« Their poor, old ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor, old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls made me weep. They are our conscripts. They are the venerable ones whom we should reverence. All the mystery of womanhood seems incarnated in their ugly being--the Mothers! the Mothers! Ye are all one! » From the Letters of William James
Motherhood, which is not only the oldest but the
most important profession in the world, has received few of the benefits of civilization.
It is a curious fact that a civilization devoted to mother-worship, that publicly
professes a worship of mother and child, should close its eyes to the appalling
waste of human life and human energy resulting from those dire consequences of leaving
the whole problem of child-bearing to chance and blind instinct. It would be untrue
to say that among the civilized nations of the world to-day, the profession of motherhood
remains in a barbarous state. The bitter truth is that motherhood, among the larger
part of our population, does not rise to the level of the barbarous or the primitive.
Conditions of life among the primitive tribes were rude enough and severe enough
to prevent the unhealthy growth of sentimentality, and to discourage the irresponsible
production of defective children. Moreover, there is ample evidence to indicate
that even among the most primitive peoples the function of maternity was recognized
as of primary and central importance to the community.
If we define civilization as increased and increasing
responsibility based on vision and foresight, it becomes painfully evident that
the profession of motherhood as practised to-day is in no sense civilized. Educated
people derive their ideas of maternity for the most part, either from the experience
of their own set, or from visits to impressive hospitals where women of the upper
classes receive the advantages of modern science and modern nursing. From these
charming pictures they derive their complacent views of the beauty of motherhood
and their confidence for the future of the race. The other side of the picture is
revealed only to the trained investigator, to the patient and impartial observer
who visits not merely one or two «homes of the poor,» but makes detailed
studies of town after town, obtains the history of each mother, and finally correlates
and analyzes this evidence. Upon such a basis are we able to draw conclusions concerning
this strange business of bringing children into the world.
Every year I receive thousands of letters from
women in all parts of America, desperate appeals to aid them to extricate themselves
from the trap of compulsory maternity. Lest I be accused of bias and exaggeration
in drawing my conclusions from these painful human documents, I prefer to present
a number of typical cases recorded in the reports of the United States Government,
and in the evidence of trained and impartial investigators of social agencies more
generally opposed to the doctrine of Birth Control than biased in favor of it.
A perusal of the reports on infant mortality in
widely varying industrial centers of the United States, published during the past
decade by the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, forces
us to a realization of the immediate need of detailed statistics concerning the
practice and results of uncontrolled breeding. Some such effort as this has been
made by the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children's
Bureau reports only incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to
coordinate it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from
pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible parenthood
that is ignored by governmental and social agencies.
I have chosen a small number of typical cases from
these reports. Though drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the
greatest crime of modern civilization--that of permitting motherhood to be left
to blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant and
irresponsible classes of the community.
Here is a fairly typical case from Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
A woman of thirty- eight years had undergone thirteen pregnancies in seventeen years.
Of eleven live births and two premature stillbirths, only two children were alive
at the time of the government agent's visit. The second to eighth, the eleventh
and the thirteenth had died of bowel trouble, at ages ranging from three weeks to
four months. The only cause of these deaths the mother could give was that «food
did not agree with them.» She confessed quite frankly that she believed in
feeding babies, and gave them everything anybody told her to give them. She began
to give them at the age of one month, bread, potatoes, egg, crackers, etc. For the
last baby that died, this mother had bought a goat and gave its milk to the baby;
the goat got sick, but the mother continued to give her baby its milk until the
goat went dry. Moreover, she directed the feeding of her daughter's baby until it
died at the age of three months. «On account of the many children she had
had, the neighbors consider her an authority on baby care.»
Lest this case be considered too tragically ridiculous
to be accepted as typical, the reader may verify it with an almost interminable
list of similar cases.[1]
Parental irresponsibility is significantly illustrated in another case:
A mother who had four live births and two stillbirths
in twelve years lost all of her babies during their first year. She was so anxious
that at least one child should live that she consulted a physician concerning the
care of the last one. «Upon his advice,» to quote the government report,
«she gave up her twenty boarders immediately after the child's birth, and
devoted all her time to it. Thinks she did not stop her hard work soon enough; says
she has always worked too hard, keeping boarders in this country, and cutting wood
and carrying it and water on her back in the old country. Also says the carrying
of water and cases of beer in this country is a great strain on her.» But
the illuminating point in this case is that the father was furious because all the
babies died. To show his disrespect for the wife who could only give birth to babies
that died, he wore a red necktie to the funeral of the last. Yet this woman, the
government agent reports, would follow and profit by any instruction that might
be given her.
