RADIANT MOTHERHOOD

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Radiant Motherhood

A Book for Those Who
are Creating the Future

Marie Carmichael Stopes

Doctor of Science, London ; Doctor of Philosophy,

Munich 5 Fellow of University College, London }

Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

and the Linnean Society, London

LONDON
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, LTD.

TORONTO
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY, LIMITED

First published August 9, 1920

HQ

652921

"? 3- S7

Copyright; translations and all other rights
reserved by the Author. Copyright in U.S.A.

^Dedicated to young husbands and
all who are creating the future

CONTENTS

PAGF

PREFACE . . . . ix

CHAPTER

I. THE LOVER'S DREAM . . j

II. CONCEIVED IN BEAUTY . . g

III. THE GATEWAY OF PAIN . . X 8

IV. THE YOUNG MOTHER-TO-BE :

HER AMAZEMENTS . , 32

V. HER DELIGHTS . . .39

VI. HER DISTRESSES . . .44
VII. THE YOUNG FATHER-TO-BE :

His AMAZEMENTS . . . 5 2

VIII. His DELIGHTS . . . 5

IX. His DISTRESSES . . .62

X. PHYSICAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE EX-
PECTANT MOTHER . . . 7 1

XI. PHYSICAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE EX-
PECTANT FATHER . . .93

XII. THE UNION OF THREE . . .99

XIII. THE PROCESSION OF THE MONTHS . 113

vii

viii Contents

CHAPTER

XIV. PRENATAL INFLUENCE . .

XV. EVOLVING TYPES OF WOMEN .

XVI. BIRTH AND BEAUTY . . .161

XVII. BABY'S RIGHTS . . . . I7 i

XVIII. THE WEAKEST LINK IN THE HUMAN

CHAIN . . /, . 183

XIX. THE COST OF COFFINS . . r . .... . 201

XX, THE CREATION OF A NEW AND

IRRADIATED RACE . ' . . 208

APPENDICES

A. PHYSICAL SIGNS OF COMING MOTHERHOOD

B. ON BIRTH . T' . . . 23I

C. SUGGESTIONS FOR CALCULATING THE DATE

OF ANTICIPATED BIRTH , . 233

PREFACE

THIS book is written for the same young
people who inspired Married Lovt.
Many of my readers have asked me to
write such a book as this, and I sincerely hope
that it will not disappoint them. Many, many
people have contributed facts which have helped
me to write it. The book, however, is pre-
eminently the work of my baby son and his
father, whose beautiful spirits have been, and
will be, through all "eternity united with me in
a burning desire to bring light into dark places.

M. C. S.

Radiant Motherhood

CHAPTER I
The Lover's Dream

So every spirit, as it is most pure,

And hath in it the more of heauenly light,

So it the fairer bodie doth procure

To habit in, and it more fairely dight,
With chearefull grace and amiable sight.

For of the soule the bodie forme doth take :

For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.

SPENCER : An Hymne in honour of Beau t if.

EVERY lover desires a child. Those who
imagine the contrary, and maintain that
love is purely selfish, know only of the
lesser types of love. The supreme love of
true mates always carries with it the yearning to
perpetuate the exquisite quality of its own being,
and to record, through the glory of its mutual
creation, other lives yet more beautiful and
perfect.

Existence being such a difficult compromise
between our dreams and the material facts of

2 Radiant Motherhood

the world, this desire may sometimes be thwarted
by factors outside itself ; may even be so sup-
pressed as to be invisible in the conduct and
unsuspected in the wishes of the lover. Yet
the desire to link their lives with the future is
deeply woven into the love of all sound and
healthy people who love supremely.

It is commonly said that most women marry
for children, and not out of a personal love,
and there is more truth in this saying than is
good for the race. To-day, alas, many women
cannot find the perfect and sensitive mate their"
hearts' desire and they hope in any marriage
to get children which will mitigate the conse-
quent loneliness of their lives. Sometimes they
may, to some extent, succeed, but far less often
than they imagine, for that strange and still but
Kttle understood force " heredity " steps in,
and the son of the tolerated father may grow
infinitely more like his physical father than he
is like the dear delight his mother dreamed he
might be.

Few girls have not pictured in day dreams
the joy of holding in their arms their own
beautiful babies, No man of their acquaintance,
however, may seem fine enough to be their
father. Until she has been crushed by experi-
ence, or, unless she listens with absolute belief
to the depressing information of her elders,
each girl believes that her own intense desire

The Lover's Dream 3

for perfection will be the principal factor in
creating the beautiful babies of her dreams.
Often it seems as though this power were granted,
for women sometimes bear lovely children by
fathers in whom one may seek in vain for any
bodily grace or charm.

The century long working of economic laws
based on physical force, the remnants of which
still affect us, has resulted in man generally
having the selective power and tending to
choose for his wife the most beautiful or charm-
ing woman that his means allow ; hence hitherto
on the whole, the race has been bred from the
better and more beautiful women. This has
undoubtedly tended to keep the standard of
physical form from sinking to the utter degrada-
tion which we see in the worst of the slums,
and in institutions where live the feeble-minded
offspring of inferior mothers who have wantonly
borne children of fathers devoid of any realization
of what they were doing.

-'From these avenues of shame and misery,
however, I must steer my line of thought, for
this book is written pre-eminently for the young,
happy and physically well-conditioned pair who
mating beautifully on all the planes of their
existence, are living in married love.

Whether early in the days of their marriage
or postponed for some months or more out of
regard for his wife's body and beauty, the hour

4 Radiant Motherhood

will come when the young husband yearning
above her, sees in his wife's eyes the reflection
of the future, and when their mutual longing
springs up to initiate the chain of lives which
shall repeat throughout the ages the bodily,
mental and spiritual beauties of each other,
which each holds so dear. Perhaps in lovers'
talk and exquisite whispers they have spoken
of this great deed on which they are embarking,
and each has voiced that intense yearning which
filled them to see another " with your eyes,
your hair, your smile," living and radiant.
The lovers dream that they will be repeated
in others of their own creation, always young,
running through the ages which culminate in
the golden glories of the millenium.

The dream is so wonderful, the thought that
it pictures in the mind so full of vernal beauty,
light and vigour that, were facts commensurate
with it, its result should spring all ready formed
from between the lips of those who breathed
its possibilities like Minerva from the head of
Jove.

It seems incredible that such splendid domin-
ant designs to fulfil God's purpose should be
hindered, and made to bend and toil through
the hard material facts of the molecular structure
of the world, and that it is only many months
afterwards that the first outward body is given
to this dream, and that .then it is in a form

The Lover's Dream 5

not strong and dancing in lightness and beauty
but weak and helpless with many intensely
physical necessities which for months and years
will require the utmost fostering care or it will
be destroyed by material effects, hostile and
too strong for it. Yet such is the limitation
of our powers of creation. And underneath
the intense passion of love and all its rich dreams
of beauty is the slow building, chemically molecule
by molecule, biologically cell by cell, against
obstacles the surmounting of which seems a
superhuman feat.

Lovers who are parents give to each other
the supremest material gift in the world, a
material embodiment of celestial dreams which
itself has the further power of vital creation.

In this and all my work, I speak to the
normal, healthy and loving in an endeavour to
help them to remain normal, healthy and loving,
and thus to perfect their lives. So in this book
I do not intend to deal with those whose marriages
are mistaken ones, or with those who do not
know true love. I write for those who having
made a love match are passing together through
the ensuing and surprising years, and inci-
dentally doing one of the greatest pieces of work
which human beings can do during their progress
through this world, and that is creating the
next generation.

In nature, the consummation of the physical

6 Radiant Motherhood

act of union between lovers generally results
in the conception of a new life. We share
this physical aspect of mating and the resulting
parenthood with most of the woodland creatures.
How far many of the lowlier lives are conscious
of, the future results of their mating unions
is a problem in elementary psychology beyond
the realm of present knowledge. But that
parenthood is the natural result of their union
is to-day known, one must suppose, by almost
all young couples who wed. I am still uncertain
how far the two are conscious of this in the early
days of their union, when every circumstance
encourages that supreme self-centredness of
happy youth. Much must depend on the age,
and on the previous experience and education
of the two ; much also on their relative natures.
A profoundly introspective and thoughtful man
and woman are more liable than others to be
speedily aware of the many interwoven strands
of their joint lives, and to live consciously on
several planes of existence simultaneously.

The supreme act of physical union as I have
shown in my book, Married Love, consists
fundamentally of three essential and widely
differing reactions, having effects in correspond-
ingly different regions. There is (a) the inti-
mately personal effect on the internal secretions
and general vitality of the individual partaking
of that sacrament ; () there is the social effect

The Lover's Dream 7

of the union of the two in a mutual act in which
they must so perfectly blend and harmonize ;
and (c) there is the racial result which may
lead to the procreation of a new life.

In the early days of the honeymoon, personal
passion and the concentrated delight of each
in the mate is probably more than sufficient
in all its rich complexity to fill the consciousness
of the two who are thus united in a life-long
comradeship to form that highest unit, the
pair. But as education and the conscious
control of our lives grow, the young pair who
are so blissfully self-centred as not to remember
or not to be aware of the racial effects of their
acts are probably decreasing in numbers. Among
the best of those who marry to-day, the majority
only enter upon parenthood or the possibility
of parenthood when they feel justified in so
doing. The young man who profoundly loves
his wife and who considers the future benefit
of their child, protects her from accidental
conception or from becoming a mother at times
when the strain upon her would be too great,
or when he is unable to give her and the coming
child the necessary care and support. That
myriads of children are born without this con-
sideration on the part of their parents applies
to the commonalty of mankind, but not to the
best.

Often to-day the betrothed young couple

8 Radiant Motherhood

will speak openly and beautifully of the children
they hope to have, while others equally full
of the creative dream feel it too tender a sub-
ject to put into words, and may marry without
ever having given expression to the possibility
that they will generate through their love yet
other lovers.

CHAPTER II
Conceived in Beauty

. . : Here in close recess

With flowers, garlands and sweet smelling heibs,

Espoused Eve deck'd first her nuptial bed,

And heav'nly choirs the Hymenaran sung,

What day the genial angel to our sire

Brought her in naked beauty more adorn'd,

More lovely than Pandora, whom the Gods

Endow'd with all their gifts . . .

.... Into their inmost bower

Handed they went; and, eased the putting off

Those troublesome disguises which we wear,

Straight side by side were laid; nor turn'd, I ween,

Adam from his fair spouie; nor Eve the rites

Mysterious of connubial love refused:

These, lull'd by nightingales, embracing slept,
And on their naked limbs the flowery roof
Shower'd roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on,
Blest pair, and O ! yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.

MILTON : Paradise Lost.

IN ancient Sanskrit, there is a work dealing
minutely with love and with the different
forms its expression takes in different
types of people. This has been modified,

io Radiant Motherhood

added to and re- written by many later authors,
and under various names works based on this
are to be found in Sanskrit and translated into
various Indian dialects.

In these volumes much that is curious, and
to Western nations, absurd, is to be found, but
also several profound observations which appear
to be based on truths generally ignored by us.
One of the interesting themes of these very
early writers is a recognition and a description
of the characteristics of the best and most
perfect type of woman, the " Padmini." In
addition to describing fully her physical appear-
ance and characteristics, it is observed that she
being a child of light and not of darkness,
prefers the supreme act of love to take place
in the daylight rather than the dark.

In this country, owing to our artificial, over-
burdened and over-strained lives, the physical
union of lovers is almost always confined to
the night time. Crowded as we are in cities
and suburban districts, solitude in Nature
is almost impossible ; for most, seclusion is
only known in a closed room after dark. The
Sanskrit writer of the sixth century, however,
takes love more seriously than we do, and he
describes how for the sacred union serious
preparation of beauty should be made a room
or natural arbour decked with flowers ; and for
the supreme expression of love (that is the

Conceived in Beauty n

love between a pair each of the highest and
most perfect type), this should take place in
the light of day and not the darkness of the
night. Even in our present degraded civiliza-
tion there are some who do realize the
sacredness and the value of the bodily embrace
in the fresh beauty of nature and sunlight.
There must be many beautiful children who
were conceived from unions which took place
under natural conditions of light and open
air radiance. The most spontaneous time for
conception is the summer when our air is mild
and sweet enough for true love in Nature's way.

In an empire where woodland or seaside
solitude is not obtainable by lovers for this
their most sacred function, the distribution of
the population is gravely wrong. It will, how-
ever, probably for some time to come be difficult
for those who desire such a profound return
to natural rectitude, to obtain the necessary
security of seclusion amid beautiful surround-
ings. Therefore, alas, it will in all probability
long remain only possible to most lovers to
ramble together in nature, and then later to
follow the usual course of uniting within their
room.

