First Principles : Part 7

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

(Page 7 of 28)

We should later see that this great truth by no means involves the condemnation of spinsterhood, but since it determines not only the physiology, but also the psychology, of the individual, and especially of woman, it will guide us to a right appreciation of the dangers and the right direction of spinsterhood, and the means whereby it may be made a blessing to self and to others. This must be said lest the reader should be deterred by the unquestionably true assertion that the individual is meant by Nature to be a parent, and has no excuse for existence in Nature's eyes except as a parent.

If we are to regard the body as a trustee of the germ-plasma, it is evident that the body which carries the germ-plasma with itself to the grave - the "immortality of the germ-plasma" being only conditional and at the mercy of the acts of individuals - has stultified Nature's end; and it will be a serious concern of ours in the present work to show how, amongst human beings, at any rate, this stultification may be averted, many childless persons of both genders having served the race for evermore in the highest degree. We must ask in what directions especially may woman, most profitably for herself or for others, seek to express herself apart from motherhood. It will appear, if our leading principle be valid, that it affords us a sure guide in the welter of controversy and baseless assertion of every kind, in which this vastly important question is at present involved.

This conception of the individual as something meant to be a parent will not be questioned by anyone who will do himself or herself the justice to look at it soberly and reverently, without a trace of that tendency to levity or to something worse which here invariably betrays the vulgar mind, whether in a princess or a prostitute. For it needs little reflection to perceive that the most familiar facts of our experience and observation never fail to confirm the doctrine based by Weismann upon the revelations of the microscope when applied to the developmental processes of certain simple animal and vegetable forms. The doctrine that the individual body was evolved by the forces of life, acted on and directed by natural selection, as guardian and transmitter of the germ-plasma, assumes a less paradoxical character when we perceive with what unfailing art Nature has constructed and devised the body and the mind for their function. We flatter ourselves hugely if we suppose that even our most enjoyable and apparently most personal attributes and appetites were designed by Nature for us.

Not at all. It is the race for which she is concerned. It is not the individual as individual, but the individual as potential parent, that is her concern, nor does she hesitate to leave very much to the mercy of time and chance the individual from whom the possibility of parenthood has passed away, or the individual in whom it has never appeared. Our appetites for food and drink, well devised by Nature to be pleasant in their satisfaction - lest otherwise we should fail to satisfy them and a possible parent should be lost to her purposes - are immediately rendered of no account when there stirs within us, whether in its crude or transmuted forms, the appetite for the exercise of which these others, and we ourselves, exist, since in Nature's eyes and scheme we are but vessels of the future. In later chapters we should have much occasion, because of their great practical importance in the conduct of woman's life from girlhood onwards, to discuss the physiological and psychological facts which demonstrate overwhelmingly the truth of the view that the individual was evolved by Nature for the care of the germ-plasma, or, in other words, was and is constructed primarily and ultimately for parenthood.

Nor is this argument, as I see it and will present it, invalidated in any degree by the case of such individuals as the sterile worker-bee; any more than the argument, rightly considered, is invalidated by any instance of a worthy, valuable, happy life, eminently a success in the highest and in the lower senses, lived amongst mankind by a non-parent of either gender. On the contrary, it is in such cases as that of the worker-bee that we find the warrant - in apparent contradiction - for our notion of the meaning of the individual, and also the key to the problem placed before us amongst ourselves by the case of inevitable spinsterhood.

Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but, in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility. But when we come to ask what are her distinctive characters and utilities we find that they are all designed for the future of the race. She is, in fact, the ideal foster-mother, made for that service, complete in her incompleteness, satisfied with the vicarious fulfillment of the whole of motherhood except its merely physical part. The doctrine, therefore, that the individual is designed by Nature for parenthood, the individual being primarily devised for the race, finds no exception, but rather a striking and immensely significant illustration in the case of the worker-bee, nor will it find itself in difficulties with the case of any forms of individual, however sterile, that can be quoted from either the animal or the vegetable world.

Natural selection, of which the continuance of the race is the first and never neglected concern, invariably sees to it that no individuals are allowed to be produced by any species unless they have survival-value, a phrase which always means, in the upshot, value for the survival of the race - whether as parents, or foster-parents, protectors of the parents, feeders or slaves thereof. Our primary purpose throughout being practical, it is impossible to devote unlimited time and space to proceeding formally through the known forms of life in order to marshal all the proofs or a tithe of them, that all individuals are invented and tolerated by Nature for parenthood or its service.

We should in due course consider the peculiar significance of this proposition for the case of woman - a significance so radical for our present argument, even to its minutiae of practical living, that it cannot be too early or too thoroughly insisted upon. But before we proceed to the special case of woman it is well that we should clearly perceive as a general guiding truth, which will never fail us, either in interpretation, prediction, or instruction, the unfailing gaze of Nature, as manifested in the world of life, towards the future. There is no truth more significant for our interpretation of the meaning of the Universe, or at least of our planetary life: there is none more relevant to the fate of empires, and therefore to the interests of the enlightened patriot: there is none more worthy to be taken to heart by the individual of either gender and of any age, adolescent or centenarian, as the secret of life's happiness, endurance, and worth. It may be permitted, then, briefly to survey the main truths, and, therefore, the main teachings of the past, as they may be read by those who seek in the facts of life the key to its meaning and its use.

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