It is true that the cases reported from Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, do not represent completely «Americanized» families. This
lack does not prevent them, however, by their unceasing fertility from producing
the Americans of to-morrow. Of the more immediate conditions surrounding child-birth,
we are presented with this evidence, given by one woman concerning the birth of
her last child:
On five o'clock on Wednesday evening she went to
her sister's house to return a washboard, after finishing a day's washing. The baby
was born while she was there. Her sister was too young to aid her in any way. She
was not accustomed to a midwife, she confessed. She cut the cord herself, washed
the new-born baby at her sister's house, walked home, cooked supper for her boarders,
and went to bed by eight o'clock. The next day she got up and ironed. This tired
her out, she said, so she stayed in bed for two whole days. She milked cows the
day after the birth of the baby and sold the milk as well. Later in the week, when
she became tired, she hired someone to do that portion of her work. This woman,
we are further informed, kept cows, chickens, and lodgers, and earned additional
money by doing laundry and charwork. At times her husband deserted her. His earnings
amounted to $1.70 a day, while a fifteen-year-old son earned $1.10 in a coal mine.
One searches in vain for some picture of sacred
motherhood, as depicted in popular plays and motion pictures, something more normal
and encouraging. Then one comes to the bitter realization that these, in very truth,
are the «normal» cases, not the exceptions. The exceptions are apt to
indicate, instead, the close relationship of this irresponsible and chance parenthood
to the great social problems of feeble-mindedness, crime and syphilis.
Nor is this type of motherhood confined to newly
arrived immigrant mothers, as a government report from Akron, Ohio, sufficiently
indicates. In this city, the government agents discovered that more than five hundred
mothers were ignorant of the accepted principles of infant feeding, or, if familiar
with them, did not practise them. «This ignorance or indifference was not
confined to foreign-born mothers... A native mother reported that she gave her two-weeks-old
baby ice cream, and that before his sixth month, he was sitting at the table `eating
everything.»' This was in a town in which there were comparatively few cases
of extreme poverty.
The degradation of motherhood, the damnation of
the next generation before it is born, is exposed in all its catastrophic misery,
in the reports of the National Consumers' League. In her report of living conditions
among night-working mothers in thirty-nine textile mills in Rhode Island, based
on exhaustive studies, Mrs. Florence Kelley describes the «normal» life
of these women:
«When the worker, cruelly tired from ten
hours' work, comes home in the early morning, she usually scrambles together breakfast
for the family. Eating little or nothing herself, and that hastily, she tumbles
into bed--not the immaculate bed in an airy bed-room with dark shades, but one still
warm from its night occupants, in a stuffy little bed-room, darkened imperfectly
if at all. After sleeping exhaustedly for an hour perhaps she bestirs herself to
get the children off to school, or care for insistent little ones, too young to
appreciate that mother is tired out and must sleep. Perhaps later in the forenoon,
she again drops into a fitful sleep, or she may have to wait until after dinner.
There is the midday meal to get, and, if her husband cannot come home, his dinner-pail
to pack with a hot lunch to be sent or carried to him. If he is not at home, the
lunch is rather a makeshift. The midday meal is scarcely over before supper must
be thought of. This has to be eaten hurriedly before the family are ready, for the
mother must be in the mill at work, by 6, 6:30 or 7 P.M... Many women in their inadequate
English, summed up their daily routine by, «Oh, me all time tired. TOO MUCH
WORK, TOO MUCH BABY, TOO LITTLE SLEEP!»
«Only sixteen of the 166 married women were
without children; thirty- two had three or more; twenty had children on year old
or under. There were 160 children under school-age, below six years, and 246 of
school age.»
«A woman in ordinary circumstances,»
adds this impartial investigator, «with a husband and three children, if she
does her own work, feels that her hands are full. How these mill-workers, many of
them frail-looking, and many with confessedly poor health, can ever do two jobs
is a mystery, when they are seen in their homes dragging about, pale, hollow-eyed
and listless, often needlessly sharp and impatient with the children. These children
are not only not mothered, never cherished, they are nagged and buffeted. The mothers
are not superwomen, and like all human beings, they have a certain amount of strength
and when that breaks, their nerves suffer.»