We do not know enough about ourselves or
the results of our actions, under our present
conditions, to realize to what extent the hour
of conception modifies the quality of the off-

/

12 Radiant Motherhood

spring. We only know that the child of lovers
beautiful in mind and body, the child ardently
desired by them, whose coming is prepared
with every beauty which it is in their power
to obtain, is often well worth all the outlay of
love and thought. Certainly among those per-
sonally known to me who have followed the
rather exceptional course I indicate, the children
are remarkable for both physical beauty and
exquisite vitality, balanced with sweetness and
strength of mental and spiritual qualities.

There is an old and in my opinion valuable
view (although it has not been " scientifically
proved ") that the actual hour of conception,
the condition of the parents at the moment
when the germs fuse is one of vital consequences
to the child-to-be. Scientific proof of this will
be, of course, extraordinarily difficult to dis-
cover, but indirectly there do appear to be
some actual data in favour of the converse,
namely that temporary unhealthy states of the
parents result in the conception of children so
inferior as to be markedly and seriously anti-
social. Forel (Sexual Question^ 1908) says :

The recent researches of Bezzola seem to prove that the
old belief in the bad quality of children conceived during
drunkenness is not without foundation. Relying on the Swiss
census of 1900, in which there figure nine thousand idiots
. . . this author has proved that there are two acute annual
maximum periods for the conception of idiots (calculated

Conceived in Beauty 13

from nine months before birth) the periods of carnival and
vintage, when the people drink most. In the wine-growing
districts, the maximum conception of idiots at the time of
vintage is enormous, while it is almost nil at other periods.

It is, of course, not always possible to arrange
the hour of the union which will lead to concep-
tion. And further even when the hour of
the union is arranged, nature, to some extent,
controls and may modify conditions before
conception. Sometimes the fertilization of the
egg cell by the sperm cell takes place in the
hour of the bodily union of the lovers, some-
times this inner process is delayed by hours
or days (see overleaf). Conception is possible
in most women at almost any time during the
years of potential motherhood, yet there do
appear to be several factors which lead to the
potential fertility of a woman varying very
much from time to time. Some women, for
instance, appear to be liable to conceive only
for a certain number of days in each month,
and these are in general the two or three days
immediately following the monthly period and
the day or two immediately before. With
other women, however, unions on any day of
the month may lead to conception, but this
depends, possibly, not only on the woman her-
self but on the vitality and probable length of
life of the sperm cells of her husband. This
also varies very greatly in individuals. The

14 Radiant Motherhood

longest time which the individual sperm has
been observed to remain vital after entry into
the woman is seventeen days (see Bossi, N.
Arch. d'Obstetr. GynocoL, April 1891).

Hence it will be realized that a union ar-
ranged to take place under ideal and perfect
conditions, perhaps on a holiday into wild and
inspiring solitudes, may result as desired in
the entry of the sperm into the womb of the
woman, and yet the actual fusion of the sperm
and egg cell, and the consequent conception may
not come to pass until some days later.

Strange it is indeed in this world, in which
so much scientific and laborious observation
has been devoted to all sorts of irrelevant and
trivial subjects, that knowledge of the actual
processes of our own fertilization and concep-
tion and of the extent of the significance to the
future generations of the mode and condition
of the union of the parents are almost totally
unknown to scientists or doctors, and are dis-
regarded by the majority of the public. *

A recent memoir in the French Academy of
Science I dealing with statistical figures (going
back in France, at any rate, so far as 1853)
proves that there does seem to be a definite
seasonal influence on the power of conception.

1 Charles Richet, " De la Variation mensuelle de la
Natalitfe," 1916, Comptes rendus Acad. Sciences, Paris, pp.
141-149 and 161-166.

Conceived in Beauty 15

Taking the births for the whole year, it is found
they are not equally divided throughout the
months, but that a notable maximum of births
is found in February and March for most of
the countries in the northern hemisphere, the
actual maximum of births being from the I5th
February to the I5th March, and thus indicating
that the maximum of conceptions took place
between the 5th May and the 5th June. Richet
quotes Bertillon as having established the fact
that this maximum of conceptions does not
depend on the chance that brides like to be
married in the spring, because an identical
maximum is found in the illegitimate birthrate.
Richet gives many tables of figures, and main-
tains that the maximum corresponds both in
the town and in the country, among the rich
and the poor, and among the married and the
unmarried, and is, therefore, in his opinion,
an actual physiological function :

C'est que les conditions phpiologiques de la maturation
de 1'ovule et de sa ftcondation ne sont pas e*galement favorables
dans toutes les periodes de I 1 anne*e. Par suite d'une ancestrale
predisposition, au moment du printemps, chez la femme,
comme chez la plupart des animaux, mais moins nettement
que chez eux, la maturation, la chute ct la fe*condation de
1'ovule se font dans des conditions meilleures et plus assumes.

The corresponding maximum for the southern
hemisphere arises between August and October.

1 6 Radiant Motherhood

This natural tendency to produce children ac-
cording to the season is, to some extent, altered
by the conscious and deliberate control of
parenthood, which all the more highly civilized
countries now find that their better citizens are
exerting.

This natural time for conception will, however,
tend not to be thwarted by those who are con-
sciously regulating their lives, because from
almost every point of view, the summer is the
best time in which to experience the joys of
love. As the verdant spring is the best time
for a baby to be born, the thoughtful mother-
to-be will try, other things being equal, to
arrange that its birth should take place then,
both for her own sake and for that of the child.
The weeks of recovery after the strain of the
birth are more easily and happily spent lying
in the warm sunshine of a spring or summer
garden than in the chill of the winter
months, and even the actual expense of the
birth is reduced when it takes place In the
warmth of the spring or early summer when
fires and the labour they involve will be
saved.

The child too has warm air to surround it
on its first introduction to the outer world after
its long period of warmth and protection within
its mother, and when in a month or two it is
able to kick about on the grass, it benefits

Conceived in Beauty 17

directly from the rays of the sun and also from
the sun-warmed earth.

Various notable men and women, and, in
particular, the famous Dr. Trail of America,
have held that the actual hour of conception
is the one of fate, and that the moods, feelings
and conditions of the parents in that hour work
more vital magic then than they can do in any
succeeding days or weeks. Instinctively, one
would like to feel that this is so. Indeed it
will take much to disprove it, although it is a
theme which it is at present impossible to prove,
and it must remain always only a personal bias,
until thousands of people who view marriage
aright will consciously observe and record many
things and contribute them to some thinker
who will tabulate, correlate and understand them.

Whether the hour of conception affects the
child directly or not, the memory of an ardent
and wonderful experience in which the pair
of lovers consciously surround themselves with
beautiful conditions, and deliberately place them-
selves through their love at the service of God
and humanity in the creation of the next genera-
tion, must give a vitalizing and joyous memory
to both throughout all their lives. This memory
being especially connected with the dear child
of that union must, therefore, have in' this
indirect way at any rate a positive racial value.

CHAPTER III
The Gateway of Pain

As when desire, long darkling, dawns, and firs
The mother looks upon the newborn child,
Even so my Lady stood at gaze and smiled
When her soul knew at length the Love it nurs'd.
Born with her life, creature of poignant thirst
And exquisite hunger, at her heart Love lay
Quickening in darkness, till a voice that day
Cried on him, and the bonds of birth were burst.

D. G. ROSSETTI.

THE price of every beauty in this world is
in proportion to its quality, even although
the payment of the price exacted may be
long deferred or may be made in such an in-
tricate and remote form that its connection
with the result is overlooked.

As the greatest thing which lovers can give
each other is a child, and as none in the world
are so great as lovers, the price exacted by
Nature for the child of loving and sensitive
people is correspondingly heavy.

This statement may apparently conflict with

18

The Gateway of Pain ig

the idea that the joy of bearing a child to the
beloved is a woman's consummation of happi-
ness ; yet it does not conflict, because of the
deeper truth that the supremest happiness is
mysteriously intermingled with self-sacrifice, A
young woman whose character is sufficiently
beautiful and sensitive to know the highest
joys of motherhood the full delights of human
existence and love will also be sensitive to the
varied pains which motherhood will bring. In-
deed, in this respect, the poet's saying that
" the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
is always the first to be pricked by the thorn "
is essentially true.

The radiance of the highest form of mother-
hood is that of the transfigured saint, hallowed
by suffering comprehended and endured, trans-
luted into a service beyond and above the
)wer desires of self.

For long, indeed for the many millions of
years during which she has shown a motherhood
comparable with that of human beings, 1 Nature
has essentially trapped and tricked the mother
into her motherhood. All the woodland and
jungle creatures, the deer or the tiger, the
rabbit or the squirrel, grow up through their

1 By this I mean the motherhood which carries and protects
the developed young within the mother's body, unlike that
of the lower animals, such as fishes, which leave the eggs to
their fate.

20 Radiant Motherhood

brief adolescence into a partial consciousness
of delight in themselves and reach the phase
of their development in which their own desires
urge them to unite with each other. One can
scarcely believe that they are conscious of the
resulting parenthood which will become a
physical fact at a later date, although the train-
ing of her cubs by a woodland mother un-
doubtedly does include handing on, through
some speechless communication, of some actual
instruction. A similar blind parenthood, but
in addition coerced^ has for many thousands of
years been characteristic of a large portion of
the human race. Even to-day motherhood is
too often blind : the young girl delighting in
herself and the fairness of her own body, con-
scious of the power she wields in social life as
a beautiful and attractive creature whom older
people pet and please and young men place
upon a pedestal, is urged by this natural self-
centred delight into accepting through flattery
the enjoyment of herself by some chosen mate ;
and the later consequences of motherhood are
then faced either in amazed astonishment or
in open revolt.

Earlier civilizations often dealt with the ex-
cessive births resulting from blind or coerced
parenthood by destroying the children as infants
after birth. This was done directly, and often
by her leading citizens, in Greece (one of the

The Gateway of Pain 21

highest forms of civilization ever attained) and
still infanticide direct or indirect goes on among
all the populous races of the world. Where the
value placed on the mother's mental and physical
suffering is low, one may still see motherhood,
not as a fine, voluntary and glorious act of self-
sacrifice from the highest possible motives of
love and service directly to the beloved, and
indirectly to the race, but as the exploitation
of a trapped and helpless sacrifice.

Mothers will say that their babies are their
greatest joys ; one may ask, therefore, how I
can use the word " sacrifice " in connection
with motherhood. The use of the word is
just, and based on truths too generally con-
cealed by those who know them, and far too
generally unknown by those who ought to know
them. Ignorance of their extent has made men
callous, indifferent or ribald towards the pro-
found sacrifices of motherhood.

Few there be, however, who do not know
of the agonizing torments of actual birth. The
Bible is read aloud in churches, and in its
wording there is some recognition of the exist-
ence of this agony, although based upon earlier
and simpler civilizations in which the women
were probably better cared for and better fitted
for motherhood than the majority of women are
to-day. Following biblical tradition, the memory
of the agony of birth is generally portrayed

22 Radiant Motherhood

as being wiped out by the supreme joy in the
child which follows. To-day, however, this
effacement of the anguish is by no means uni-
versal, and the abiding horror of the birth is
so great that not a few women refuse to bear
another child. Then men, who cannot even
imagine the experience of child-bearing, de-
nounce such a mother, rate her and hold her
up to derision. How little do they realize
that in her they may see Nature's working of
the laws of evolution (see p. 24).

The torturing agony of birth might so easily
have been averted by Nature had the construc-
tion of our bodies differed but very slightly
from those which we to-day possess in common
with most of the higher animals. The human
baby when the hour comes for it to sever its
connection from its mother, and as an inde-
pendent individual to venture into the open
air of the world, has to make its way through
the arched gateway of bone fixed and set by
the mother's own requirements as a frame to
her own structure. The encircling archway of
bone through which the infant has to pass is
but three or four inches in diameter. " It would
have been possible had our evolution taken a
different turn for the infant to have made its
exit through the soft wall of the mother's body
instead of through this fixed and hardened
circle of her bone. But for some causes too

The Gateway of Pain 23

remote for us at present to discover this was
not so, and the essential fact faces us to-day
that every infant born naturally must be born
through this circle of bone. Moreover if the
infant is a well-developed and healthy one, as
the ordinary baby of a healthy and beautiful
young couple should naturally and rightly be,
that infant's head is larger in diameter than the
circle of bone through which it has to pass.
Its tissues have, therefore, to be squeezed and
pressed to mould their shape in order to allow
its exit through the orifice, and this must be
a slow process, and one which almost always
entails great pressure and consequent agony to
the mother. Dr. Mary Scharlieb says in The
Welfare of the Expectant Mother :

It is, however, scarcely possible that either the public or
the profession realizes that one woman dies in child birth for
every 250 children born alive. In addition to this we have
to remember that the same accidents and diseases which kill
the mothers and the babies inevitably cause a still heavier
percentage of crippling and invaliding (p. 43).

