First Principles : Part 6

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

(Page 6 of 28)

The vote, or any other thing, is good or bad in so far as it serves or hurts these great and everlasting needs. I believe in the vote because I believe it will be eugenic, will reform the conditions of marriage and divorce in the eugenic sense, and will serve the cause of what I have elsewhere called "preventive eugenics," which strives to protect healthy stocks from the "racial poisons," such as venereal disease, alcohol, and, in a relatively infinitesimal degree, lead. These are ends good and necessary in themselves, whether attained by a special dispensation from on high, or by decree of an earthly autocrat or a democracy of either gender or both. For these ends we must work, and for all the means whereby to attain them; but never for the means in despite of the ends.

This first chapter is perhaps unduly long, but it is necessary to state my eugenic faith, since there is neither room nor need for me to reiterate the principles of eugenics in later chapters, and since it was necessary to show that, though this book is written in the interests of individual womanhood, it is consistent with the principles of the divine cause of race-culture, to which, for me, all others are subordinate, and by which, I know, all others will in the last resort be judged.

The whole teaching of this book, from social generalizations to the details of the wise management of girlhood, is based upon a single and simple principle, often referred to and always assumed in former writings from this pen, and in public speaking from many and various platforms. If this principle be invalid, the whole of the practice which is sought to be based upon it falls to the ground; but if it be valid, it is of supreme importance as the sole foundation upon which can be erected any structure of truth regarding woman and womanhood. Our first concern, therefore, must be to state this principle, and the evidence therefore. This will occupy not a small space: and the remainder will be amply filled with the details of its application to woman as girl and mother and grandmother, as wife and widow, as individual and citizen.

Woman is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and it is as such that she will here be regarded. The purpose of adding yet another to the many books on various aspects of womanhood is to propound and, if possible, establish this conception of womanhood, and to find in it a never-failing guide to the right living of the individual life, an infallible criterion of right and wrong in all proposals for the future of womanhood, whether economic, political, educational, whether regarding marriage or divorce, or any other subject that concerns womanhood. A principle for which so much is claimed demands clear definition and inexpugnable foundation in the "solid ground of Nature." Cogent in some measure though the argument would be, we must appeal in the first place neither to the poets, nor to our own naturally implanted preferences in womanhood, nor to any teaching that claims extra-natural authority.

Our first question must be - Do Nature and Life, the facts and laws of the continuance and maintenance of living creatures, lend countenance to this idea; can it be translated from general terms, essentially poetic and therefore suspect by many, into precise, hard, scientific language; is it a fact, like the atomic weight of oxygen or the laws of motion, that woman is Nature's supreme instrument of the future? If the answer to these questions be affirmative, the evidence of the poets, of our own preferences, of religions ancient and modern, is of merely secondary concern as corroborative, and as serving curiosity to observe how far the teachings of passionless science have been divined or denied by past ages and by other modes of perception and inquiry. Therefore this is to be in its basis none other than a biological treatise; for the laws of reproduction, the newly gained knowledge regarding the nature of gender, and the facts of physiology, afford the evidence of the essentially biological truth which has been so often expressed by the present writer in the quasi-poetic terms already set forth.

Let us, then, first remind ourselves how the individual, whether male or female, is to be looked upon in the light of the work of Weismann in especial, and how this great truth, discovered by modern biology and especially by the students of heredity, affects our understanding of the difference between man and woman. Setting forth these earlier pages in the year of the Darwin centenary, and the jubilee of the "Origin of Species," a writer would have some courage who proposed to discuss man and woman as if they were unique, rather than the highest and latest examples of male and female: their nature to be rightly understood only by due study of their ancestral forms, ancient and modern. The biological problem of gender is our concern, and we may have to traverse many past ages of "Ionian evolution," and even to consider certain quite humble organisms, before we rightly see woman as an evolutionary product of the laws of life.

But, first, as to the individual, of whatever gender. Observing the familiar facts of our own lives and of the higher forms of life, both animal and vegetable, with which we are acquainted, we must naturally at first incline to regard as worse than paradoxical the modern biological concept of the individual as existing for the race, of the body as merely a transient host or trustee of the immortal germ-plasma. Since life has its worth and value only in individuals, and since, therefore, the race exists for the production of individuals, in any sense that we human beings, at any rate, can accept, we must be reasonable in expressing the apparently contrary but not less true view that the individual exists for the race. After all, that does not mean that individuals exist and are worth Nature's while merely in order to see the germ-plasma on its way. To say that the individual exists for the race is to say that he, and, as we should see, pre-eminently she, exist for future individuals; and that is not a destiny to be despised of any. Let us attempt to state simply but accurately what biologists mean in regarding the individual as primarily the host and servant of something called the germ-plasma.

When the processes of development and of reproduction are closely scrutinized, we find evidence which, together with the conclusions based thereon, was first effectively stated by August Weismann, of Freiburg, in his famous little book, "The Germ-Plasma."[1] The marvelous cells from which new individuals are formed must no longer be regarded, at any rate in the higher animals and plants, as formerly parts of the parent individuals. On the contrary, we have to accept, at least in general and as substantially revealing to us the true nature of the individual, the doctrine of the "continuity of the germ-plasma," which teaches that the race proper is a potentially immortal sequence of living germ-cells, from which at intervals there are developed bodies or individuals, the business and raison d'être of which, whatever such individuals as ourselves may come to suppose, is primarily to provide a shelter for the germ-plasma, and nourishment and air, until such time as it should produce another individual for itself, to serve the same function. This is another way of saying what will often be said in the following pages - that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent.

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