The Chief Enemy of Women : Part 8

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

(Page 28 of 30)

"The domestic occupations which are the chief field of women's activities obviously allow ample opportunity for the continuance of alcoholic habits formed prior to marriage. This is a matter of much importance. For the ordinary existence of the working man's wife, with its succession of pregnancies and suckling, and the management of a brood of children in cramped surroundings, will of itself be very likely to promote tippling; and if a knowledge of the effect of alcohol as an industrial excitant has been acquired by the factory girl, it is pretty sure of further development in the married woman. Instances of this sort, in which the discomforts of the first pregnancy stimulate the growth of a rudimentary habit of industrial drinking to confirmed intemperance, are tolerably common in any wide experience of the alcoholic."

The following paragraph must also be quoted for its clear indication of a matter which is of prime importance, which no one denies, and yet of which no statesman or politician has begun to take cognizance:

"The employment of women in the ordinary industrial occupations not only involves a disorganization of their domestic duties if they are married, but it also interferes with the acquisition of housewifely knowledge during girlhood. The result is that appalling ignorance of everything connected with cookery, with cleanliness, with the management of children, which make the average wife and mother in the lower working class in this country one of the most helpless and thriftless of beings, and which therefore impels the workman, whose comfort depends on her, not only to spend his free time in the public-house, but also tends to make him look to alcohol as a necessary condiment with his tasteless and indigestible diet. Both directly and indirectly, therefore, the employments that withdraw women from domestic pursuits are likely to increase alcoholism, and, it may be added, to increase its greatest potency for evil, namely its influence on the health of the stock."

Elsewhere I have endeavored to deal with the general physiology of alcohol and its relations to race-culture. Here our special concern has been woman, and not woman as mother, but rather woman as individual. We have had specially to refer, however, to expectant and nursing motherhood because each of these offers special temptations and opportunities for the beginning of the alcoholic habit or strengthening its hold in a deadly fashion, and it is certainly necessary for us to know that the supposed advantages to the child, which constitute a new argument for alcohol at these times, are not advantages but injuries which may be grave and often fatal. The utterly incomprehensible thing is how anyone can suppose or ever could suppose otherwise.

It is necessary to add a few words to the foregoing since there has recently appeared what purports to be a contribution to some of the problems that have concerned us. Part of the foregoing argument has rested upon the fact, only too definitely, variously and frequently proved, that alcoholism in women prejudices the performance of their supreme functions. Complicated as the maternal relation to the future is, the relations of alcohol to the problem are correspondingly so, and in any discussion that is to be of value we must draw the necessary distinctions. In many scientific contributions to the subject this has already been done. We have identified certain degenerate stocks who display the symptoms of alcoholism. The alcohol may aggravate their degeneracy but it is not the prime cause of it in them, though it may have been so in their ancestors. The children of such persons are degenerate also, and as the class is numerous and fertile there is here a social problem which is not primarily a problem in alcohol, but is accidentally connected therewith simply because the proneness to alcoholism is a symptom of the degeneracy.

Quite distinct from the foregoing there is the influence of alcohol upon mothers and motherhood that would otherwise have been healthy. Alcohol, like lead, as has been shown elsewhere, may injure the racial elements in the mother before even expectant motherhood occurs. Later, it may prejudice both expectant motherhood and nursing motherhood; further it is often the primary cause of over-laying and of chronic cruelty and neglect. Until quite lately there was also the action of the public-house upon the children to be reckoned with, where the mother visited it and was allowed to take them with her. That, however, has been at last put a stop to in England, following the example of civilization elsewhere.

But it will be clear that the problem is a complicated one. It has been confidently attacked by Professor Karl Pearson in a Report upon "the influence of parental alcoholism upon the offspring," and the conclusions of that Report have been widely circulated and are being circulated almost wherever the monetary interest of alcohol has power. Briefly, Professor Pearson came to the conclusion that the children of drunken parents are, on the average, superior to those of sober parents in physique and in intelligence, in sight and in freedom from epilepsy and other diseases. This, of course, as everybody knows, is obvious nonsense, and the only problem remaining is how to account for its assertion.

I have dealt with that question at length elsewhere, and here need only note in a word that Professor Pearson's Report includes no comparison between the children of abstainers and drinkers, since the number of abstainers was too few to be treated separately; that Professor Pearson attaches no strict meaning to the term alcoholism, by which he means anything from what the word really means down to a general suspicion that the parents were drinking more than was good for themselves or their home; and finally that in studying the influence of alcohol upon offspring Professor Pearson has omitted to inquire in a single case whether the alcoholism or the offspring came first. The Report has no scientific basis whatever and has been riddled with criticism by expert students of every kind, including not merely students of alcoholism but also Professor Alfred Marshould of Cambridge, the greatest English-speaking economist of the time, who has shown that there are no grounds for the assumptions made by Professor Pearson in that part of his argument which is based upon the economic efficiency of drinking and non-drinking parents.

The publication of this Report merely hastens the rapid decadence of "biometry," the foundations of which have already been sapped by the re-discovery of Mendelism in 1900; but it was necessary to refer to the matter here, since in the advertisements and the other printed matter paid for by the alcoholic party, the public is being informed that the children of alcoholic parents have been proved to be, on the whole, superior to those of non-alcoholic parents. This question has been exhaustively studied, yet again, in London by Dr. Sullivan, in Helsingfors by Professor Laitinen, and also in New York in an inquiry which actually embraced no less than fifty-five thousand school children. The elementary fallacies entertained by Professor Pearson were of course avoided and the uniform result in these and in a host of other inquiries that might be named is the only result which could be imagined in a universe where causes have effects.

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