Twenty-five per cent, and more of the babies
conceived and borne die before they reach nor-
mal birth. Often they find the journey through
the bony archway into the outer world so diffi-
cult and arduous a task that they perish in
the process of birth, although probably had
they been born by Cesarean section, they

24 Radiant Motherhood

would have survived and grown into healthy
children.

We do not consider what the infant itself in
birth may be enduring. The infant is "uncon-
scious," that is to say it carries no memory of
these earlier months in its conscious memory
as it grows up, but the excessive moulding,
particularly of its head, which often has to take
place and sometimes takes weeks to right itself,
must, one thinks, greatly disturb the little
brain, and in my opinion may have a lifelong
effect.

I have never heard this aspect of our present
problem duly considered. The fact that the
increasing brain capacity of civilized man tends
ever to give the new born infant a larger head,
and tends proportionately to increase the size
of the head out of relation to the size of the
circle of its mother's bone, has been commented
on, and appears to some far seeing thinkers
as the possible cause of the ultimate extinction
of the human race. Because if we go on
developing in the way we are at present doing,
ever depending more and more on our brains,
and the head of the new born infant tends to
increase with the natural development of the
brain, the day will come when the birth of a
child is absolutely blocked by the relative diam-
eter of its head and of its mother's pelvic bones.
If the higher races maintain a dominant place

The Gateway of Pain 25

in the world, the day may come when with nearly
all women such an incompatible relation will
arise. Of what avail then would be the ratings
and peevish fury of callous men ? What scheme
the race may have devised before that date
to relieve this cruel deadlock we cannot here
discuss. The perfecting of the method of
birth by Cesarean section offers much promise.
It may become a racial necessity. This possi-
bility, on which to-day we are beginning to
impinge, indicates one great cause of the tortur-
ing agony of the actual hours of birth which the
young mother and father-to-be may have to
face before they can see the child of their love.

Fortunate women are even still so constructed
that the circle of bone has a relatively large
orifice which allows the infant comparatively
easily to pass through it, and the difficulty and
danger of birth for them is minimized. With
them the birth pangs may be so trivial in
comparison with the result, that they are truly
" almost negligible " as most men would like
to believe of most women.

Such women, when outward circumstances
allow it, are those whom every impulse should
encourage to be the mothers of the large families,
which are, under proper conditions, still desirable
for a portion of our people.

Such a woman as the one who wrote me
the following letter is indeed the standard which

26 Radiant Motherhood

all women and would-be mothers would gladly
reach were it possible in any degree to control
the formation of a growing girl's body so that
as a woman she might retain such a primitive
adaptation to motherhood :

On the exact right day the babe arrived ... in a quarter
of an hour he was there, without nurse, doctor or any one and
with no pain to myself. This little party has grown into a
splendid specimen, very large (he was 8 Ibs. at birth) and
firm and muscular. He is the whole day long laughing and
kicking or sleeping.

Such women, however, so far as records go,
are few. Much might be done by science to
discover what are the causes of the reverse
condition, and if possible to attempt to eliminate
them.

In view of the agony which myriads of women
throughout the ages of civilization have endured,
it seems strange indeed that no effort should
apparently have been made by the learned to
undertsand the causes which control the indi-
vidual formation of the growing structure, with
a view possibly to securing some such develop-
ment. In recent years, however, a little has
been done in the recognition of the causes of
the converse, that is to say the excessive narrow-
ing of the pelvis to the degree where child birth
is not only torment but a life and death agony.
And it is now well known that this condition

The Gateway of Pain 27

is associated with malnutrition and rickets in
infancy and early girlhood.

The little baby girl who has rickety bones
(which result from being improperly fed as
an infant) is, in extreme cases certain, and in
many cases very likely, to have such contracted
pelvic bones that when her turn comes for
motherhood, the birth of a living child may be
impossible by the ordinary processes of Nature.
Here again, as so often is inevitable, in the
course of any consideration of the profound
truths of mated existence, we impinge upon
the treatment of the unsound and the diseased.
This under development of the mother's pelvic
bones is a different problem from that evolu-
tionary one touched on in the paragraphs above.

Alas, that it should be true that the great
majority of city dwellers come into the category
of the spoilt and the tainted in some respect
or another. But with the vision of true health
and beauty as a standard before our eyes, many
might escape the incipient weaknesses by con-
sciously pursuing a standard of health, beauty
and normality. It is this standard, this ideal
picture, which may yet be reproduced in the
lives of millions, which I desire to present in
this book, so that in telling young married people
some of the great facts which are ahead of them
I will present only those difficulties which are
inevitable, and leave to others the handling of

28 Radiant Motherhood

disease. As things are to-day among British
stock, 1 it is the very exceptional women who
find birth an entirely easy process of which the
pain is trivial, and this is chiefly due to the bony
structure fixed and limited in size, which stands
as a gateway of pain between the infant and the
outer world, between the young wife and her
motherhood.

Before the hour of birth is reached, however,
the young mother-to-be, if she is neither in-
structed nor helped by the wisdom of her elders,
may have already endured much that it will
distress and dismay her lover and husband to
observe, and much more which she, being a
woman, will endure without allowing him to
perceive, although she may be so frightened
that it may be hard indeed for her not to cry
out in her bewildered pain. How much of
this distress and pain is essentially " natural,"
how much is the artificial result of our mode
of living and our ignorance of Nature's laws ?
What are the things which a healthy, finely-built
young woman mated to a healthy young man
must endure, those experiences which she cannot

1 In this, and in most of the generalisations found in this
book, I am speaking of things as they are in Great Britain.
While to a considerable extent the same is true of America
and the Scandinavian countries, it must be remembered all
through that I am speaking of the British, and primarily of
our educated classes.

The Gateway of Pain 29

escape and those which she may with proper
help avoid altogether or in part ? It is the
object of several chapters in this book to answer
these questions more truthfully and I hope
more helpfully than they have yet been answered.
The things I deal with specially, because they
will face nearly every healthy girl, are in most
books ignored.

My chapters may appear superfluous to those
who view the long list of books purporting to
give advice to the young wife and expectant
mother on how to treat herself and the coming
child. I have read the majority of those books,
and I write this one because of their failure to
touch on the profoundest essentials in a way
which will truly help the healthy and sensi-
tive type of young people. The healthy, nor-
mal and happy in my mind's vision are the
standard of the race : those who to-day to
some extent foreshadow the strength and beauty
of bodily and mental equipment which will
become a commonplace when all have risen to
their standard, and it is for them that I feel
it imperative to add this one more book to the
long list of books advising the young mother.
With the young mother I also consider and
try to help the young father who has been so
strangely neglected and ignored and who also
needs help.

The majority of the writers on cognate sub-

30 Radiant Motherhood

jects, like the majority of the minds of those
who are concerned at all with the problems
of the young mother, really though perhaps un-
consciously present studies in disease, pictures
of aberrations from the normal, accounts or
innuendos dealing with illness and handicaps,
with abnormal conditions which should never
arise, and the knowledge of which should not
be brought before the sensitive mind as if they
were a usual and general thing. The acquies-
cence in a low standard of health, the discussion
of diseased conditions as though they were
normal, or even as though they were unavoidable,
are intensive in their result and harmful to all
who come under their influence. The race
sickens ever more and more profoundly because
of such influences.

We have to-day in our community a new
conception in the Government Department of
the Ministry of Health, but alas, that Ministry
is engrossed in the contemplation of disease.
In the present state of our civilization this is
perhaps unavoidable, because there are not
enough people in the country of standing and
experience in scientific research who have con-
cerned themselves with the problems of the
healthy and beautiful, and with the needs and
requirements in the way of instruction and
outward conditions and environment of those
who by nature are healthy and normal, and who

The Gateway of Pain 31

desire to remain healthy and normal. Even
these need instruction to compensate for that
which Nature cannot give to those who toil
apart from her bosom in the cities, where
they cannot hear her voice for the roaring of
the traffic. This is the piteous plight of the
majority of our citizens to-day, for so many
live in towns.

Alas, that there are physical facts which
all must face of a type which makes one feel
that Nature is cruel in her treatment of us.
When two young, beautiful and ardently happy
beings are embarking upon the greatest work
for the community which they can do, with a
desire to create further beautiful and happy
lives, it seems indeed an ironic and wanton
mistake that there should be distressing physical
experiences for both of them to endure. But
" As gold is tried by the fire, so the heart is tried
by pain," and if they are given a conscious
knowledge of what they must face and what
they may avoid, there will then be a firm founda-
tion and a triumphant consummation to the visions
and ideals of splendour and perfection which
they can secure unimpaired through the trials
which they conquer.

CHAPTER IV

The Young Mother-to-be :
Her Amazements

But lo ! what wedded souls now hand in hand
Together tread at last the immortal strand

With eyes where burning memory lights love home ?
Lo ! how the little outcast hour has turned
And leaped to them and in their faces yearned

" I am your child : O parents, ye have come."

ROSSETTI : The House of Life.

THE intermingling of the physical, the
mental and the spiritual is so subtle,
intricate and inexplicable that, in des-
cribing the states of the bride who is about
to be a mother, it is difficult to know with which
first to deal.

In an Appendix, p. 229, I put in compact form
one or two of the obvious physical phenomena
with which it may be necessary for the bride
and bridegroom to acquaint themselves. Although
generally known to their elders, my many corre-
spondents have shown me that even such simple

Her Amazements 33

and direct facts are often unknown to young
people, who are frequently so shy that they do
not like to consult a medical practitioner or
an older friend. Assuming then that the simple
physical facts are known, there still remain
innumerable subtleties which may cause heart
searching, perhaps to both bride and bride-
groom.

It is almost as though the bearing of a child
were a function so primitive in its origin that
it tends, to some extent, to dissociate the ordinary
coherence of the mother's life, and to result
in a weakening of the sub-conscious control
over her emotions to which she had all her life
grown accustomed. Thus she enters upon a
complex state in which primitive instincts and
feelings may be at variance with the conscious
thoughts and aspirations of highly civilized and
sensitive humanity.

This complexity of her instincts and her
conscious feelings may lead the young wife to
find an apparently inexplicable conflict in her
attitude towards her husband. Consciously she
desires ardently, with all that is best in her
nature, to bear the child of their love. She
adores her husband and is full of tender emo-
tions towards him as the coming father, and
experiences a form of gratitude that he should
be the means of fulfilling her dreams ; bmt
possibly, at the same time, she may be amazed to

4

34 * Radiant Motherhood

find in herself an intense and active antagonism
to his personal presence, an antagonism which
she has to fight against revealing. She may
realize that it is utterly at variance with her
real feelings, and she may know that it would
be the acme of cruelty to allow him to become
aware of it, particularly when he is full of deep
concern and love for her, and is doing all that
a loving consideration can do for her happiness
and welfare.

Such a complex diversity of mental states
existing perhaps co-incidently at the same hour
in the mind of a girl may, if acute, lead to an
outwardly recognizable form of hysteria and
even to an unbalanced mind. Of such, how-
ever, lam not speaking, but am now describing
the outwardly controllable, but nevertheless in-
wardly felt effervescing conflict of instinctive
emotions, which is far more frequent than is
generally recognized, and which the best
balanced and most loving women are amazed
to experience in themselves.

From women whom I know to be exceptionally
happy wives and mothers, I have evidence on
this theme. With, of course, personal varia-
tions, they tell me that they have never confided
this bewildering experience to their husbands,
their doctors or their relatives, but, in essence,
they say what is said in the following words
by one of my correspondents :

Her Amazements 35

In the first few months of coming mother-
hood she had a feeling of antagonism so strong
" that it amounted to actual dislike of my hus-
band's presence, and a desire to be right away
from him. This distressed me very much at
first as I thought I must be losing my love for
my husband, and could not understand such a
sudden reversal of feeling as I loved him very
deeply. ... At the end of the first three
months, I found that my feeling of love
returned in full strength, and with it a feeling
of intense devotion and tenderness towards
my husband as the father of my coming
child."

Some such experience, generally and fortu-
nately limited to comparatively short though
different periods, is not infrequently felt and is
often a source of secret distress and anguish
to the young wife whose sense of loyalty to
the man she loves and ^married bars her from
the relief of talking of these feelings. As is
now beginning to be realized, emotions deeply
experienced which are deliberately suppressed,
may have far reaching effects even on the health.
It is, therefore, well that she should know what
is, I am sure, the truth, that this physical re-
pugnance, which sometimes even amounts to a
detestation of sharing the same house with the
husband, and a desire to escape even from the
superficial contact of eating in the same room

36 Radiant Motherhood

with him, is a temporary phase, possibly phylo-
genetic * in its origin.

