The Chief Enemy of Women : Part 1

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

(Page 21 of 30)

If we believe that the genders are mutually dependent and, in the long run, can neither be injured nor befriended apart, we should be prepared to expect that the chief enemy of civilized mankind is no less inimical to women than to men. So long as it was supposed that drinking merely injured the drinker, and so long as the drinkers were almost entirely men, it could be argued by persons sufficiently foolish that indulgence in alcohol was a male vice or delight which really did not concern women at all - if men choose to drink or to smoke or to bet or to play games, what business is that of women? It is an argument which would not appeal to the mind of the primitive law-giver, and can be accepted by no one who thinks today.

For the least effects of drink are those which are seen in the drinker. The question of alcoholism is not one of the abuse of a good thing, here and there injuring those who take it to excess, but is a national question which affects the entire community, abstainers, and drinkers, men, women and children, present and to come. No one who has seriously studied the action of alcohol on civilization can question that it is our chief external enemy. We must use the word external for the best of good reasons, since we know that always and everywhere man's chief foes are those of his own household - his own proneness to injure himself and others. And alcohol, indeed, would not be our chief external enemy were it not for the very fact that its malign power is chiefly exerted by a degradation of the man within. It is a material thing and no part of our psychological nature. So long as it is kept outside us it has the most admirable uses, which are yearly becoming more various and important; but, taken within, it alters the human constitution, and hereby achieves its title as our worst enemy.

People who estimate the influence of alcohol by means of the alcoholic death-rate or by the rate of convictions for drunkenness will not readily accept the doctrine that alcohol is a greater enemy of women than of men. Yet assuredly this is true. It is an axiomatic and first principle that whatever injures one gender injures the other, and while drinking on the part of women at present injures men as a whole in comparatively small degree, the consumption of alcohol by men works enormous injury upon women indirectly, in addition to that direct injury which civilized women are yearly inflicting more gravely upon themselves, at any rate in Great Britain.

Woman, we have argued, is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and just as she is mediate between men and the future, so men are mediate between her and the present. For the individual woman and the present, the quality of the manhood which constitutes her human environment is more important than anything else. If the manhood is withdrawn and she is thrown upon her own resources, there is disaster; if the manhood be damaged or degenerate, so much the worse for the woman; if the manhood be of the best, there and only there are the best conditions provided for the highest womanhood.

First, then, let us observe how alcohol injures women by its contribution to the male death-rate. Allusion has already been made to a simple statistical inquiry which I made a few years ago in regard to the influence of alcohol as a maker of widows and orphans. The results of that inquiry may here be quoted, having only appeared in the daily press hitherto. They will suffice to show that alcohol on this ground alone is a great enemy of women, and especially of wives. The following is the conclusion published in several papers in England in November, 1908: -

"Some time ago we heard a good deal, both in and out of Parliament, about the debenture widow whose little all is invested in brewery securities. There is, on the other hand, the widow so made by alcohol. I am not aware that anyone has attempted to estimate the approximate number of each of these two classes. The following is merely a rude approximation.

It has been stated that there are half a million persons who have invested money in the licensed trade. Let us allow that half of these are men. The death-rate of all males, above fifteen years of age, is slightly over sixteen per 1,000. At the census of 1901, 536 in each 1,000 males aged fifteen years and upwards were found to be married. Ignoring the differential death-rate of the married as compared with bachelors and widows, it follows that about 4,100 male investors in the licensed trade die each year, of whom some 2,197 will be married men, leaving behind them the same number of widows entirely or partly dependent on these investments.

The widows made by drink are nearly six times as many.

Numerous inquiries at home and abroad agree somewhat closely in stating 14 percent. of the entire death-rate to be due to alcohol. The proportion of one in seven is accepted by Dr. Archdall Eeid, who considers that all efforts to restrain drinking increase drunkenness. I do not think the justness of this figure can be disputed at all, except as an under-estimate. We are here dealing with male deaths only, and I will do my contention the obvious injustice of supposing that the proportion of deaths due wholly or in part to alcohol is no higher amongst men than amongst women. If one could allow for the existing difference, the result would be even more terrible.

Taking the figures for 1906 for England and Wales alone, we have 167,307 deaths of males over fifteen; 23,422 of these wholly or partly due to alcohol, and of this number 12,554 were married men (i. e., 536 per 1,000). The average size of a family in England and Wales is 4.62, according to Whitaker. If we multiply the number of widows, 12,554, by 3.62, we should have an approximation to the number of widows and orphans made by alcohol in 1906. There were 45,445, or over 124 widows and orphans made by alcohol every day in the year.

We may now note some further data helping us to compare the 12,554 alcohol-made widows with the 2,197 whose husbands' fortunes were wholly or in part bound up with the welfare of the licensed trade. (Of these latter, also, of course, a large proportion would be alcohol-made.)

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