The Price of Prudery : Part 3

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

(Page 12 of 25)

Meetings confined to persons of one gender offer excellent opportunities. Much can be done, if the suspicion of cant be avoided, by men addressing the meetings of men only which gather in many churches on Sunday afternoons, and which have a healthy interest in the life of this world and of this world to come, as well as in matters less immediate. It seems to me that women doctors ought to be able to do excellent work in addressing meetings of girls and women, provided always that the speaker be genuinely a woman, rightly aware of the supremacy of motherhood.

Most of us know that it is possible to read a medical work on gender, say in French, without any offense to the aesthetic sense, though a translation into one's native tongue is scarcely tolerable. This contrasted influence of different names for the same thing is another of those problems in the psychology of prudery which I do not undertake to analyze, but which must be recognized by the practical enemy of prudery. It is unquestionably possible to address a mixed audience, large or small, of any social status, on these matters without offense and to good purpose. But certain terms must be avoided and synonyms used instead. There are at least three special cases, the recognition of which may make the practical difference between shocking an audience and producing the effect one desires.

Reproduction is a good word from every point of view, but its associations are purely physiological, and it is better to employ a word which render the use of the other superfluous and which has a special virtue of its own. This is the term parenthood, a hybrid no doubt, but not perhaps much the worse for that. One may notice a teacher of zoology, say, accustomed to address medical students, offend an audience by the use of the word reproduction, where parenthood would have served his turn. It has a more human sound - though there is some sub-human parenthood which puts much of ours to shame - and the fact that it is less obviously physiological is a virtue, for human parenthood is only half physiological, being made of two complementary and equally essential factors for its perfection - the one physical and the other psychical.

Therefore it is possible to speak of physical parenthood and of psychical parenthood, an. Therefore not only to avoid the term reproduction, but to get better value out of its substitutes. One may be able to show, perhaps, that in the case of other synonyms also a hunt for a term that should save the face of prudery may be more than justified by the recovery of one which has a richer content. Terms are really very good servants, if they are good terms and we retain our mastery of them. Let any one without any previous practice start to write or speak on "human reproduction," and on "human parenthood, physical and psychical," and he will find that, though naming often saves a lot of thinking, as George Meredith said, wise naming may be of great service to thought.

In these matters there is to be faced the fact of pregnancy. Here, again, is a good word, as every one knows who has felt its force or that of the corresponding adjective when judiciously used in the metaphorical sense. The present writer's rule, when speaking, is to use these terms only in their metaphorical sense, and to employ another term for the literal sense. I should be personally indebted to any reader who can inform me as to the first employment of the admirable phrase, "the expectant mother." The name of its inventor should be remembered. In any audience whatever - perhaps almost including an audience of children, but certainly in any adult audience, whether mixed or not, medical or fashionable, serious or sham serious - it is possible to speak with perfect freedom on many aspects of pregnancy, as for instance the use of alcohol, exposure to lead poisoning, the due protection at such a period, by simply using the phrase "the expectant mother," with all its pregnancy of beautiful suggestion. Here, again, our success depends upon recognizing the psychical factor in that which to the vulgar eye is purely physiological - not that there is anything vulgar about physiology except to the vulgar eye.

For myself, the phrase "the expectant mother" is much more than useful, though in speaking it has made all the difference scores of times. It is beautiful because it suggests the ideal of every pregnancy - that the expectant mother should indeed expect, look forward to the life which is to be. Her motto in the ideal world or even in the world at the foundations of which we are painfully working, will be those words of the Nicene creed which the very term must recall to the mind - Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi.

Let any one who fancies that these pre-occupations with mere language are trivial or misplaced here take the opportunity of addressing two drawing-rooms under similar conditions, on some such subject as the care of pregnancy from the national point of view. Let him in the one case speak of the pregnant woman, and so forth, and in the other of the expectant mother. He will be singularly insensitive to his audience if he does not discover that sometimes a rose by any other name is somehow the less a rose. The more fools we perhaps, but there it is, and in the most important of all contemporary propaganda, which is that of the re-establishment of parenthood in that place of supreme honor which is its due, even such "literary" debates as these are not out of place.

gender is a great and wonderful thing. The further down we go in the scale of life, whether animal or vegetable, the more do we perceive the importance of the evolution of gender. The correctly formed adjective from this word is gender, but the term is practically taboo with Mrs. Grundy. Only with caution and anxiety, indeed, may one venture before a lay audience to use Darwin's phrase, "gender selection." The fact is utterly absurd, but there it is. One of the devices for avoiding its consequences is the use of gender itself as an adjective, as when we speak of gender problems; but the special importance of this case is in regard to the gender instinct, or, if the term offends the reader, let us say the gender instinct. Here prudery is greatly concerned, and our silence here involves much of the price of prudery. Now since the word gender has become sinister, we cannot speak to the growing boy or girl about the gender instinct, but we may do much better.

For what is this gender instinct? True, it manifests itself in connection with the fact of gender, but essentially that is only because gender is a condition of human reproduction or parenthood. It is this with which the gender instinct is really concerned, and perhaps we should never learn to look upon it rightly or deal with it rightly until we indeed perceive what the business of this instinct is, and regard as somewhat less than worthy of mankind any other attitude towards it. Of course there are men who live to eat, yet the instincts concerned with eating exist not for the titillation of the palate but for the sustenance of life; and, likewise, though there are those who live to gratify this instinct, it exists not for sensory gratification, but for the life of this world to come. Can we not find a term which should express this truth, should be inoffensive and so doubly suitable for the purposes of our cause?

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