This passing phase, whether it lasts a few days
or months, is neither necessary nor absolutely
universal, but so far as I can ascertain it appears
to be a common occurrence in the lives of the
more sensitive and tenderly loving of wives.
Where the coming child has not been desired
by both parents, and where the mother resents
her coming maternity, there is, of course, a totally
different problem for which there is a very
obvious reason. I am speaking now only of
the mother-to-be who deeply desires her child,
who is physically healthy and well formed,
living under comfortable, protected and happy
conditions, and who ardently loves and is loved
by her husband ; it is she who may and most
frequently does feel this passing phase of intense
physical antagonism. That she loves, and con-
sciously loves, gives her an outward control so
that this under-current of inherent antagonism
is not allowed to show, and is gallantly concealed
from the whole world. She would feel it an
intense disloyalty to speak of it to any living
soul, but it is there and it is so often a source

1 That is to say, repeating the history of our very early
ancestors, where the female probably felt some resentment
towards the male who had encompassed her maternity, and
who most certainly would live apart from her and not in the
ordinary contact of a united life.

Her Amazements 37

of distress and strain upon the nervous system
that it should be openly faced instead of being
as it now is a repressed feeling. This repression
tends to result in one of the greatest difficulties
of the healthy woman who is carrying a child,
namely sleeplessness. The complex balance of
her nervous control is strained by her surprise
at herself, and perhaps by her self-reproaches,
and thus she has an unnecessary burden in
addition to the one of the coming child. This
phase, therefore, is not a fact to be ignored or
treated too lightly, and while it lasts it should
be respected so far as is Compatible with the
circumstances of the two and with due regard
for the mother. It is not a thing either to fear
or to be ashamed of. It is perhaps best openly
faced as a fact of rather curious interest as an
ancient survival in oneself of racial history. If
possible it should form the object of innocently
playful laughter between the girl and her hus-
band ; this would do much to prevent its sup-
pression taking a serious root.

Aware of the existence of this phase and its
probable meaning and treating it in this simple
sensible way, neither the young mother nor
the father-to-be need fear this brief physical
antagonism. Where its danger lies, however,
is in the possibility that unrecognized, it will,
with those who live a shade less perfectly, result
in the beginning of a habit of irritation, and

38 Radiant Motherhood

perhaps in the setting up of some form of verbal
bickering on the part of those who cannot lead
as secluded and separate lives as would be pos-
sible in a spacious country or in a large establish-
ment. When once the pair have broken the
sweet custom of speaking only in love to each
other, then, even after the temporary phase of
antagonism has passed, they may find themselves
with a habit of verbal bickering which is intensely
corrosive, ultimately perhaps more than any
other thing tending to destroy the outward
beauty of a mutual life.

There is another and reverse aspect of the
mental phases through which a young mother-
to-be may pass, in which she has an intense
and added passion for her husband, and, as
this leads to a subject of great importance, and
a subject which has never been adequately
handled, I will defer its consideration to
Chapter XII.

CHAPTER V

The Young Mother-to-be :
Her Delights

The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby's limbs
does anybody know where it was hidden so long ? Yes,
when the mother was a young girl it lay pervading her
heart in tender and silent mystery of love the sweet, soft
freshness that has bloomed on baby's limbs.

TAGORE : Gitanjali.

IN a happy and desired motherhood, every
hour of the day and night may bring
its intense delight, both in the dreams
of contemplation, wherein the experience of
love sinks deep into the heart, and of the linking
up of the present with the future. All natural
functions rightly performed give a deep satis-
faction and content, but this, the greatest function
of all, now so specialized and intimately inter-
woven with every highest racial impulse and
every dearest personal desire of the loving pair,
yields a wealth and profundity of experience
surpassing al) else.

4.O Radiant Motherhood

In my opinion, undoubtedly the ideal way
of spending the earlier months of coming parent-
hood is in the form of an extended honeymoon,
in which the couple travelling slowly should
follow the guide of seasonal beauty or should
visit place after place of historic interest or
natural charm so that the mother's mind should
Ije fed and stimulated by historic memories,
by the exquisite freshness of nature, and the
grandeur of man's artistic achievements. This,
of course, would not be possible in its fullest
extent to many, until, in the future, society
recognizes the supreme importance to the race
of the expectant mother. Some such course,
however, might be possible to a larger number
than it is at present were they to realize not
their person^ good but the racial benefit
of this procedure. ' In pur country, owing to
our artificial and unclean attitude, the mother-
to-be, particularly during the later months,
stays at home so far as possible, and does not
go from place to place. When going about
entails battling with crowds on public convey-
ances, this is wise. But the easy effort of walk-
ing or of riding in the old fashioned horse
carriage from place to place on an extended
journey, is ideal, and sometimes appears to
have beneficial reactions on the character and
quality of the child that is coming. But, even
if such a mode of life is impossible, yet the

man
/ only

Her Delights 41

mother by reading and conversation can, if
she has a mind of trained imagination, vary
and enrich the mental environment of her child
while it is developing.

Then, too, the mother-to-be can count among
her delights all the intimate personal enjoyment
of the little physical things which contribute
to the great anticipations of the future. She
can, if she has the skill herself, sew the little
clothes, stitching into them sunny thoughts
and beautiful hopes, making them links between
the present delightful solitude a deux and
another beautiful time which the little one who
is coming cannot comprehend till, many years
hence, he or she will experience its charm in
turn.

Little things intensely loved undoubtedly bring
a greater reward in human happiness than
great and numerous possessions, the joy of
which can be but partly grasped. Within a
tiny home, a mother whose heart vibrates with
love can find a thousand sources wherewith to
enrich the coming life.

But of all her delights, the greatest must
always be the thought of the wonderful gift,
which, at some ever nearing date, she will be
able to give to the man whom she adores. ' Some
men are negligent of the charms and enravish-
ments of children, but I think in every man
who fully loves and is fully loved by his wife,

42 Radiant Motherhood

the thought of the child of them both must
always be a stimulant to everything most
ardently beautiful and profound in their
natures.

Pictures of the child in after life rilling brightly
and beautifully some big position in the world
may flit past the mother's mind during this
time, but, if the mother is wise, she will not
too intimately visualize the outward form of
her child as a maturing girl or boy. By so
doing she may indirectly wrong it. (See Chap-
ter XIV).

Her delight should be to picture a tiny
laughing messenger from God, thinly veiled so
that its sex is hidden ; the figure of a child a
few years old, still full of divine innocence and
radiant possibilities. Happy hours of bodily
rest may be spent picturing it in a thousand
beautiful actions dancing in the sunlight, a
contagious centre of joy in the whole world
around them. On such an idea of delight she
may lavish every day invigorating thoughts and
wonderful dreams ; none will be wasted, of
that she may be assured. If, at the same time,
she is securing the coming child's bodily well-
being through the proper material channels,
then she can feel that these dreams of higher
than material beauty are being built into reality.
The secret sacred wonder of the process of
which she is the active centre casts its spell of

Her Delights 43

magic and delight around the willing mother.
" A Garden enclosed is my Beloved," and she
feels within her own existence the mystic sense
of divine beauty, which one feels in another
form in a walled garden in the summer twilight.

CHAPTER VI

The Young Mother-to-be :
Her Distresses

The amount of suffering that has been and is borne by
women is utterly beyond imagination.

HERBERT SPENCER : Principles of Ethics, II.

THE bodily changes which at first almost
imperceptibly steal upon the mother, if
she be a girl who has enjoyed her own
physical beauty, and has taken that care of
herself which so delightful a thing as a young
woman's body merits, will be at first a series
of amazements and perhaps of delights as her
body rounds itself and becomes more perfect.
At this time the husband should fill his memory
with her exquisiteness, for though she will,
in the end, return perhaps to her normal strength
and a re-awakened and different beauty, she
will never again in her life reach such a point
of bodily perfection as she does during the
first three months or so of her coming mother-
hood, culminating at about the close of the
third month.

44

Her Distresses 45

As the years pass, hallowed and sanctified
by love which is understood, even when grey
with age, her face may gain an ever increasing
beauty and power, but the perfection of her
body is reached in the early days when she is
first about to become a mother.

To one who cares for the outward form of
her body, changes will occur inevitably as the
months pass, which may give rise to deep dis-
tresses, principally because they feel at the
time so permanent and it is difficult to believe
that the disfigurements will ever pass. For a
time she must inevitably become less and less
beautiful ; she may indeed become, even to
herself, repugnant. Perhaps to her as to so
many thousands of women the sight of them-
selves then is a torment, and the conquest of
this feeling is a great and increasingly difficult
mental exercise. As this time approaches and
is upon her, the young mother-to-be must
concentrate all her conscious thought on the
beauty of the future. She must forget the
present and its cruel distortions and live in the
months and years that are to come when she
will have with her another life and lovely form
to which she has given origin.

Nothing is at present gained for our civili-
zation by the obstinate blindness on the part
of some, and the wilful deception on the part of
others, which together encourage the conceal-

46 Radiant Motherhood

ment from the bride of what she has to
face.

On the one hand stan these prudes, but
on the other the too eager and explicit, even
lewd and profane and soiled minds who delight
in lugubrious warnings.

The result has been that many a woman
enters upon her motherhood gaily and eagerly,
totally unprepared for what is to follow, totally
unaware that, by the first act of motherhood,
she gives up something essential to herself and
something which is irreplacable in all the after
years. So great a gift should be made not only
voluntarily, but consciously, and with full know-
ledge of what it entails.

Cruel indeed is the callous hardness of the
older mind that can see without desiring to
help the proud and sensitive young spirit em-
barking upon a course which cannot but entail
subtle difficulties at the best and extreme physical
anguish at the worst, yet help of the kind the
modern sensitive girl needs is almost unobtain-
able. Rare indeed is the mother of the last
generation who has the power and the knowledge
to meet the unvoiced demands of this.

Acquainted as I am with all sorts and con-
ditions of men and women, I am nevertheless
frequently amazed and filled with burning in-
dignation at the well-nigh inhuman cruelty,
stupidity and hypocrisy of the older generation

Her Distresses 47

towards young potential parents. It is not an
uncommon thing to hear a man who is un-
faithful to his wife because she has lost her
physical beauty, at the same time haranguing
the public on the compulsory duties of parent-
hood on the part of all young married women,
and coupling his denunciations with sneers at
the young girl who fears to embark on mother-
hood, reviling her as selfish. Yet the cause of
her shrinking may be that from all the weltering
confusion of contradictory and scrappy informa-
tion which may have been allowed to reach her,
the one which has fixed itself in her mind most
vividly, is that which promised her loss of her
bodily charm and that of all she possesses which
is most valuable to her as a bond which binds
her husband's affection to her. The woman
who is perfectly sure of the continuance of
her husband's spiritual and romantic love does
not fear the risks of motherhood. All who
truly and deeply love, desire parenthood. But
can a woman who was married by a shallow
man only for her beauty dare to risk the thing
which holds him to her ?

There is indeed a diabolical malignity in the
older man who is himself unfaithful because of
the very things in his wife which he denounces
the younger girl for fearing.

This must not be misunderstood by my
readers as indicating that I think a woman

48 Radiant Motherhood

should shrink in any way or that her husband
should grudge the sacrifice of all the fragrance
and beauty which they possess towards making
the child of their love the citizen of the future.
But with fervent intensity, I feel that to keep
the young woman ignorant of facts, and, at
the same time, on the one hand to upbraid and
bully her and on the other to terrorize her with
evil minded tales and tragic sights, is conduct
which would be laughable in its absurdity did
it not touch the spring of tears.

As the months of expectant motherhood
succeed one another the girl will find her power
to walk and run, to keep up with her husband
in his pleasure, his out-door exertions, or even
to do the usual standing involved in the course
of her house work, increasingly curtailed. This
is perhaps the inevitable consequence of the
burden of actual weight which results from
the later growth of the child within her as it
increases and approaches the size of a living
baby.

Sometimes the fortunate mother finds that
she is still capable of the same amount of exer-
tion to which she is generally accustomed, but,
under modern conditions, this is but seldom.
The stories of Kaffir women on the trek who
bear their children and follow on with the rest,
and savages whose activity is in no way cur-
tailed, are neither applicable to modern condi-

Her Distresses 49

tions, nor are they fair standards to set, because
such women do not live as the modern woman
is forced to, nor is their bodily organization
really comparable with that of our highly sen-
sitive brain-evolved race.