We are presented with a vivid picture of one of
these slave-mothers: a woman of thirty-eight who looks at least fifty with her worn,
furrowed face. Asked why she had been working at night for the past two years, she
pointed to a six-months old baby she was carrying, to the five small children swarming
about her, and answered laconically, «Too much children!» She volunteered
the information that there had been two more who had died. When asked why they had
died, the poor mother shrugged her shoulders listlessly, and replied, «Don't
know.» In addition to bearing and rearing these children, her work would sap
the vitality of any ordinary person. «She got home soon after four in the
morning, cooked breakfast for the family and ate hastily herself. At 4.30 she was
in bed, staying there until eight. But part of that time was disturbed for the children
were noisy and the apartment was a tiny, dingy place in a basement. At eight she
started the three oldest boys to school, and cleaned up the debris of breakfast
and of supper the night before. At twelve she carried a hot lunch to her husband
and had dinner ready for the three school children. In the afternoon, there were
again dishes and cooking, and caring for three babies aged five, three years, and
six months. At five, supper was ready for the family. The mother ate by herself
and was off to work at 5:45.»
Another of the night-working mothers was a frail
looking Frenchwoman of twenty-seven years, with a husband and five children ranging
from eight years to fourteen months. Three other children had died. When visited,
she was doing a huge washing. She was forced into night work to meet the expenses
of the family. She estimated that she succeeded in getting five hours' sleep during
the day. «I take my baby to bed with me, but he cries, and my little four-year-old
boy cries, too, and comes in to make me get up, so you can't call that a very good
sleep.»
The problem among unmarried women or those without
family is not the same, this investigator points out. «They sleep longer by
day than they normally would by night.» We are also informed that pregnant
women work at night in the mills, sometimes up to the very hour of delivery. «It's
queer,» exclaimed a woman supervisor of one of the Rhode Island mills, «but
some women, both on the day and the night shift, will stick to their work right
up to the last minute, and will use every means to deceive you about their condition.
I go around and talk to them, but make little impression. We have had several narrow
escapes... A Polish mother with five children had worked in a mill by day or by
night, ever since her marriage, stopping only to have her babies. One little girl
had died several years ago, and the youngest child, says Mrs. Kelley, did not look
promising. It had none of the charm of babyhood; its body and clothing were filthy;
and its lower lip and chin covered with repulsive black sores.
It should be remembered that the Consumers' League,
which publishes these reports on women in industry, is not advocating Birth Control
education, but is aiming «to awaken responsibility for conditions under which
goods are produced, and through investigation, education and legislation, to mobilize
public opinion in behalf of enlightened standards for workers and honest products
for all.» Nevertheless, in Miss Agnes de Lima's report of conditions in Passaic,
New Jersey, we find the same tale of penalized, prostrate motherhood, bearing the
crushing burden of economic injustice and cruelty; the same blind but overpowering
instincts of love and hunger driving young women into the factories to work, night
in and night out, to support their procession of uncared for and undernourished
babies. It is the married women with young children who work on the inferno-like
shifts. They are driven to it by the low wages of their husbands. They choose night
work in order to be with their children in the daytime. They are afraid of the neglect
and ill-treatment the children might receive at the hands of paid caretakers. Thus
they condemn themselves to eighteen or twenty hours of daily toil. Surely no mother
with three, four, five or six children can secure much rest by day.
«Take almost any house»--we read in
the report of conditions in New Jersey--«knock at almost any door and you
will find a weary, tousled woman, half-dressed, doing her housework, or trying to
snatch an hour or two of sleep after her long night of work in the mill. ...The
facts are there for any one to see; the hopeless and exhausted woman, her cluttered
three or four rooms, the swarm of sickly and neglected children.»
These women claimed that night work was unavoidable,
as their husbands received so little pay. This in spite of all our vaunted «high
wages.» Only three women were found who went into the drudgery of night work
without being obliged to do so. Two had no children, and their husbands' earnings
were sufficient for their needs. One of these was saving for a trip to Europe, and
chose the night shift because she found it less strenuous than the day. Only four
of the hundred women reported upon were unmarried, and ninety-two of the married
women had children. Of the four childless married women, one had lost two children,
and another was recovering from a recent miscarriage. There were five widows. The
average number of children was three in a family. Thirty-nine of the mothers had
four or more. Three of them had six children, and six of them had seven children
apiece. These women ranged between the ages of twenty-five and forty, and more than
half the children were less than seven years of age. Most of them had babies of
one, two and three years of age.
At the risk of repetition, we quote one of the
typical cases reported by Miss De Lima with features practically identical with
the individual cases reported from Rhode Island. It is of a mother who comes home
from work at 5:30 every morning, falls on the bed from exhaustion, arises again
at eight or nine o'clock to see that the older children are sent off to school.
