The Task of Social Hygiene. Ellis Havelock

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before marriage, to give, and to receive, the fullest information on all the matters that concern ancestral inheritance, while the registration of such information, it is probable, will become ever simpler and more a matter of course. 42 And if he finds that he is not justified in aiding to carry on the race, the eugenist will be content to make himself, in the words of Jesus, "a eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven's sake," whether, under modern conditions, that means abstention in marriage from procreation, or voluntary sterilization by operative methods. 43 For, as Giddings has put it, the goal of the race lies, not in the ruthless exaltation of a super-man, but in the evolution of a super-mankind. Such a goal can only be reached by resolute selection and elimination. 44

      The breeding of men lies largely in the hands of women. That is why the question of Eugenics is to a great extent one with the woman question. The realization of eugenics in our social life can only be attained with the realization of the woman movement in its latest and completest phase as an enlightened culture of motherhood, in all that motherhood involves alike on the physical and the psychic sides. Motherhood on the eugenic basis is a deliberate and selective process, calling for the highest intelligence as well as the finest emotional and moral aptitudes, so that all the best energies of a long evolution of womanhood in the paths of modern culture here find their final outlet. The breeding of children further involves the training of children, and since the expansion of Social Hygiene renders education a far larger and more delicate task than it has ever been before, the responsibilities laid upon women by the evolution of civilization become correspondingly great.

      For the men who have been thus born and taught the tasks imposed by Social Hygiene are in no degree lighter. They demand all the best qualities of a selectively bred race from which the mentally and physically weak have, so far as possible, been bred out. The substitution of law for war alike in the relations of class to class, and of nation to nation, and the organization of international methods of social intercourse between peoples of different tongues and unlike traditions, are but two typical examples of the tasks, difficult but imperative, which Social Hygiene presents and the course of modern civilization renders insistent. Again, the adequate adjustment of the claims of the individual and the claims of the community, each carried to its farthest point, can but prove an exquisite test of the quality of any well-bred and well-trained race. It is exactly in that balancing of apparent opposites, the necessity of pushing to extremes both opposites, and the consequent need of cultivating that quality of temperance the Greeks estimated so highly, that the supreme difficulties of modern civilization lie. We see these difficulties again in relation to the extension of law. It is desirable and inevitable that the sphere of law should be extended, and that the disputes which are still decided by brutal and unreasoning force should be decided by humane and reasoning force, that is to say, by law. But, side by side with this extension of law, it is necessary to wage a constant war with the law-making tendency, to cherish an undying resolve to maintain unsullied those sacred and intimate impulses, all the finest activities of the moral sphere, which the generalizing hand of law can only injure and stain.

      It is these fascinating and impassioning problems, every day becoming of more urgent practical importance, which it is the task of Social Hygiene to solve, having first created the men and women who are fit to solve them. It is such problems as these that we are to-day called upon to illuminate, as far as we may—it may not yet be very far—by the dry light of science.

       II

      THE CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN 45

      The Origin of the Woman Movement—Mary Wollstonecraft—George Sand—Robert Owen—William Thompson—John Stuart Mill—The Modern Growth of Social Cohesion—The Growth of Industrialism—Its Influence in Woman's Sphere of Work—The Education of Women—Co-education—The Woman Question and Sexual Selection—Significance of Economic Independence—The State Regulation of Marriage—The Future of Marriage—Wilhelm von Humboldt—Social Equality of Women—The Reproduction of the Race as a Function of Society—Women and the Future of Civilization.

I

      It was in the eighteenth century, the seed-time of modern ideas, that our great-grandfathers became conscious of a discordant break in the traditional conceptions of women's status. The vague cries of Justice, Freedom, Equality, which were then hurled about the world, were here and there energetically applied to women—notably in France by Condorcet—and a new movement began to grow self-conscious and coherent. Mary Wollstonecraft, after Aphra Behn the first really noteworthy Englishwoman of letters, gave voice to this movement in England.

      The famous and little-read Vindication of the Rights of Women, careless and fragmentary as it is, and by no means so startling to us as to her contemporaries, shows Mary Wollstonecraft as a woman of genuine insight, who saw the questions of woman's social condition in their essential bearings. Her intuitions need little modification, even though a century of progress has intervened. The modern advocates of woman's suffrage have little to add to her brief statement. She is far, indeed, from the monstrous notion of Miss Cobbe, that woman's suffrage is the "crown and completion" of all progress so far as women's movements are concerned. She looks upon it rather as one of the reasonable conditions of progress. It is pleasant to turn from the eccentric energy of so many of the advocates of women's causes to-day, all engaged in crying up their own particular nostrum, to the genial many-sided wisdom of Mary Wollstonecraft, touching all subjects with equal frankness and delicacy.

      The most brilliant and successful exponent of the new revolutionary ideas—making Corinne and her prototype seem dim and ineffectual—was undoubtedly George Sand. The badly-dressed woman who earned her living by scribbling novels, and said to M. du Camp, as she sat before him in silence rolling her cigarette, "Je ne dis rien parceque je suis bête," has exercised a profound influence throughout Europe, an influence which, in the Sclavonic countries especially, has helped to give impetus to the resolution we are now considering. And this not so much from any definite doctrines that underlie her work—for George Sand's views on such matters varied as much as her political views—as from her whole temper and attitude. Her large and rich nature, as sometimes happens in genius of a high order, was twofold; on the one hand, she possessed a solid serenity, a quiet sense of power, the qualities of a bonne bourgeoise, which found expression in her imperturbable calm, her gentle look and low voice. And with this was associated a massive, almost Rabelaisian temperament (one may catch glimpses of it in her correspondence), a sane exuberant earthliness which delighted in every manifestation of the actual world. On the other hand, she bore within her a volcanic element of revolt, an immense disgust of law and custom. Throughout her life George Sand developed her strong and splendid individuality, not perhaps as harmoniously, but as courageously and as sincerely as even Goethe.

      Robert Owen, who, like Saint-Simon in France, gave so extraordinary an impulse to all efforts at social reorganization, and who planted the seed of many modern movements, could not fail to extend his influence to the region of sex. A disciple of his, William Thompson, who still holds a distinguished position in the history of the economic doctrines of Socialism, wrote, under the inspiration of a woman (a Mrs. Wheeler), and published in 1825, an Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. It is a thorough and logical, almost eloquent, demand for the absolute social equality of the sexes. 46

      Forty years later, Mill, also inspired by a woman, published his Subjection of Women. However partial and inadequate it may seem to us, this was at that day a notable book. Mill's clear vision and feminine sensibilities gave freshness to his observations regarding the condition and capacity of women, while his reputation imparted gravity and resonance to his utterances. Since then the signs in literature of the breaking up of the status of women have become far too numerous to be chronicled even in a volume. It is enough to have mentioned here some typical initiatory names. Now, the movement may be seen at work anywhere, from Norway to Italy, from Russia to California. The status which women are now entering places them, not, as in the old communism, in large measure practically above men, nor, as in the subsequent

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