Nevertheless, with the exception of heavy
exertion, the girl who is carrying her child
should be able to indulge in a much greater
amount of healthful exercise, without undue
fatigue, than she is generally able to enjoy.
(See also Chapter X).

Most women have heard rumours of others
who have been able to follow out almost all
their usual occupations, and have felt little or
no handicap from child bearing. Such an
exceptional woman is my correspondent who
wrote :

I lived exactly as usual ; I played golf up to the middle
of the seventh month and bicycled up to my very last. On
the afternoon of the day my second child was born (weighing
8J Ib.) I was shopping with a woman acquaintance, who had
no idea there was anything on the way.

Such women, although not very many, do
exist among us. Their existence is perhaps
the source of the hope which always animates
every girl first embarking on her parenthood
that she, by the sheer force of the longing for
health which is within her, will prove also to be
such an exception. Sometimes this desire may

5

50 Radiant Motherhood

be apparently fulfilled, but generally, unless it
is coupled with much greater knowledge than
most girls possess, as the months pass one by
one, her proud spirit will bend, she will give
up and give up and give up. Humbled,
weakened, humiliated before herself, through the
fact that she is not strong enough to fight what
she now is inclined acquiescently to call " Nature,"
she too goes down the stream with all the myriads
of other happy hearted girls, whose gallant
endeavours have equally failed. Then she creeps,
wearily resting by the way, where she had hoped
to tread with a firm and lightsome step.

There grows in her mind, and this is stronger
the more she loves her husband, the added
distress that she feels that she is failing him.
He married a mate, an equal, who lighter of
step could yet cover the ground as well as he,
and who could share his amusements, his work
to some extent perhaps, and his pleasures. She
feels that she must, so far as she possibly can,
maintain this position. This hope impels her
particularly if they have been married but a
short time, and hence their days of delightful
untramelled companionship have been so few.

In this unselfish distress, which is primarily
for him, she is tempted to conceal her effort
and tends to overstrain herself in an endeavour
to act as completely as she can the part, as
reported, of the early Greek or Roman matron

Her Distresses 51

or of the proud and savage mother who could
bear her children as lightly as a woodland creature.
Finding sooner or later that she cannot do so,
she suddenly gives in. Her strength, under-
mined by the series of distresses, the subtle
shocks and blows to which she is secretly sub-
jected, she yields and takes on that air of semi-
invalidism, demanding constant care and con-
sideration from her husband and those about
her, which in a way represents the hauling
down of her gallant flag. Her dreams of an
easy motherhood are vanquished.

She will at times be dimly conscious that
she is no longer able to feel so acutely. This,
in a way perhaps, is Nature's provision against
the too intense experiencing of emotion, which
would otherwise come with sensitive mother-
hood. The sensation can be described, as one
woman put it, as though each one of her powers
of feeling were, wrapped round in cotton wool,
deadened and clogged so that they no longer
gave contact. This may be well, but it adds
in a dim way to the various distresses, a sense
of unreality and apartness, which, if it coincides
with that temporary antipathy to her husband,
which was noted on page 33, may make the
mother-to-be, for the time at any rate, indeed
a wanderer in the valley of the shadow.

CHAPTER VII

The Young Father-to-be :
His Amazements

Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more ; for there she lay.

D. G. ROSSETTI.

r I ^HE young father-to-be, though a real and
very important person, has been curiously

-** neglected by all and sundry who concern
themselves with the affairs of the " expectant
mother," " child welfare," and the other social
and semi-eugenic matters about which well-
meaning people have so voluminously written
and so sedulously talked.

Sometimes jesting reference is made to the
rather strange fact that, in some savage races,
it is the father and not the mother who lies in
bed for weeks after the birth of the child, but
of the material and very real psychological
experiences and physical difficulties which the
young father is encountering and living through
during the months before the advent of his

His Amazements 53

first-born, few have any knowledge. Fewer
still have offered the father-to-be any sympathy
or help. Nevertheless with the increasingly
perceptive and specialized individuals comprising
our civilization, there arises an increasing number
of young men capable of feeling and suffering
in some degree corresponding to the great
realities of which, for each, his home is the
centre. And, moreover, it must not be for-
gotten that among our thoughtful classes
are now growing up the young men whose
mothers were among the pioneers of women's
emancipation, whose mothers, therefore, were
voluntary mothers who have trained their sons
consciously and unconsciously, directly and
indirectly, to be more in harmony with the
true and natural attitude of a sensitive human
being to its mate than are the average gross
and over-bearing males, sons of enslaved and
involuntary mothers. The sensitiveness of the
modern young man towards his duties as a
father, towards his wife as the mother of his
child is, in my experience, very remarkable
in its extent and its beauty. I have direct and
indirect evidence from thousands that among
the young Army men in various messes on the
continent in recent years, an unexpected racial
seriousness of attitude was shown when the
necessary key that unlocked the secret chamber
was available. Although it is a most deplorable

54 Radiant Motherhood

truth, that there has been an increase in the
racial diseases and an outward levity towards
women, this is less an inherent baseness
on the part of the young men than the result
of the existence of the false conditions in
which they have been placed, due to the
criminal mishandling the whole racial problem
has received from those older and in a posi-
tion of authority.

In the nature of things, at first the young
man can scarcely avoid taking fatherhood much
more lightly than the girl takes motherhood.
In normal, sweet, and healthy men, a desire
for children of their own is very strong. Yet,
however sympathetic their dispositions, however
observant they may be of others, the unmarried
young men cannot, under present conditions,
have a full comprehension of what the attain-
ment of motherhood involves in sacrifice for
the mother. Hence the ideally mated young
couple embarking upon parenthood set about
it gaily, but before many months have passed,
the young father-to-be must also be filled
with amazements. For, control her impulse
to be alone as she may (see Chapter III), curb
her induced fretfulness as she may, the general
psychological attraction between the man and
the woman must be affected by the physiological
state of the mother. The young man should
find himself, if not actually repelled as the

His Amazements 55

months progress, at least much more able to
give his wife an impersonal tenderness in place
of an active desire for physical union than he
would have imagined possible. However sweet
their love, if they are average human beings
and not exceptional, he will perhaps, from time
to time, be amazed and pained by unexpected
peevishness and fretfulness, perhaps by what
appear to be quite irrational and unjustifiable
complaints from his wife. He should be made
acquainted with the facts on page 33, and should
apply them to himself and his wife. Knowing
of the liability of such a temporary development,
he can guard against any permanent injuries to
love arising from the experience, such as often do
result when it is unexpected and misunderstood.

I remember once being told by a nurse who
had been at a large maternity home that of
those who came there for the birth of their
child she had only seen one couple between
whom there was no bickering, not even infinite-
simal criticisms and gusts of temper to ruffle
the surface of their intense and romantic devo-
tion. " Generally the women at this time,"
she said, " lead their husbands an awful dance,
and are always snapping at them, but they do
not really mean it, of course."

Men, on the whole, I think (although it is
difficult and dangerous to generalize) are less
tolerant of " superficial snappiness " than women,

56 Radiant Motherhood

and the ruffling of the surface which comes
with a few angry words enters probably deeper
into the life of a sensitive man than it does in
the life of a girl of corresponding type, although,
on the other hand, a man may very quickly
acclimatize himself to ignoring such comparative
trivialities. Yet at first, at any rate, they not
only amaze but distress, and when they appear
irrational and swiftly pass, they may, although
a trifle in themselves, be the cause of much
misunderstanding and may be the foundation
of more serious later disharmonies.

To the man who has any biological knowledge,
all the wonderful processes of the growth of
the unseen embryo, leading up to birth, are
full of amazed wonder. If a man knows, as
all should in these days (see my book, Married
Love, for information about the fundamental
processes of mating) how minute is the single
sperm cell from which his growing child takes
its rise, the immensity of the results of the
activity of that tiny cell appear indeed stupendous.
His flower-like bride is changed, her whole
body is permeated, * altered and impressed by
the activities of this particle of himself united
with its counterpart within her.

Only for the utterly callous can the experience
of the months of waiting be anything but full
of continual reminders of the amazing complexity
of life. Long ago Tennyson felt :

His Amazements 57

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower but // I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

Even more filled with humble and profound
amazement must be the future father, who
feels that his wife is now the very centre of the
greatest mystery and wonder of the universe.
Looking at her, brooding in her dreams, his
mind must be continually filled with the con-
sciousness of the eager active growth that is in
progress, and the intense desire to take part in
the mystical processes.

CHAPTER VIII

The Young Father-to-be :
His Delights

A Garden enclosed is my spouse, a spring shut up, a

fountain sealed.

Song of Solomon.

IT is said that men naturally have a more
casual interest in fatherhood than women
have in motherhood. It is sometimes
even definitely said that men do not have a
passion for fatherhood or care profoundly for
young children. This is not my experience.
A much larger number of men than are credited
with it feel an intense desire for fatherhood,
and take a great delight in young children.
Though they should share the joy equally, yet
the father often has a larger proportion of the
pleasure of the little child, while to the mother
comes a larger proportion of the burden and the
difficulties. To the child itself, too, the father
is often more precious than the mother. An

accidental testimony to this effect was given by

58

His Delights 59

the little daughter of one of those " devoted
wives and mothers " who thought woman's
place was only the home, and a mother's duty
only to care for her children. The child and
I were chatting and the little one misunder-
stood something I said, and thought that I
asked which of its parents it loved most. The
child quickly answered, " Oh, I like father
best, of course mother is there every day and
she washes us." The privilege of being a
child's favourite is no small one, and, as this
child shows us, a father may win it with unfair
facility.

The conscious dream of parenthood, a parent-
hood which shall give the children the best
possible chance in life undoubtedly lies behind
the majority of marriages. Hence when the
young man who has married with the desire,
perhaps not for immediate, but for ultimate father-
hood, first learns the definite fact that he has
already inaugurated the beginnings of his child's
development he must experience an intense and
unique wave of feeling, which, as in the early
days of marriage, with all its freshness, and with
the actual physical difficulties yet unfaced, must
be one primarily of buoyant delight.

There is also in the earlier months, for the
man of artistic perceptions, an unique experience
in the appreciation of his wife's enhanced beauty.
It is perhaps known that the most critical artistic

6o Radiant Motherhood

view of woman claims the highest point of
perfection in her form about the third month
of her first period of motherhood. To a pair
of lovers who have delighted in their bodily
beauty, as all natural and healthy and well
formed young people should do, this period,
when the loveliness of the woman is at its very
height, and when the man can feel that he has
contributed to its perfection, must be a time
of very special entrancement. That it is some-
thing from within his most sacred being that
has added this glow and radiance in perfecting
the rounded form of the body that he adored
in its virginal grace, must give a man with
artistic and poetic potentialities an all too brief
but never to be forgotten experience. The
young father-to-be should not lose a day of
these swiftly passing weeks, for this phase, like
all human developments, but even more intensely
so than most, is passing and transient, only to
be immortalized in the permanence of a per-
ceptive memory.

When, as is inevitable, it has passed, and is
followed within another month or two by a phase
so acutely, perhaps agonizingly its reverse, the
crucifixion of the mother's sensitive feelings
which is entailed should be hallowed and elevated
in both their minds by that deeper, less personal,
and more profoundly racial delight, the picturing
with each other of the radiance, the strength,

His Delights 61

the power, the purpose and passion of the life
which they are creating. So tragically soon
after the days when he has feasted his eyes and
filled his memory with her beauty, she will,
she must withdraw her body from him and for
months to come he will be shut out entirely
from all sight of her. The reward will be an
inner experience of the mind.

A day will come when, for the first time,
the father-to-be may lay his hand upon his
wife below her waist and feel the sturdy little
kicks of his future son or daughter, and can
know that, though hidden from him, still there
is beside him a vital and independent being
whom he has wakened to life. The presence
of this little creature whom he has not seen
colours and permeates every hour of their joint
existence, and links the family in an extra-
ordinary unity, the full significance of which I
will consider in Chapter XII.

When the later months pass, the father-to-be
will have lost one of his most exquisite memories
if he has not already talked and laughed with
his future child, and if he and his wife and
child together have not united in that most
mystical union possible to human flesh.

CHAPTER IX

The Young Father-to-be :
His Distresses

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no
door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never
lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of the

many.

TACORE : Gitanjali.

