The Chief Enemy of Women : Part 5

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

(Page 25 of 30)

Preparations such as those which have been mentioned above have no place or status whatever in scientific medicine. Their constituents are known and their action is known. The public pays for sarsaparilla, for instance, and simply gets a 20 percent. solution of flavored alcohol, and there is no one to inform it that sarsaparilla has been exhaustively studied by pharmacologists, employing every means of observation and experiment in their power, and that none of them have yet been able to detect its capacity to modify the body or any function of the body in any degree at all whether in health or disease. This is only one of many instances that might be named; every preparation of which the composition is not stated is suspect. Men are paying for these things at this moment under the impression that they are buying valuable tonics which will save their wives from the consequences of the drink craving and help to avert it.

Large numbers of women are ruining themselves in purse and in body quite secretly under cover of these scandalous abuses which are allowed to go on from year to year, and which are undoubtedly doing more injury to the feminine - that is to say, to the more important - half of the community in each succeeding year. At least let the facts be known. Let liberty be believed in and encouraged; but if these things are to be made and sold and bought, let their composition be stated on the bottles. The composition of milk is supervised by the State; margarine, which is harmless and an excellent food, may not be sold as butter; alcohol, which is noxious, may be sold under any lying name, but so long as the State gets its percentage, it is well pleased. The official organ of the medical profession in this country has done well to draw renewed attention to this subject. Surely it ought to be possible for the profession and the advocates of temperance to join hands for the promotion of legislation in a direction where reform cannot otherwise be obtained. Something, one hopes and believes, can be done by merely writing on the subject.

A certain number of women who read this book will be deterred from buying these things on finding that they are simply "masked alcohol" and that their medicinal virtues are less than nil. But though all that is to the good, only legislation can meet the real need. These preparations offer insidious means of teaching women to drink, and when the habit is established, nothing can be accomplished by revealing to the victim the history of its origin. The minimum demand for legislation should be, at the very least, that all preparations of this kind should have their composition stated with every portion of them that is vended to the public. Assuredly the champions of womanhood will have to take this matter up soon, and the sooner the better. There is no need to be a fanatic, there is no need even to be a teetotaler, in order to satisfy oneself that here is a crying abuse which is ruining the unwarned and the unprotected up and down the land, and which is quite definitely and obviously within the capacity of legislation to control effectively and finally.

Let us turn now to the general question of the organic or physiological relations between womanhood and alcohol. Both genders of human beings are identical in a vast majority of their characters, and the various reactions to alcohol come within this number. There is no need to repeat here any of the facts and conclusions which have been set forth at length elsewhere. What was said there applies to women as to men. That is true so far as the individual is concerned and it is also true that, so far as the race is concerned, the germ-plasma or germ-cells in both genders alike may be injured by the continued consumption of large quantities of alcohol.

There remains the important fact, which it is the present writer's constant effort to bring to the notice of eugenicists, that alcohol has special relations to motherhood, to which there can necessarily be no correspondence in the case of the other gender, and though motherhood, as such, is not the subject of this book, yet it would be most pedantically to limit the usefulness which one hopes it may possess if we were to omit the discussion, as brief as possible, of the effect of alcohol upon womanhood at the time when womanhood is expressing itself in its supreme function.

In my book on Eugenics there is merely the briefest allusion in a foot-note to this subject, and I confess myself now ashamed of having dealt with it in that utterly inadequate fashion. In practical eugenics, - though sooth to say when eugenics begins to become practical many professing eugenicists seem to think that it is wandering from the point - the great fact of expectant motherhood must be reckoned with. To decline to do so is in effect to declare that we are greatly concerned with bringing the right germ-cells together, but have nothing to do with what may or may not happen to the product of their union. We desire, however, not merely conjugated germ-cells, but worthy men and women, and expectant motherhood is therefore part of the eugenic province. Unfortunately it is easier to invent terms and categories and get people to accept them than to control their use of one's terms thereafter. Otherwise, I should forbid the use of the term eugenicist at all by anyone who is unprepared to move a finger or utter a word on behalf of the care and the protection of expectant motherhood.

It is quite true that the question of expectant motherhood has nothing to do with heredity in the proper sense of that term. We are dealing now with "nurture," not with "nature," but we are dealing with a department of nurture which can only be understood when we realize that human beings begin their lives nine months or so before they are born, and that the first stage of their nurture is coincident with what we call expectant motherhood, while the second stage of their nurture, normally and properly, ought to be coincident with what we may call nursing motherhood.

Let us then acquaint ourselves with the fact, fully established by experimental and chemical observation, that alcohol given to the expectant mother finds its way into the organism of the child. Therefore, as we should expect, alcohol can readily be demonstrated in a newborn child when the drug has been given to the mother just before its birth.

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