The Rights of Mothers : Part 3

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

(Page 21 of 28)

Next we may consider the case of the unmarried mother and her "illegitimate" child or children. Here, again, the child must be cared for, and the care of the child is the work which has been imposed upon the mother. We must enable her to do it, nor must we countenance the monstrous and unnatural folly, injurious to both and therefore to us, of separating them. Napoleon, desirous of food for powder, forbade the search for the father in such a case, though the French are now seeking to abrogate that abominable decree. Our law recognizes that the father is responsible, and under it he may be made to pay toward the upkeep of the child. Some contemporary writers on the endowment of motherhood are advocating changes which would make this law absurd, for they are seeking to free the married father from any responsibility for his children, and could scarcely impose it upon the unmarried father.

Such proposals, however, are palpable reversions to something much lower and eons older in the history of life than mere barbarism, and I have no fear of their success. Assuredly the unmarried father must be held responsible; and no less certainly must we see to it that, with or without his help, the unmarried mother and her children are adequately provided for. The present death-rate amongst illegitimate children is a scandal of the first order and must be ended. If we are wise, our provision will involve protecting ourselves against the need for new provision, especially where the mother is feeble-minded or otherwise defective, as is so often the case: but provision there must be.

Finally, we come to the central problem of the mother who has a living husband in employment. It is the case of the working classes that really concerns us, not least because the greater part of the birth-rate comes therefore. It is the contemporary settling-down of the birth-rate in this class, combined with the novel consequences of modern industrialism, especially in the form of married women's labor, that makes the question so important. Before we go any further, the proposition may be laid down that married women's labor, as it commonly exists, is an intolerable evil, condemned already by our first principles. It need scarcely be said that one is not here referring to the labors of the married woman who writes novels or designs fashion-plates. There is no condemnation of any kind of labor, in the home or outside it, if the condition be complied with, that it does not prejudice the inalienable first charge upon the mother's time and energy. Her children are that first charge.

It may perfectly well be, and often is, chiefly though not exclusively in the more fortunate classes, that the mother may earn money by other work without prejudice to her motherhood. Such cases do not concern us, but we are urgently concerned with married women's labor in the ordinary sense of the term, which means that the mother goes out to tend some lifeless machine, while her children are left at home to be cared far anyhow or not at all. No student of infant mortality or the conditions of child life and child survival in general has any choice but to condemn this whole practice as evil, root and branch. And from the national and economic point of view it may be said that whatever the mother makes in the factory is of less value than the children who consequently die at home. The culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people, and any industry that involves its destruction and needs the conditions which make up that destruction, is one which the country cannot afford, whatever its merely monetary balance-sheet. A complete balance-sheet, with its record of children slain, would only too readily demonstrate this.

Our right attitude toward married women's labor must depend upon a right understanding of the social meaning of marriage. This was a question which had to be dealt with at length in a previous volume and I can only state here in a word, what was the conclusion come to. It was that marriage is a device for supporting and buttressing motherhood by fatherhood. Its mark is that it provides for common parental care of offspring. A more prosaic way of stating the case would be that marriage is a device for making the father responsible. If we go far back in the history of the animal world, we find mating but not marriage.

The father's function is purely physiological, transient and wholly irresponsible. The whole burden of caring for offspring, when first there comes to be need for that care, in the history of organic progress, falls upon the mother. But even amongst the fishes we find that sometimes, as in the case of the stickleback, the father helps the mother to build a sort of nest, and does "sentry-go" outside it to keep off marauders. In this common care of the young we see what is in all essentials marriage, though some may prefer to dignify the word by confining it to those human associations which have been blessed by Church and State, even though the father throws the baby at the mother, or sends her into the streets to earn her bread and his beer.

If some of our modern reformers knew any biology, or even happened to visit a music-hall where the biography was showing scenes of bird-life, they would learn that the human arrangement whereby the father goes out and forages for mother and children has roots in hoary antiquity. The pity is that there is no one to point the moral to the crowd when the father-bird is seen returning with delicacies for the mother, who tends her nest and its occupants.

The reader will already have anticipated the conclusion, to which, as I see it, the study of the fundamental laws of life must lead the sociologist in this case. It is that the duty of the father is to support the mother and children, and that the duty of the State is to see that he does this.

Thus, if asked whether I believe in the endowment of motherhood, I reply, yes, indeed, I believe in the endowment of motherhood by the corresponding fatherhood. If our first principles are sound, we must believe that the mother must be endowed or provided for; there can be no difference of opinion so far. Often, as we have seen, there is no corresponding fatherhood, for the mother may be a widow, or unmarried and unable to find the father. But where the corresponding fatherhood exists, we fly directly in the face of Nature, we deny the consistent teaching of evolution as the study of sub-human life reveals it to us, if we do not turn to the father and say, this is your act, for which you are responsible.

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