WITH all the passion for children, with
the protective chivalrous feeling to-
wards his wife which a well born and
well knit man instinctively feels, through all
the joy of fatherhood that is coming and the
delight in its accomplishment, there must run
a thread of intense distress at his own helpless-
ness to help. With every consideration that
the most resourceful man can think of towards
his wife, with every helpful, tender, encouraging,
supporting thing that he can do, how little is
his share during all these months in the burden
of the coming parenthood. If, through sym-
pathy, he feels each pang his wife may feel ;

His Distresses 63

if, through sympathy, he curtails his activity to
rest with her, nevertheless it is a voluntary
abnegation, and if it became intolerable at any
moment he could escape ; he could run over
the hills ; he could go for a day's fierce solitude
and activity wherever his feet desired to lead
him ; but he knows that his wife cannot, that
she is chained, that not for a moment of the
day or night for nine months can she lay down
the burden for a brief rest that there is no
exit for her from this imprisonment of so many
of her potentialities but through the gateway of
agonizing pain.

The instinct behind marriage is often a feel-
ing of chivalrous devotion towards a tender
and confiding girl, and the desire to give her
every protection. The man finds, however,
that his act has placed the one whom he desired
to protect in such a position that she must bear
the greatest burden possible for a human being
to bear, and must bear it alone. This must
be a deep distress to an imaginative man of
integrity, although the distress be mingled with
other and joyous feelings. To pretend that it
is not so, to say that the joy of coming parent-
hood should and does wipe out all such under-
currents of thought is merely to be callous or
silly. To repress an intense feeling, to pretend
that it is not there, may give an apparent surface
bravery or brightness. But such repression is

64 Radiant Motherhood

ultimately destructive to the consciousness and
whole physique of the one who, thus gallantly
to himself, endeavours to deny the truth, and
is often apt to lead to deeper disorders. The
modern school of psycho-analysts who endeavour
to set right the effects of mental strain often
discover that throughout life, perhaps dating
from childhood, a personality has been handi-
capped and weakened by some deep suppression
of an intensely experienced emotion.

In my opinion, the pretence that a sensitive
man does not feel, and does not endeavour to
conceal his feeling about his relation to his
wife, particularly at the time of their first coming
parenthood is to dishonour man's capacity and
his imagination. Why imply that a rational
man does not experience what surely all but
a brute must feel. It impoverishes our life of
emotional expression, and it tends to injure
the man himself, to increase the strain by the
pretence that the strain is not there. I know,
for instance, one man who fainted at the time
his wife gave birth to their child, and who,
under no consideration, would allow her to have
a second child, although he had intensely desired
and looked forward to the fatherhood of a large
family before he knew the actual physical experi-
ences which it entailed. Such a man, in my
opinion, was a good father wasted by an excess
of emotion made all the more intensely des-

His Distresses 65

tructive to himself by the endeavour to main-
tain the totally artificial and indeed the crude
attitude which is supposed to be " correct " for
a man, namely a sort of dissociation of himself
from his wife's experiences and a hardened lack
of recognition of all that is involved. It is
surely better to recognize that there is that
intense and poignant sense of helplessness, that
the sensitive and developed young man should
and does feel it, but that it should be recognized
as the compensating price which he pays for
fatherhood.

If we are ever to raise our race to the point
when every child is so precious that no child
can be hungry, neglected or unwanted, the
conscious price which the father pays for his
children will be one of the assets in valuing
the children of the nation. It is, therefore,
better to acknowledge and encourage such sen-
sitiveness in the father by allowing the open
and honourable expression of such feeling, and
thus to avoid that almost neurotic and destructive
effect of the suppression of such intense feeling
as warped the father mentioned above. Because,
if the wife avails herself of the advice I give
in this book, and if the time for parenthood is
chosen rightly and wisely in relation to her
general health, and it is ascertained before she
embarks upon potential motherhood that her
bodily and bony structure is fit for motherhood,

6

66 Radiant Motherhood

then though the experiences of both will be
difficult and profound in their testing of the
quality of each other, motherhood should not
result in any excessive strain, and should
indeed be a time of wonderful life activity.

With all needless ill-health, and wanton
ugliness and wasteful distress which at present
are artificially involved in it, once swept away,
potential motherhood should not be an unen-
durable burden. Though the father's feelings
should be intense and poignant on behalf of
his wife and though she may go through search-
ing experiences, yet the gladness should so
preponderatingly weigh in the balance in excess
of the troubles and difficulties that no normally
healthy and well endowed young couple should
ever suffer so much that they dare not face a
second maternity, as happens alas only too
often to-day.

On quite a lower plane, but nevertheless on
the one so essential that it greatly affects all
the rest of life, is the too frequent distress of
the young father-to-be about the more material
provision of all that is necessary for his wife.
In counting the cost of the coming parenthood,
too often quite heavy expenses are unforeseen,
and, with a fixed income, the young man may
have the intense distress of being unable to
provide all that his wife not only wishes but
really ought to have. Recent years, for instance,

His Distresses 67

were times of extraordinary difficulty for all
women who bore children, and who had a
naturally healthy and proper desire to eat fruit.
With oranges at a shilling each, as they were
in the winter of 1918-19, how could an ordinary
young couple afford a glassful of orange juice
a day, which I recommend as profoundly valu-
able (see p. 80). It was obviously impossible.
Such a time, of course, one hopes will never
be repeated. It was a period of undue strain,
when none, considering the future of the race,
should have borne a child unless private reasons
made it specially advisable.

But apart from such excessive and unpre-
cedented difficulties, there are, and probably
always will be, difficulties for the young man
who desires to provide everything that can
benefit his wife. Not long ago in the news-
papers, a budget of the cost of the baby in an
ordinary lower middle class home was given,
and there was an item : " Dentist's bill for
the mother, twenty pounds." A wise comment
was made on this that, alas, it is by no means
an unusual, indeed it is a usual experience that
the coming child adversely affects the mother's
teeth, and both for the health of the baby and
the mother they should be attended to. Pos-
sibly, even her very life may depend on her
teeth being thoroughly free from decay after
the birth. A heavy dentist's bill is too often

68 Radiant Motherhood

an unexpected anxiety to the young husband,
so that the teeth are neglected. Neglected teeth
either weaken, or may actually result in the
death of the mother from their decay, causing
internal poisoning, to which she is peculiarly
liable after bearing a child.

Then too, there are unexpected and heavy
expenses which are unforeseen through a variety
of circumstances, such, for instance, as the
uncertainty of the date of the birth. Those
who go to nursing homes, as many are now
doing owing to housing and service difficulties,
experience this trial more acutely than others.
They expect and plan, perhaps, for the birth
within a given week, and the baby may delay
two or three or even more weeks beyond the
calculated time. Young couples, scarcely able to
afford the heavy expenses of a good nursing
home, who yet had saved sufficient to allow the
wife three weeks there, may have their plans
quite dislocated by a delay of three weeks in
the infant's appearance, resulting in the mother
unexpectedly having to remain double the length
of time for which they had saved the money
for the nursing home. The young father is
then faced by the sordid difficulty of finding
the necessary money, and unless he is gifted
in such a way as to make extra earning a pos-
sibility, is under a condition of strain. Just
when all his free energy and time should be

His Distresses 69

devoted to companionship with his wife and
infant, he has to spend extra hours working at
high pressure in order to meet unexpected ex-
penses. The young father-to-be who wishes
to maintain the right and beautiful atmosphere
around his coming child should inform himself
of all certain and likely contingencies of expense,
and should make due provision for these before
the great act of calling into being one for
whom he is primarily responsible.

To a healthy man, also, there may be a period
of chastening experience in sharing daily life
with one who is out of health. Though the
prospective mother ought not to be in any way
invalided, yet, alas, as things are, too often she
is, and only an unselfish man will fail to resent
the personal sacrifice which he endures as a
result.

There is a certain self-centred type of man
who may, with the most model intentions and
in order to lead a self-respecting life, marry,
and who may find the resulting pregnancy of
his wife very disconcerting to himself and very
thwarting to his own requirements. With a
certain bitter selfishness, this attitude was un-
consciously expressed by one of my correspond-
ents in the following words : " Something must
be done to prevent any more children ; imagine
what a wretched time I have with my wife sick
every day for nine months." Perhaps the reader

70 Radiant Motherhood

can scarcely restrain a smile at so callously
self-centred an attitude on the part of a husband,
but, nevertheless, that man does have a real
and difficult physical problem before him. One
way, of course, in which to help such a man
would be to place such help and knowledge
before his wife that her motherhood should be
more normal, and not so terrible an experience
for her.

CHAPTER X

Physical Difficulties of the
Expectant Mother

We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so
much more than we do that they cannot understand us ;
but though we cannot reason with them, we can find out
what they have been most accustomed to, and what there-
fore they are most likely to expect ; and we can see that
they get this, as far as it is in our power to give it them,
and may then generally leave the rest to them.

SAMUEL BUTLER.

TO far too many women tlie time when they
are carrying a child is a period ^f strain
and semi-invalidism, a time filled*, irt
only with surprises and difficulties, but too
often coloured with actual distress 'and ill-health.
This should not be. The time of prospective
motherhood should be one of buoyancy, health,
physical activity and mental vitality. The low
standard of health which the modern woman
tolerates is deplorable.

But to whom can the yrning mother-to-be

71

72 Radiant Motherhood

turn for advice and assistance ? Such healthy,
happy, prospective motherhood does not come
by instinct in our city life. Those around her,
older than she, who have had children of their
own may perhaps be able to give her a hint
here and a little piece of advice there, which to
some extent may alleviate her difficulty or pierce
with a faint shadow of light the gloom of per-
plexity in the ever deepening unknown into
which she is entering for the first time ; but
nearly all such women have themselves gone
blindly and individually through this period of
immense significance and mystery without having
had any rational help from one devoted to the
maintenance of health.

Almost every book written to advise the
coming mother is written by a doctor of disease,
with very few exceptions by doctors who tolerate
what is, in my opinion, a disgracefully low
standard of general health in women. A dis-
tinguished gynecologist who, in cross-examina-
tior before a commission persisted in main-
taining tricu' ; the " daily morning sickness "
which is so prevalent in women who are carrying
a child is " ph ysiologically right and natural "
(indeed, he implied almost that it was necessary)
represents an attitude of mind very general and
capable of far-reaching hypnotic injury to the
community as a '-whole.

By far the best and sanest book available for

Her Difficulties 73

healthy women is one to which I have already
referred, namely Tokology^ by Dr. Alice Stockham,
but this book has its inaccuracies and its draw-
backs, and even its pages are too much occupied
with the wretched and handicapping troubles
which women do experience in large numbers,
but which should not be.

Nevertheless, to allow a young girl or woman
to enter upon these months of trial without
making clear to her what she has to face, is cruel
indeed. For a sensitive woman the experience,
even at its best, and when most free from in-
capacities is, yet incredibly and penetratingly
more terrible than she anticipated. The more
sensitive and more conscious she is, the deeper
and profounder may be her joy in her coming
motherhood, but, at the same time, the more
intense the physical experiences through which
she must pass.

The modern sensitive young woman does
not take things blindly and patiently and with
resignation, with a pious belief in her own
inferiority, which may have helped to dull and
moderate the sensations of her grandmothers.
The more evolved she is, the more she may be
willing to bow to natural law, but the less is
she content to suffer wanton cruelties imposed
upon her by ignorance, stupidity or coercion.

Many are the midwives, maternity nurses
and medical practitioners with whom I have

74 Radiant Motherhood

discussed such matters, and from whom, often
incognito, I have asked advice. I may say
that none gave all the necessary advice, not one
gave one-tenth of what is in this book, only
one or two gave any necessary simple advice
in the sympathetic and understanding fashion
desirable, and only one or two appeared to have
any clear generalizations or scientific understand-
ing of the facts about which I asked. The
resignation, the shrugging of the shoulders in
the face of things which would otherwise make
one weep, or the cheerful braving out or pre-
tending that things are not as bad as they are,-
which is the general attitude of mind of the
maternity nurse is little more helpful than that
of the practitioner. Concerning many of the
practical facts of the later months of pregnancy
and actual birth, and the succeeding weeks of
recovery, the properly trained midwife seems
on the whole wiser than the average general
practitioner, wiser even than the specialist who
may come at a crisis, but who does not watch
his patient through the succeeding weeks.

Many young women who have recently been
mothers have told me of the mental and physical
horror: which they then experienced, and of the
added horror that they should feel horror. They
have asked me to generalize, if it is possible,
from their cases in such a way as to help others
who enter upon maternity's difficulties for the

Her Difficulties 75

first time, so that they may at least be spared that
terrible sense of isolation and of exceptional
failure when they experience one by one the
things which are inevitable, or the things
which are, by our artificial lives, so frequently
imposed.

The bearing of a child very often may be
complicated by actual disease, and then requires,
of course, expert medical attention. With those
who are in any sense actually ill, and who should
be in the hands of a doctor, I am not here dealing,
for, in this respect, as throughout my other
books, I desire only to write of health for the
healthy so that they may have sufficient know-
ledge to maintain their health and raise the
vitality of the race.

