The Chief Enemy of Women : Part 2

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

(Page 22 of 30)

Dr. Tatham's recently published letter on occupational mortality in the three years, 1900, 1901, 1902, informs us as to twenty-one occupations in which the alcoholic death-rate is grossly excessive. In these twenty-one occupations selected by Dr. Tatham as having an alcohol mortality which exceeds the standard by at least 50 percent., we can work out the alcohol factor and find that it amounts to 24.5 percent. The table would take up too much space for me to ask you to print it, but it is ready on demand, public or private. The figures work out to show that 5,092 married men in these twenty-one trades died in each year from alcohol. (I have taken 24.5 percent, of the whole number of deaths in the three years, and reckoned the married proportion of these.)

The calculation shows that in these twenty-one occupations the comparative alcohol mortality is 24.5 percent., as against only 12 percent. in all other occupations.

Amongst the occupations in Dr. Tatham's table may be noted coal heaver, coach, cab, etc., service, groom, butcher, messenger, tobacconist, general laborer, general shopkeeper, brewer, chimney sweep, dock laborer, hawker, publican, inn and hotel servants. A glance at the table will show that in most cases the men who are dying are "industrial drinkers," who frequent public-houses in the districts where the reduction in the number of the licenses under the present Bill will occur. Often nowadays the widows are heavy drinkers, and the lives of their children center round the public-house.

If the only wealth of a nation is its life, and history teaches no more certain truth - and if, since individuals are mortal, the quantity and quality of parenthood - or of childhood, according to the point of view - are the supreme factors in the destiny of nations, do not the foregoing figures warrant the contention that he who at this date is for alcohol is against England?"

It has been shown that the effect of alcohol upon the brain persists for not less than thirty hours after the last dose. But more than two years have now passed since the foregoing was printed, leaving ample time for any member of the alcoholic party to "pull himself together" and demolish it. One is therefore entitled to assume that it cannot be demolished; on the contrary, it could easily be shown that the foregoing figures very considerably underrate the actual number of widows and orphans who must be made by alcohol in this country every year.

All students of modern life, however greatly they differ in their methods and objects, are agreed that the question of the economic position of women is one of the gravest of our time. While this is so, it may be added that only the eugenicist can adequately realize the importance of this question, since he knows that with it is involved the all-important matter of the selection amongst present women for the motherhood of the future. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the modern trend is quite definitely in the direction of those of our guides, whom most of us follow, knowingly or unknowingly, because they have the brains and we have not, in favoring the economic position of women at the expense of male responsibility.

Meanwhile we have the economic basis of society as it is, and there is no more serious indictment against alcohol than this which I have attempted to formulate against it on the ground of its destruction of fatherhood. Whatever the rest of the community may incline to, it assuredly seems that the wives, from palace to hovel, ought to be enemies of this great enemy of theirs. The time will certainly come when the woman who is bringing up children will be placed in a position of economic security, and when indeed all other persons will be less secure than she because the sane State of the future will guarantee, and regard as the first charge upon itself, the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the production of the next generation. But in the chaos in which we welter, widows and orphans have to take their chance. Who will say a good word for the substance which makes them by tens of thousands in England and Wales alone every year?

At least one economic aspect of this question may, however, be dealt with here. In a rightly constituted society people are held responsible for their deeds. Parenthood is a deed; in a very true sense it is a more deliberate, a more active, more self-determined deed, on the part of the father than on the part of the mother. At present the only act for which men are held irresponsible - for our practice amounts to that - is the act for which, above all others, they should be held responsible. A large amount of the money now spent by men on alcohol and tobacco, and other things which shorten their lives, and are needed only because they create a need for themselves, is really required for the interests of the race.

Such is the double destruction worked by the alcoholic form of this waste that if the average sum, say six shillings a week, expended in the working-class family on alcohol, were invested on behalf of the possible widows and orphans, not only would they be provided for, but the fathers would be saved, and they would not become widows and orphans. In days to come it will be discovered that such matters as these are the real political economy, the absence or presence of tariffs, the incidence of taxation and the like, being matters of no consequence or significance whatever compared with the question, fundamental in all times and places for every nation and for every individual: For what are you spending: for bread or a stone, for life or for death?

The foregoing has been chosen for the forefront of this chapter because of its bearing on a central economic problem of the time, and also because, for some reason or other, this alcoholic destruction of fatherhood, though it is of the utmost importance, has hitherto escaped the attention of sociological students. We pass now to a second point, of a wholly different character, which particularly well illustrates certain of the general principles with which we began. The supreme importance of alcohol or of anything else for human happiness is attained only through its influence on the selves of men and women. It is upon these that our happiness depends - upon the nature and the nurture, from hour to hour, of our selves and the selves with which we have to deal. Above all, do women as individuals depend for their happiness upon the selves of men, as we have suggested.

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