Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes. C. Gasquoine Hartley
me to be the chief causes that hitherto have hindered motherhood and bound my sex from the full enjoyment of life; and to suggest that the reason of this bondage is not, as is so often stated, the aggressive selfishness of men, but is due much more to women’s own actions, to their absurdly wrong education and entire misunderstanding of the sexual life; a misunderstanding which has decided the direction in which they believed the freedom they have been so ardently, yet wastefully seeking, was to be found.
So that we may understand our present failures better, I have attempted to seek causes and to suggest reasons. My inquiry reaches back before human parenthood and examines the parental instinct in its making; it shows the way and for what reason this instinct of caring for the young became fixed and stronger in the mother than in the father. It sets out from this beginning, and, after a short chapter on primitive motherhood, passes to the consideration of women and the home, marriage as it affects parenthood, the unmarried mother and sexual relationships outside of marriage, as well as other allied questions. It tries to offer a practical solution to some of the problems involved, in particular the problem of education and new ideals of conduct and sexual health for all girls. It recommends a revolution in our schools and methods of training; changes that must, as I believe, be made, unless we are prepared to accept as inevitable the decay of motherhood, as well as an increasing failure of happiness in marriage, with its resulting antagonism between sex and sex.
But to return to this present introductory chapter. I have upon my study table two documents. The one is that from which I have taken the quotation placed before this opening section of my book. It is the Annual Report for 1914,[2] of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education. The second consists of two pamphlets on the Health of Munition Workers, treating of the Hours of Work and Employment of Women, both prepared by the command of Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, and published in connection with the important illustrated Report, which shows and explains all the numerous and different engineering operations on which women are now engaged in munition work. The object of the Report is to attract more women workers; but it is with the two pamphlets I am concerned. For the present, however, I shall leave them, returning to them later in order to show how closely they are connected with the other Report, which treats of infant mortality, child disease and neglect, and all the wastage of motherhood. It is on the shameful significance of the facts given in this Report that we must now fix our attention.
It would be difficult to find a more complete condemnation of motherhood. The Report is full of condemning facts. For, let us not disguise it from ourselves that, in spite of much that has been done, many efforts and real improvements, motherhood remains very evil; about the lives of little children lurk cruelties, disease, dirt, and neglect that ought not to be permitted.
Let me take one group of facts from this Report; facts that cry out to us all how urgently wrong things are. In the year 1914, 92,166 children died in England and Wales under one year of age. Think of the wanton wastage: in every thousand children born one hundred and five have died. Their number of the year’s toll of new lives reaches close up to the recorded deaths for the first fifteen months of war![3] And the evil does not end here, for the bad conditions which kill these babies act also in maiming and disabling, or at least in lowering the health standard, of many of the children who live, and thus add to the number of those who die in the early years of childhood, or survive only with enfeebled bodies and defective minds. And, further, no account is taken here of the lives that are lost before birth takes place: I mean the still births and abortions, the ante-natal deaths of which no record is kept. Our tendency is to assume that life begins at the birth, whereas the life of each child starts at the moment of its conception. Thus the birth rate is really the survival from the conception rate. And the destruction of life before birth from adverse ante-natal conditions is probably larger than the death rate in the first post-natal year.
You will see that the problem is sufficiently grave. And this unnecessary waste—for it is unnecessary—is going on every year, and will go on until we begin to feel it strongly enough to take action to prevent it. It can be prevented. The chief causes of infant mortality are briefly two—
(1) Poor physique of the mother or inheritable disease in one or other parent, causing premature births with weakened constitutions and congenital defects in the children.
(2) Ignorance of mothers in appropriate infant care and low standard of home life; bad feeding and insanitary conditions are accountable for the greater number of child deaths.
We find the infantile death rate is much higher in urban communities than it is in rural England. It is well to give a table to show this—
| Annual Rates per 1000 living | Annual Rates per 1000 births | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Birth Rate. | Death Rate. | Diarrhœa and Enteritis (under two years). | Infant Mortality Rate. | |
| England and Wales | 23.8 | 13.7 | 20.4 | 105 |
| 97 great towns (including London) | 25.0 | 15.0 | 26.1 | 114 |
| 145 smaller towns | 23.9 | 13.1 | 19.8 | 104 |
| England and Wales less the 242 towns | 22.2 | 12.4 | 12.6 | 93 |
| London | 24.3 | 14.4 | 27.6 | 104 |
Consider the reason for this difference in the death rates—114 deaths per 1000 in the great towns, 104 in the smaller towns, and 93 in the country districts. Does not this prove that children are killed by the conditions into which they are born. It is obvious that urbanisation, with all that it means of unhealthy living, with factory work and the employment of women, exerts a profound effect on the lives and health of little children.
A portion of infant and child mortality represents, I well know, the removal from life of diseased children who ought never to have been born, and would not have been born under different sexual conditions, for this, above all, is a question of instructed motherhood. I am not forgetting this side of the problem. But these children, doomed to death from the time they are conceived, represent a fraction only of our infant mortality. The vast majority of babies are born healthy; it is we who kill them. Though the fact of the falling birth rate is being shouted aloud with an ever-increasing fear and insistence, the plain, simple fact is neglected; it is absurd to go on having more babies if we can’t first care enough to keep alive the babies that we have. There are still too many births for our civilisation to look after; we are still unfit to be trusted with a rising birth rate.[4]
Let us consider now how our neglect acts on the children who fight through the first years of infancy. I can take a few facts only chosen almost at hazard from the mass of similar evidence in the Educational Report. In London, out of 294,000 children medically examined, 101,000 or nearly half, were found to be in need of treatment. In England and Wales 391,352 children of school age were medically attended. A summary of the returns shows a wide prevalence of verminous uncleanness, the percentage being 18.1 per cent. for the heads and 11.8 per cent. for the bodies of the children. Again the figures show unclean conditions to be most prevalent in the towns, in some instances the percentage rising as high as thirty unclean children out of each hundred children examined. I ask you to think what this implies.