I may say here that, even for the healthiest,
it is very advisable, not only for her first, but
for every succeeding pregnancy, that a woman
should be examined and measured by some
wise and healthy-minded medical practitioner
or midwife at least once during the first three
months and twice again during the last three
months, but that, for the first baby, it would
be better to go at least every month for examina-
tion. In that way, the various insidious dis-
turbances of the excretory system, and other
fundamental things which may go a little wrong,
even in an otherwise healthy woman, can be
detected immediately and dealt with. Many

7 6 Radiant Motherhood

however, find a great difficulty in bringing
themselves to do this.

Undoubtedly it is much better for the pros-
pective mother to go to a specialist, old enough
to be wise and experienced and mellow, and yet
young and virile and active enough to be ac-
quainted with modern knowledge, and healthy
and clean enough to look for and to desire health
and normality in those who come for advice.

This should pre-eminently be the special
field for women doctors, but there is not nearly
a sufficient body of them with the necessary
qualifications to meet the requirements of the
community, and I should like to see a new
profession created for women who, to the
experience and the training of first-class mid-
wives, have added a sufficient training in general
medicine to be specialized to advise the healthy
prospective mother, and to be able to detect at
once anything which should necessitate handing
her on to the doctor of disease. Such practi-
tioners should rank in status somewhere between
the cultivated midwife of gentle birth (such as
a Queen Charlotte's Hospital nurse) and the
medical woman. Thus the prospective mother
would be spared that hard and bitter contact
with one who has become myopic in the observa-
tion of disease, and would be able to go to
someone specially trained to encourage health.
Meanwhile, as this is but a bright picture of

Her Difficulties 77

what may come in the future (and that will
come if women make a sufficient demand for
it) it may spare many women distress if I set
out the physical difficulties and peculiarities
which are most liable to occur with a healthy
woman.

From the welter of accounts of the effects of
pregnancy, I have disentangled into three groups
those which normal women may have to face.
The difficulties are :

(1) Those nature-imposed ; these are essen-
tial ; they cannot be avoided by the healthiest
woman. They can be perhaps, to some extent,
mitigated. They are things which the coming
mother must be helped through and over ; she
cannot be saved from them.

(2) Those entirely artificial ; these are quite
needless and are the results of either ignorance
or our gross disregard of known facts, and can
be entirely eradicated.

(3) Those which are to-day very usual, but
which knowledge and a better mode of life may
entirely conquer.

Now to consider first the third group : those
which are general, but which a knowledge could
or should conquer.

One of the first signs that she is to become
a mother, and one of the most usual experiences
of a young woman when this time begins, is
the daily recurrence of that penetrating nausea

7 8 Radiant Motherhood

and sickness usually after she has risen in the
morning, called " Morning Sickness." This is
so usual that medical practitioners rely on it
to some extent as a sign of pregnancy. It is
described in almost every book for the pros-
pective mother, and, as I have mentioned (p. 72),
it is sometimes even maintained by distinguished
gynecologists as a physiological function, i.e.,
a normal function.

Now this is a very -nauseating and wretched
experience to the majority of women, and it
is one which, I maintain, is entirely imposed
by ignorance, wrong living and the general
hypnotic effect of others* perverted views on the
woman's system. In those women whose internal
organs are improperly placed or somewhat mal-
formed, it occurs as a physiological result of
pressure or other disturbance. In true health
there is no physiological reason whatever for the
morning sickness, and a woman who lives as she
should live during the time of her coming
motherhood need not experience it. This should,
in the next generation, be entirely conquered,
because it is to a very large extent caused by
allowing, even forcing to wear corsets, girls when
they are still unformed and developing. Those
women who have never worn corsets in the
whole of their lives, and who dress as they
should dress, and do as they should do during
the months when they are becoming mothers.

Her Difficulties 79

seldom experience morning sickness. Though
there are some who, when they know the child
is coming, discard their corsets too late, and
these may still experience this unpleasant feature.
The extraordinary adaptability and vitality in a
woman's system, however, is a remarkable thing,
and even those who begin later in life than
they should to train for motherhood may yet
accomplish much.

Granted a healthy, well-formed body, a
previous life of normal activity, sensible attention
to the following points will insure complete
freedom from morning sickness in all but the
exceptional and pre-disposed :

(a) Discard every scrap of heavy or constricting clothing,
wearing only the lightest garments hung from the shoulders
entirely.

As I said in Married Love the standard of
dressing for the prospective mother, whose
garments should be of the lightest wool and
silk if possible, and should be so lightly hung
that a butterfly can walk the length of her body
without tearing its wings.

(3) Discard all rich, heavy and over-cooked foods, such
as pastries and hot cakes, dried peas and beans, rich game
or highly seasoned dishes, and live as much as possible on
uncooked foods and simple milk puddings, stewed fruit, lightly
cooked meat and fish, with the largest obtainable quantity of
very fresh ripe fruit.

8o Radiant Motherhood

(c) Start the day not with tea, but with the juice of two
or three oranges squeezed into a tumbler.

If she does these things a normal woman
may go through the whole nine months with-
out experiencing one single moment of nausea,
as many a woman has done.

A retardation of the action of the bowels or
constipation is very frequent, and is a cause of
many other ill-effects. A right diet such as I
advise, adding for this purpose honey and
brown bread, does much to prevent it ; if it
exists in spite of this, take suitable bending
exercises (see also page 72), even a warm
hydrostatic douche (using a douche-can with
a little common salt in the water), but do not
I take regular drugs or " aperients."

Another of the very frequent experiences of
the mother who is carrying a child, particularly
towards the later months, is the enlargement of
the veins of the legs and ankles and the forma-
tion of varicose veins. These may become
very serious if neglected, and even if the
woman is being doctored, unless, at the same
time, she regularly follows the proper healthy
method of dieting and living. In addition to
the dieting and clothing described above, which
will make her almost certain to be immune
from varicose veins, she should take warm
comfortable sitz baths every evening, and

Her Difficulties 81

she should lie down for at least half an hour
or an hour in the middle of the day or early
evening with her feet raised a few inches above
the level of her head.

One of the most serious difficulties, felt even
by those who avoid all other drawbacks, is
sleeplessness, particularly in the last month or
two when the activities of the child may be
very disturbing. In this, much depends on
the position in which the child is lying, and
sometimes the position of the child can be
improved by massage and manipulation by a
trained midwife or doctor. Something also can
be done by the mother herself through her
mental attitude and hand touch on the child,
and also by taking hot sitz baths nightly before
going to bed. Still more, however, is accom-
plished by right diet, clothes, exercise and
happiness (see also Chapter XII).

The habit of taking aspirin regularly or in
large quantities, which too many women indulge
in if sleepless during this time, is extremely
bad both for the child and for the mother.
Drugs of any sort should not be appealed to.
If it is possible during these later months, sleep
will be much more refreshing, and the advantage
will be very great both to the coming child
and the mother, if her bed can be arranged on
a verandah or out of doors, but it must not
be forgotten that towards the end of the period

7

82 Radiant Motherhood

the expectant mother ought not to be out of
ear-shot of someone.

Now to consider the second group of dis-
abilities ; those entirely the result of artificial
outlook and condition. Among these must be
classed the inability to walk any distance or to
take part in active work of any sort. This is
partly imposed by the hesitation of a woman
to be seen at this time, and particularly to face
the vulgar and leering attitude of the general
public, and it is partly also due to the general
heaviness or strain on the muscles or to the
presence of varicose veins. If these have, by
the methods just described, been almost or
entirely avoided, she will find that her natural
activity is much less reduced than it would
otherwise be. To walk a mile or two, or even
three miles the day before or even the day of
the birth is not at all beyond what can be expected
from an ordinary healthy woman who lives as
she should.

The necessity perpetually to be fussing, to
be taking tonics or drugs or medicines, to be
thinking only of herself and never of any general
or greater theme, is also eliminated when the
general health is improved, and any mental or
bodily activity which the mother can indulge in
without a sense of strain is advantageous to
the child as well as to herself.

The highly nervous condition and overstrained

Her Difficulties 83

state of so many modern women during this
time is due entirely to th^ artificial social lives,
involving late hours, which they try to lead.
The mother-to-be should give up almost all
social engagements which keep her out of bed
after 9 o'clock. Sleep, fresh air, exercise under
the healthiest natural conditions she can com-
mand, coupled with the right diet, will
secure her health and strength throughout the
time.

The difficulties, however, about which help is
most needed are the first group, those nature-
imposed and inevitable difficulties which the
woman has to face, and which, without instruction
in the things she might do to mitigate them,
often lead her to suffer intensely, though need-
lessly, and tend to have life-long effects on her
health and appearance. Simple and sometimes
obvious precautions are required, and yet these
are almost unknown to the generality of advisers
to whom the prospective mother can turn.

The first and most obvious inmost change
that affects her is that felt in the muscles below
the waist, particularly those which run vertically,
and which support, by their elasticity and strength,
the whole front of the body. As the months
pass and the child and its attendant tissues
grow, there is a slowly increasing strain on these
muscles. As the enlargement proceeds the
skin will also stretch, and the under-skin and

84 Radiant Motherhood

tissues beneath it are finally stretched almost
to breaking-point, stretched sometimes so that
they do break apart and leave ultimate permanent
little scars under the skin of the mother. Few
apparently know, but all should know, that this
can be almost entirely avoided (by fortunate
women entirely avoided), if the skin and tissues
immediately below it are kept supple by daily
rubbing with olive oil from the fifth month.
Perhaps from the fourth month once a week,
and certainly from the fifth month daily, the
mother should rub the lower part of her body
and her breasts with a little olive oil. This
will not only have a soothing effect upon
the skin, but will assist its elasticity in such
a way that she may return to her virgin
condition without leaving those tell-tale scars
which so often mark a woman, and which
many, even highly trained maternity nurses
and doctors, seem to think are inevitable.
Such scars are not inevitable, and this very
simple precaution, coupled with exercise, will
frequently be sufficient safeguard for the woman
who desires to avoid them altogether.

The same internal growth which enlarges the
muscles and strains the skin will also some-
times press apart the two main vertical muscles
in such a f way that there is a tendency for
inner tissues to project, and for the last month
or two this may be very uncomfortable without

Her Difficulties 85

in any way being dangerous. It is then ad-
visable to wear a small stiff pad over this and
fasten it in place with a narrow, soft elastic
band. The use of a localized plaster very often
strains the skin and leaves scars or makes it
sore. It is wise to have the small hard central
bandage wherever there is a tendency to localized
projection as will be self-evident to anyone who
experiences it.

The natural darkening of the colour of the
skin when it is strained and stretched as it must
be is very displeasing to the eye and, particularly
to a young girl whose beautiful body has been
her delight, may be a cause of great distress
and self-repugnance. It is well that she should
be helped over this most anxious time of self-
detestation by the reliable assurance that it is
only a temporary phase, and that if she keeps
in good health, and rubs herself with pure
oil for two or three months after birth as
well as before, the skin will be entirely freed
from any stained or discoloured appearance,
and will return to its normal condition.

As the months pass, the actual physical
weight ">of the body will increase, gradually
becoming a greater burden, so that long distance
walking and any acute activity such as running
or tennis-playing must become impossible.
Nevertheless if the diet and mode of living
suggested above is followed out this will be

86 Radiant Motherhood

very much less embarrassing than is usually
experienced.

Many forms of support or maternity corsets
are advertised or medically recommended to
assist supporting the weight at such times, but,
unless the woman has any actual slipping of
the position of the organs or any deformity,
she is very much better not to take such proffered
assistance for they will form a broken reed,
and, as one knows, " the broken reed pierces
the hand." It is much better for her to
strengthen her own muscles by slow and careful
exercise, bending forward until she touches the
ground or as nearly touches the ground as
possible ; also lying on her back on the ground
and rising without touching the floor with her
hands and arms ; also slowly raising the feet
forward above the head while lying on the back,
and then allowing them to drop slowly to the
ground, this last exercise being very strengthen-
ing to the central muscles of tlie body wall
(detailed accounts of other useful exercises will
be found in Dr. Alice Stockham's Tokology).
So long as there is no strain upon her, she
should exercise throughout the whole of the
time. She would then not need any artificial
support, and would be much better without it.

