it is recorded by my old friend and teacher, Dr. Clouston, that never yet has he found the climacteric to damage a woman's natural love for children: the maternal instinct will not be destroyed. See, then, what a valuable being we have here; none the less so because, as has been said, she now begins to enjoy, in many cases, the best health of her life. Whatever activities she adopts, there is now no question of depriving the race of her qualities: if they are good qualities, it is to be hoped they are already represented in members of the rising generation. The scope of womanhood is now extended. The principles to be laid down later still apply, but they are entirely compatible with, for instance, the discharge of legislative functions. The nation does not yet value its old or elderly women aright.

We use as a term of contempt that which should be a term of respect. Savage peoples are wiser. We need the wisdom of our older women. It would be well for us to have Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Humphry Ward in Parliament. The distinguished lady who approves of woman's vote in municipal affairs, and fights hard for her son's candidature in Parliament, but objects to woman suffrage on the ground that women should not interfere in politics, could doubtless find a good reason why women should sit in Parliament; and though she would scarcely be heeded on matters of political theory, her splendid championship of Vacation Schools and Play centers would be more effective than ever in the House, and might instruct some of her male confreres as to what politics really is.

The prefatory point here made is, in a word, that the following doctrines are perhaps less reactionary than the ardent suffragette might suppose, compatible as they are with an earnest belief in the fitness and the urgent desirability of women of later ages even as Members of Parliament. It may be added that, on this very point, there is a ridiculous argument against woman suffrage - that it is the precursor of a demand to enter Parliament, which would mean (it is assumed), women being numerically in the majority, that the House would be filled with girls of twenty-two and three. Men of a sort would be likelier than women, it could be argued, to vote for such girls; but the wise of both genders might well vote for the elderly women whose existence is somehow forgotten in this connection.

No chapter will be found devoted to the question of the vote. The omission is not due to reasons of space, nor to my ever having heard a good argument against the vote - even the argument that women do not want it. That women did not want the vote would only show - if it were the case - how much they needed it. Nor is the omission due to any lukewarmness in a cause for which I am constantly speaking and writing. My faith in the justice and political expediency of woman suffrage has survived the worst follies, in speech and deed, of its injudicious advocates: I would as soon allow the vagaries of Mrs. Carrie Nation to make me an advocate of free whiskey. Causes must be judged by their merits, not by their worst advocates, or where are the chances of religion or patriotism or decency?

The omission is due to the belief that votes for women or anybody else are far less important than their advocates or their opponents assume. The biologist cannot escape the habit of thinking of political matters in vital terms; and if these lead him to regard such questions as the vote with an interest which is only secondary and conditional, it is by no means certain that the verdict of history would not justify him. The present concentration of feminism in England upon the vote, sometimes involving the refusal of a good end - such as wise legislation - because it was not attained by the means they desire, and arousing all manner of enmity between the genders, may be an unhappy necessity so long as men refuse to grant what they will assuredly grant before long. But now, and then, the vital matters are the nature of womanhood; the extent of our compliance with Nature's laws in the care of girlhood, whether or not women share in making the transitory laws of man; and the extent to which womanhood discharges its great functions of dedicating and preparing its best for the mothers, and choosing and preparing the best of men for the fathers, of the future.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.