A son of five, like the rest of the children, is on a diet of coffee,--milk costs
too much. After the children have left for school, the overworked mother again tries
to sleep, though the small son bothers her a great deal. Besides, she must clean
the house, wash, iron, mend, sew and prepare the midday meal. She tries to snatch
a little sleep in the afternoon, but explains: «When you got big family, all
time work. Night-time in mill drag so long, so long; day-time in home go so quick.»
By five, this mother must get the family's supper ready, and dress for the night's
work, which begins at seven. The investigator further reports: «The next day
was a holiday, and for a diversion, Mrs. N. thought she would go up to the cemetery:
`I got some children up there,' she explained, `and same time I get some air. No,
I don't go nowheres, just to the mill and then home.»'
Here again, as in all reports on women in industry,
we find the prevalence of pregnant women working on night-shifts, often to the very
day of their delivery. «Oh, yes, plenty women, big bellies, work in the night
time,» one of the toiling mothers volunteered. «Shame they go, but what
can do?» The abuse was general. Many mothers confessed that owing to poverty
they themselves worked up to the last week or even day before the birth of their
children. Births were even reported in one of the mills during the night shift.
A foreman told of permitting a night-working woman to leave at 6.30 one morning,
and of the birth of her baby at 7.30. Several women told of leaving the day-shift
because of pregnancy and of securing places on the nightshift where their condition
was less conspicuous, and the bosses more tolerant. One mother defended her right
to stay at work, says the report, claiming that as long as she could do her work,
it was nobody's business. In a doorway sat a sickly and bloodless woman in an advanced
stage of pregnancy. Her first baby had died of general debility. She had worked
at night in the mill until the very day of its birth. This time the boss had told
her she could stay if she wished, but reminded her of what had happened last time.
So she had stopped work, as the baby was expected any day.
Again and again we read the same story, which varied
only in detail: the mother in the three black rooms; the sagging porch overflowing
with pale and sickly children; the over-worked mother of seven, still nursing her
youngest, who is two or three months old. Worn and haggard, with a skeleton-like
child pulling at her breast, the women tries to make the investigator understand.
The grandmother helps to interpret. «She never sleeps,» explains the
old woman, «how can she with so many children?» She works up to the
last moment before her baby comes, and returns to work as soon as they are four
weeks old.
Another apartment in the same house; another of
those night-working mothers, who had just stopped because she is pregnant. The boss
had kindly given her permission to stay on, but she found the reaching on the heavy
spinning machines too hard. Three children, ranging in age from five to twelve years,
are all sickly and forlorn and must be cared for. There is a tubercular husband,
who is unable to work steadily, and is able to bring in only $12 a week. Two of
the babies had died, one because the mother had returned to work too soon after
its birth and had lost her milk. She had fed him tea and bread, «so he died.»
The most heartrending feature of it all--in these
homes of the mothers who work at night--is the expression in the faces of the children;
children of chance, dressed in rags, undernourished, underclothed, all predisposed
to the ravages of chronic and epidemic disease.
The reports on infant mortality published under
the direction of the Children's Bureau substantiate for the United States of America
the findings of the Galton Laboratory for Great Britain, showing that an abnormally
high rate of fertility is usually associated with poverty, filth, disease, feeblemindedness
and a high infant mortality rate. It is a commonplace truism that a high birth-rate
is accompanied by a high infant-mortality rate. No longer is it necessary to dissociate
cause and effect, to try to determine whether the high birth rate is the cause of
the high infant mortality rate. It is sufficient to know that they are organically
correlated along with other anti-social factors detrimental to individual, national
and racial welfare. The figures presented by Hibbs [2] likewise reveal a much higher infant mortality rate
for the later born children of large families.
The statistics which show that the greatest number
of children are born to parents whose earnings are the lowest,[3] that the direst poverty is associated
with uncontrolled fecundity emphasize the character of the parenthood we are depending
upon to create the race of the future.
A distinguished American opponent of Birth Control
some years ago spoke of the «racial» value of this high infant mortality
rate among the «unfit.» He forgot, however, that the survival-rate of
the children born of these overworked and fatigued mothers may nevertheless be large
enough, aided and abetted by philanthropies and charities, to form the greater part
of the population of to-morrow. As Dr. Karl Pearson has stated: «Degenerate
stocks under present social conditions are not short-lived; they live to have more
than the normal size of family.»