I have never seen it elsewhere clearly stated,
but I have discovered that one very important
icason against corsets is that, however well

Her Difficulties 87

shaped and loose they may be, they tend to
touch and exert some slight pressure on the
soft tissues at the back of the waist ; they must
do so, merely to remain upon the body without
dropping off, and this amount of pressure is
sufficient to induce morning sickness (see p. 88)
for the following among other reasons. As
the womb grows in the centre of the body it
pushes aside and to the back the many yards
of soft tubular alimentary canal which normally
lie coiled in the front of the body, and, if there
is no constriction or pressure, these tend to
find room for themselves round the waist line
and to the back, so that there appears what
seems almost like a coil or roll of fat round
the waist. This disposition is very advan-
tageous, however, and should not be interfered
with in the way any corset must interfere, and
it greatly reduces the ungainly frontal size
and helps to keep the body better balanced
(see p. 91).

At first the breasts will become firmer and
larger and will support themselves more readily
than at any time, but later on their shape
somewhat changes and they tend to fall. They
should then have carefully slung and properly
arranged supports looped over the shoulder.
Neglect of this often results in the final and
lifelong loss of the beauty of the bosom, and it
is indeed a cruel thing that the average doctor

88 Radiant Motherhood

or nurse appears not to be capable of giving
any useful advice on this point, so that hundreds
of thousands of women have not only lost their
beauty, but have been told that it is an inevit-
able and natural result of having borne a child.
That it is well-nigh inevitable under modern
unaided conditions, may be true. With proper
support, proper massage and treatment after-
wards, the ugly breasts need not have oeen, and
need not be.

A thing which often distresses girls, but
which however unsightly it is while present
is a temporary and passing phenomenon, is
the sudden appearance of freckles, even large
patches of brown colouring matter, on the skin
during the time the baby is forming. So far
as I am aware nothing can be done to prevent
it, and if as sometimes happens these brown
patches even appear on the face, it is a mis-
fortune which must be endured as stoically as
possible, encouraged with the knowledge that
it will entirely pass.

Another curious thing I know one woman
experienced, and about which I am awaiting
further evidence, was the apparent transplanta-
tion by the child in the mother of the strong
black body hairs of the father. The result was
that during the later months of carrying and
for a few months after birth, the mother's lower
limbs and forearms had a thick growth of

Her Difficulties 89

masculine-like hair, which nearly all fell off
within six months after the birth.

The tendency that the coming child has to
extract nutriment from the mother's tissues
often results in the loss or temporary spoiling
of two of her beauties, the beauty of her nails
and the beauty of her hair. These are apt to
suffer unless she is warned in time and protects
them. The injury to them probably depends on
the withdrawal of the proper quantity of fat
from the tissues. It is, therefore, advisable for
the mother-to-be to rub her nails and hair with
some suitable natural oil. Refined paraffin,
almond oil or castor oil for the hair are by far
the best, and for the nails some animal grease
such as lanoline, or perhaps simple vaseline.
Expensive concoctions, very much advertised
and claiming wonderful properties, generally
owe anything which they may contain to these
ingredients, but more frequently contain little
or nothing of any value, and are often harmful.

The more fundamental, and, alas, almost
inevitable result of bearing a child is that it
extracts not only the fat from the system, but
the hardening matter from the teeth. This
indeed is, so far as I am aware, a theft from
the mother by the next generation which no
knowledge of its liability can prevent, and
which can only be met by a careful supervision
of the mother's teeth both before and after

go Radiant Motherhood

birth. Women differ in the amount they lose,
but it is, alas, one of the almost inevitable things
that there shall be a certain weakening of the
teeth. Sometimes this will right itself and
teeth which shook in their sockets immediately
after the birth may apparently harden again
and refix themselves firmly, but if the weakening
takes the form of actual decay, they must be
attended to.

In this respect the diet recommended by Dr.
Stockham in Toko logy > which advocates the
elimination of all calcareous food is perhaps
inadvisable if strictly followed out, because the
growing child insists on mineral matter, and
it simply takes it from the mother's structure
if it does not get it in other ways. I have,
therefore, thought it advisable not entirely to
eliminate the wheat and other bone making
materials from the usual diet as Dr. Stockham
recommends, but to maintain a certain propor-
tion of wheat, especially whole wheat, in the
food. Her advice to replace rich dishes by
simple rice, stewed fruits, etc., is certainly wise,
and still more important is it to follow her warm
recommendation to eat large quantities of fresh
fruit.

One of the perfectly natural, but to the young
mother rather unexpected, results of the changes
of the later months is the alteration which
gradually comes in the position of the centre

Her Difficulties 91

of gravity of her whole body. She is of course
scarcely conscious of this, and yet it is a point
of some importance, because it results in a
certain liability to slip and to fall, particularly
coming downstairs. The danger of such a fall
is less to the child, which is safely surrounded
by a buffer of fluid and by the mother's protective
muscles, but more to the mother herself, who,
in falling, may strain or injure herself. The
growth which results in this change in the
centre of gravity comes too rapidly for the
system quite perfectly to adjust itself to it. It
will be remembered how long it takes a baby
to learn to balance itself upright upon its feet ;
the adult mother-to-be has had a whole lifetime
knowing just how to balance, and every muscle
has become adjusted to the centre of gravity
in its accustomed place. The change in the
distribution of weight changes the position of
the centre of gravity to some extent, sufficiently
at any rate to throw the co-ordination of many
years somewhat out of gear, and it is, therefore,
wise for the expectant mother to take particular
care not to slip or stumble unexpectedly. The
sudden and active movement of the child which
may kick or turn with no warning may
cause her quite to lose her balance, particularly
if she is on a steep staircase. It is well, there-
fore, to make a special point of keeping guard
against this possibility by always having a firm

92 Radiant Motherhood

grip on the handrail when going up or down
stairs during the later months of carrying a
child.

However well and full of a sense of power
and creative vitality she may be, a woman
should take long hours of rest : to bed at nine
each evening and not up till eight o'clock in
the morning and taking at least one hour lying
down during the day. During the nine months
of bearing the unborn child, she should re-
member she is providing it with vitality every
second of the twenty-four hours of each day,
and she should neither have forced upon her,
nor should she desire to do, work which ever
tires her, though she should live an active, full,
healthy, happy existence and should be capable
of nearly all her normal work and enjoyments.
If she is wise she will work in direct contact
with sun-lit earth. Gardening ensures the truest
sense of physical well-being.

CHAPTER XI

Physical Difficulties of the
Expectant Father

I was a child beneath her touch, a man
When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,
A spirit when her spirit looked through me,
A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran,
Fire within fire, desire in deity.

D. G. ROSSETTI.

"^HE higher the evolution of the creatures,
the more is the parental responsibility
shared by both parents. Among human
beings the institution of monogamy, which is
universally accepted as a higher form of human
relation than polygamy, involves in the dual
partnership a certain sharing of the actual physical
difficulties of parenthood by the father which
is not entailed in the fatherhood of a polygamous
establishment. In fact, a pure monogamy
strictly maintained, does really affect the physical
aspects of expectant fatherhood more than it

93

94 Radiant Motherhood

does the physical aspects of expectant mother-
hood.

The modern pair, being intensely and deeply
united, the effects of the experiences and physical
states of one have actual reverberations and
physical effects on the other. In this respect the
change in the girl's attitude of mind towards the
man, which is sometimes a result of the physical
effect of motherhood (see Chapter III), may have
a very far reaching influence upon the man's
health and happiness if he does not comprehend
the cause of this experience, and, through com-
prehension, know how to endure or overcome
it. Undoubtedly a home which is disturbed
by uncomprehended antagonisms or suppressed
irritations has a physical effect on the general
mental balance, and consequently on the whoie
health of the pair involved.

The way in which these difficulties can be
overcome is by a mutual comprehension, so
far as is possible, of the needs of each other, and
sometimes perhaps by the attitude of " bowing
before the storm " until it has passed, recognizing
that it is a phenomenon beyond human control.

Beyond this may be subtler and more in-
tricate reverberations from his wife's state.
The actual physical fact has to be faced by the
father-to-be that perhaps rapidly following on
the period when all his natural desires for a
completed sex union with his wife were met

His Difficulties 95

and consummated by equal desires in her, there
comes a time when such impulses on his part
are not only not responded to by his wife, but
are perhaps antagonized and may be entirely
thwarted by either her mental or her physical
condition.

In Chapter XII, I will show how, to some
extent, and at probably rather long intervals,
his impulses may be not only satisfied but may
be harmoniously responded to and may be
profoundly valuable. Nevertheless, in almost
every period of coming fatherhood, there will
be at least some months when bodily union is
actively repugnant and consequently actively
harmful, to the wife. At such a time the in-
stinctive feeling of the mother against any act
should be sufficient to bar it, because, even if
the act itself should not be harmful, to force
her will at such a time or to lure her into coercing
herself against her own will is in itself harmful.
A young husband, therefore, will be faced by
periods in which it will be impossible for him
to have any of the unions to which he may
have become accustomed and which his natural
virility may at first continue to demand.

This difficulty is of very varying intensity
for different types of men. Some feel it so
acutely that, although they may do so with
deep shame, they yield to the impulses and are
unfaithful to their wive? in a bodily sense just at

96 Radiant Motherhood

the time when of all others they may be mentally
and spiritually most deeply united to her. Such
shameful conflict of will with deed must have
blackened many a father's memory, and, with
due understanding of all the circumstances, it
should be eliminated from our race : it should
not take place. Nature has created a way out
for the man who deeply loves and is in sym-
pathetic rapport with his wife. While the wife
on whom he centres all his desires and love
is in a bodily condition which deprives her
from such an experience as a complete union
with him, this fact has a mental and consequently
a physical reaction on the better type of man,
and he finds, sometimes even to his surprise,
that the instinctive impulses to which he has
been accustomed die down. At first perhaps
becoming only sufficiently dormant to be con-
quered by a deliberate exertion of the will,
but as the weeks pass and the inhibition from
his wife increases, its reaction stills his desire
also, and his need for unions may temporarily
cease.

This is partly to be explained as a nervous
reaction due to his anxiety and his concentration
of nervous force on his wife, which tend to
inhibit the setting free of the vital energy which
would otherwise demand an outlet.

The vitality, the physical state, the needs,
however, of different men vary very greatly,

His Difficulties 97

and there are those who really do require some
physical assistance in addition to will power
and even a religious determination to help them
through this time of difficulty. For such I
recommend daily thorough washing in cold
water of the organs of generation, and when
an over-mastering desire may come, the soaking
of the whole body in as hot a full length bath
as can be borne.

It may perhaps sound fantastic because one
has not yet scientific proof (neither had Leonardo
da Vinci when he casually made the first announce-
ment that our earth is a planet of the Sun),
but I think, in addition to the physical presence
of the secretions potentially demanding exit,
that a very important factor in the desire for
sex union is an electrical accumulation within
the system, and undoubtedly the soaking in
hot water tends to disperse this tension, and to
allay the urgency for a desire for a sex union.

These two simple physical assistances, com-
bined with a definite will to maintain himself
purely for his wife, and the definite concentra-
tion of his nervous energy to her support with
the desire to contribute everything possible,
mental and bodily, to the well-being of his
child, should suffice to keep the body of a normal
man in that condition which his best instincts
will approve. Others more acutely handicapped
by ' incorrigible physical requirements, may

8

98 Radiant Motherhood

have a hard time ; if it is insupportable, the
explanation of that may be the existence of
some slight physical abnormality for which
they should and can get medical treatment.

After the restraint of the time of betrothal,
followed by the usage of the honeymoon, the
strain of almost total deprivation again, due to
the wife's pregnancy, is greater on the husband
than it need be ; and this is another argument
in favour of deferring conception for at least
some months or a year after the wedding. (Cf.
Married Love, Chapter IX).

Even when, as is indicated later, there may
come times when the impulse of the potential
family is to unite, the physical condition of the
mother may offer a hindrance to the customary
form of union, but this with tact and intelligence
may be surmounted.

CHAPTER XII
The Union of Three

"The Kingdom of Heaven is within you."

IN the early days of our modern civilization,
that is to say within the last couple of
hundred years, the treatment of women
in Western Europe sank to a terribly low ebb.
Although the last few years have done much
to restore woman to some of her ancient rights
and privileges, there are still among us a dis-
tressing proportion of ignorant, coarse and con-
sequently ruthless men who are not debarred
from becoming husbands. Such men have been
in the past in the habit of " using their wives "
regardless of the desires or even the actual
health requirements of the unfortunate women
who are tied to them, and such men have made
a practice of continuing to indulge in sex union
even through the later stages of pregnancy. I
have heard from midwives, to my amazed horror,
that some such depraved men (not bestial, for
no beast behaves in such a way) have even used

ioo Radiant Motherhood

their wives while they are still in bed after child
birth. With such I have in this volume no
concern beyond the mention that they are
loathsome.

Their existence, however, has had an effec