The Price of Prudery : Part 4

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

(Page 13 of 25)

The term reproductive instinct is often employed. It is vastly superior to gender instinct, because it does refer to that for which the instinct exists; but it hints at reproduction, and though Mrs. Grundy can tolerate the idea of parenthood, reproduction she cannot away with. We cannot speak of it as the parental instinct, because that term is already in employment to express the best thing and the source of all other good things in us. Further, the gender instinct and the parental instinct are quite distinct, and it would be disastrous to run the possibility of confusing them - one the source of all the good, and the other the source of much of the evil, though the necessary condition of all the good and evil, in the world.

For some years past, in writing and speaking, I have employed and counseled the employment of the term "the racial instinct." This seems to meet all the needs. It avoids the tabooed adjective, and if it fails to allude at all to the fact of gender, who needs reminding thereof? It is formed from the term race, which prudery permits, and it expresses once and for all that for which the instinct exists - not the individual at all, but the race which is to come after him. Doubtless its satisfaction may be satisfactory for him or her, but that does not testify to Nature's interest in individuals, but rather to her skill in insuring that her supreme concern should not be ignored, even by those who least consciously concern themselves with it.

These are perhaps the three most important instances of the verbal, or perhaps more than verbal, issues that arise in the fight with prudery. One has tried to show that they are not really in the nature of concessions to Mrs. Grundy, but that the terms commended are in point of fact of more intrinsic worth than those to which she objects. Other instances will occur to the reader, especially if he or she becomes in any way a soldier in this war, whether publicly or as a parent instructing children, or on any other of the many fields where the fight rages.

It is not the purpose of the present chapter to deal with that which must be said, notwithstanding prudery, and in order that the price of prudery should no longer be paid. But one final principle may be laid down which is indeed perhaps merely an expression of the spirit underlying the foregoing remarks upon our terminology. It is that we are to fly our flag high. We may consult Mrs. Grundy's prejudices if we find that in doing so we may directly serve our own thinking, and therefore our cause. This is very different from any kind of apologizing to her. All such I utterly deplore. We must not begin by granting Mrs. Grundy's case in any degree. Somewhere in that chaos of prejudices which she calls her mind, she nourishes the notion, common to all the false forms of religion, ancient or modern, that there is something about gender and parenthood which is inherently base and unclean.

The origin of this notion is of interest, and the anthropologists have devoted much attention to it. It is to be found intermingled with a by no means contemptible hygiene in the Mosaic legislation, is to be traced in the beliefs and customs of extant primitive peoples, and has formed and forms an element in most religions. But it is not really pertinent to our present discussion to weigh the good and evil consequences of this belief. Without following the modern fashion, prevalent in some surprising quarters, of ecstatically exaggerating the practical value of false beliefs in past and present times, we may admit that the cause of morality in the humblest sense of that term may sometimes have been served by the religious condemnation of all these matters as unclean, and of parenthood as, at the best, a second best.

But for our own day and days yet unborn this notion of gender and its consequences as unclean or worse part is to be condemned as not merely a lie and a palpably blasphemous one, grossly irreligious on the face of it, but as a pernicious lie, and to be so recognized even by those who most joyfully cherish evidence of the practical value of lies. Whatever may have been the case in the past or among present peoples in other states of culture than our own, no impartial person can question that during the Christian Era what may be called the Pauline or ascetic attitude on this matter has been disastrous; and that if the present forms of religion are not completely to outlive their usefulness, it is high time to restore mother and child worship to the honor which it held in the religion of Ancient Egypt and in many another.

If the mother and child worship which is to be found in the more modern religions, such as Christianity, is to be worth anything to the coming world it must cease to have reference to one mother and one child only; it must hail every mother everywhere as a Madonna, and every child as in some measure deity incarnate. By no Church will such teaching be questioned today; but if it be granted the Churches must cease to uphold those conceptions of the superiority of celibacy and virginity which, besides involving grossly materialistic conceptions of those states, are palpably incompatible with that worship of parenthood to which the Churches must and should now be made to return.

All this will involve many a shock to prudery; to take only the instance of what we call illegitimate motherhood, our eyes askance must learn that there are other legitimacies and illegitimacies than those which depend upon the little laws of men, and that if our doctrine of the worth of parenthood be a right one it is our business in every such case to say, "Here also, then, in so far as it lies in our power, we must make motherhood as good and perfect as may be."

This passage recalls one of Ruskin's, which is to be found in "Unto This Last":

"Nearly all labor may be shortly divided into positive and negative labor - positive, that which produces life; negative, that which produces death; the most directly negative labor being murder, and the most directly positive the bearing and rearing of children; so that in the precise degree in which murder is hateful on the negative side of idleness, in that exact degree child-rearing is admirable, on the positive side of idleness."

Here is the right comment upon the swaggering display of the means of death and the hiding as if shameful of the signs of life to come. What has Mrs. Grundy to say to this? Will she consider the propriety of urging in future that it is murder and the means of murder, and the organized forces of capital and politics making for murder, that must not be mentioned before children, and must be hidden as shameful from the eyes of men; and while a woman may still glory in her hair, according to that spiritual precept of St. Paul: "But if a woman have long hair it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering," perhaps she may be permitted even to glory in her motherhood, contemptible as such a notion would doubtless have seemed to the Apostle of the Gentiles.

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