Reports of charitable organizations; the famous
«one hundred neediest cases» presented every year by the New York Times
to arouse the sentimental generosity of its readers; statistics of public and private
hospitals, charities and corrections; analyses of pauperism in town and country--all
tell the same tale of uncontrolled and irresponsible fecundity. The facts, the figures,
the appalling truth are there for all to read. It is only in the remedy proposed,
the effective solution, that investigators and students of the problem disagree.
Confronted with the «startling and disgraceful»
conditions of affairs indicated by the fact that a quarter of a million babies die
every year in the United States before they are one year old, and that no less than
23,000 women die in childbirth, a large number of experts and enthusiasts have placed
their hopes in maternity-benefit measures.
Such measures sharply illustrate the superficial
and fragmentary manner in which the whole problem of motherhood is studied to-day.
It seeks a LAISSER FAIRE policy of parenthood or marriage, with an indiscriminating
paternalism concerning maternity. It is as though the Government were to say: «Increase
and multiply; we shall assume the responsibility of keeping your babies alive.»
Even granting that the administration of these measures might be made effective
and effectual, which is more than doubtful, we see that they are based upon a complete
ignorance or disregard of the most important fact in the situation--that of indiscriminate
and irresponsible fecundity. They tacitly assume that all parenthood is desirable,
that all children should be born, and that infant mortality can be controlled by
external aid. In the great world-problem of creating the men and women of to-morrow,
it is not merely a question of sustaining the lives of all children, irrespective
of their hereditary and physical qualities, to the point where they, in turn, may
reproduce their kind. Advocates of Birth Control offer and accept no such superficial
solution. This philosophy is based upon a clearer vision and a more profound comprehension
of human life. Of immediate relief for the crushed and enslaved motherhood of the
world through State aid, no better criticism has been made than that of Havelock
Ellis:
«To the theoretical philanthropist, eager
to reform the world on paper, nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils
of child- rearing by setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers
of everything connected with the men of the future beyond the pleasure--if such
it happens to be--of conceiving them, and the trouble of bearing the, and at the
same time to rear them up independently of the home, in a wholesome, economical
and scientific manner. Nothing seems simpler, but from the fundamental psychological
point of view nothing is falser. ...A State which admits that the individuals composing
it are incompetent to perform their most sacred and intimate functions, and takes
it upon itself to perform them itself instead, attempts a task that would be undesirable,
even if it were possible of achievement.[4]» It may be replied that maternity benefit measures
aim merely to aid mothers more adequately to fulfil their biological and social
functions. But from the point of view of Birth Control, that will never be possible
until the crushing exigencies of overcrowding are removed--overcrowding of pregnancies
as well as of homes. As long as the mother remains the passive victim of blind instinct,
instead of the conscious, responsible instrument of the life-force, controlling
and directing its expression, there can be no solution to the intricate and complex
problems that confront the whole world to-day. This is, of course, impossible as
long as women are driven into the factories, on night as well as day shifts, as
long as children and girls and young women are driven into industries to labor that
is physically deteriorating as a preparation for the supreme function of maternity.
The philosophy of Birth Control insists that motherhood,
no less than any other human function, must undergo scientific study, must be voluntarily
directed and controlled with intelligence and foresight. As long as we countenance
what H. G. Wells has well termed «the monstrous absurdity of women discharging
their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children, in their spare time,
as it were, while they `earn their living' by contributing some half- mechanical
element to some trivial industrial product» any attempt to furnish «maternal
education» is bound to fall on stony ground. Children brought into the world
as the chance consequences of the blind play of uncontrolled instinct, become likewise
the helpless victims of their environment. It is because children are cheaply conceived
that the infant mortality rate is high. But the greatest evil, perhaps the greatest
crime, of our so-called civilization of to- day, is not to be gauged by the infant-mortality
rate. In truth, unfortunate babies who depart during their first twelve months are
more fortunate in many respects than those who survive to undergo punishment for
their parents' cruel ignorance and complacent fecundity. If motherhood is wasted
under the present regime of «glorious fertility,» childhood is not merely
wasted, but actually destroyed. Let us look at this matter from the point of view
of the children who survive.
1U.S. Department of Labor: Children's Bureau. Infant Mortality
Series, No. 3, pp. 81, 82, 83, 84.
2Henry H. Hibbs, Jr. Infant Mortality: Its Relation to
Social and Industrial Conditions, p. 39. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1916.
3Cf. U. S. Department of Labor. Children's Bureau: Infant
Mortality Series, No. 11. p. 36.
4Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society, p. 31.