RADIANT MOTHERHOOD
BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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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 effect
on a better type and has given rise to reaction
on the part of men infinitely their superiors.
Women who have seen their sister women thus
outraged have had the support of men of sen-
sitive conscience and consideration when they
have claimed that the mother who is carrying
and nursing her child is sacred, and must not
be approached by her husband at all during the
whole of the child's coming and nursing period.
It has, therefore, come about that a large number
of our best and most high-minded women
(supported by correspondingly high-minded men,
anxious to do the best that is within their power
for their wives and children) hold the view that
no sex union after the third month, or perhaps
that no sex union at all is allowable during
pregnancy.
Now this is one more matter which has not
begun to receive the consideration which it
deserves. When I wrote Married Love I felt
that I was not entitled to decide on this subject,
and I tried to hold the balance between the
various opinions, and drew attention to the
fact that the prospective mother of the lower
creatures is always set apart. This was appar-
The Union of Three 101
ently misinterpreted by some of my readers as
being a personal expression of opinion, and
women wrote or spoke to me about the subject
saying they were sure I was right because their
husbands held the same opinion as I did^ BUT
the women themselves were ashamed^ almost humili-
ated^ to confess that during the carrying of their
child they most ardently desired unions.
To these, as individuals, I pointed out that
I was very far from expressing a definite opinion
in my book on this point, and that my actual
opinion indeed inclined towards thinking that
restricted unions should be advantageous. In
a later edition (the 7th) of my book, I enlarged
on what I had to say on this subject, concluding :
"There is little doubt that in this particular,
even more than in so many others, the health,
needs, and mental condition of women who are
bearing children vary profoundly.'*
Through evidences from very various types of
women in the last year or two, I have now
accumulated facts in sufficient numbers to begin
to see something approaching a possible generali-
zation on this subject.
One of the most striking things I noticed
concerning the evidences I received was that
the women who confessed to a desire for sex
union while they were carrying a child were,
almost without exception, the best type. A
hasty generalization would have predicted that
IO2 Radiant Motherhood
those very women with their pure attitude,
their high degree of culture, their intellectual
attainments, and their gracious self-restraint in
outer life were just exactly those women who
would maintain a fierce chastity during the nine
months. These quite remarkable corresponding
experiences of similarly superior women forced
the matter vividly upon my attention, and I
am now prepared to make a tentative generaliza-
tion, coupled with the generalization to be found
in Chapter XV.
The attitude of one of the women who con-
fessed her intimate feelings to me is typical of
those of this type, and is illuminating. She is
a woman of unusually gifted brain, well endowed
physically and a normally healthy mother in
every respect ; she is noted for a peculiar beauty
and sweetness of disposition, and an unusually
high degree of sensitive appreciation of beauty
and goodness. In conversation she said to
me : " You know I feel so ashamed and degraded
by myself, but just at the time when I felt I
ought to be sacred from these things, I more
ardently desired my husband than I had done
throughout all my married life of fifteen years."
She then told me that her husband who had
been truly devoted to her all his life was par-
ticularly considerate and thoughtful for her
during her time of expectant motherhood, and
that when she tentatively hinted at her wish
The Union of Three 103
for union with him he refused tenderly on the
grounds that the higher standard for men was
to share, however difficult it was, in the nine
months of complete abstinence. He said that,
for the sake of the child and herself, he must
refuse. Her desire, however, again recurred,
much to her own shame and mortification,
because she felt that what her husband said
really represented the highest accepted standard
of pre-natal conduct. Quite a number of rather
similar and also exceptionally endowed women
have confessed to me in almost the same terms
the same feeling.
Before I indicate my conclusions, let us
briefly consider some of the surrounding cir-
cumstances of this problem. As I said in the
opening paragraphs of this chapter, the nobler
and better men have been carried away by a
certain type of woman into thinking that it is
man's share of the difficulties and self-sacrifice
of parenthood that he should entirely sacrifice
what is spoken of as "his desires."^ In my
opinion, this attitude involves two profound
fallacies. The first fallacy is that the act of
sex union is to meet only " his desires " ; it
is not. Completed union is something infinitely
greater : it is a consummation jointly achieved
by both the man and his wife. This attitude
I make clear in my book, Married Love and in
my new Gospel addressed to the Bishops at
104 Radiant Motherhood
Lambeth. And I must postulate in this, my
present book, the far reaching effects on the
bodily, spiritual and mental health of a man and
woman concerned in this complex sex union.
The truth is that the husband who mutually and
considerately unites with his wife when she can
accept him is not merely gratifying his own
desire, he is enriching her whole system as well
as his own through this mutual alchemy.
Before following up the logic of this para-
graph, let us turn to the woman and her needs.
The drain on her system of providing for another
life out of her own tissues, and the substances
which pass through her own body, must be
very severe unless she is amply provided with
all the subtle chemical compounds which are
demanded of her. Now there is much evidence
that in unmarried women, and in young wives
who are debarred from sex union altogether,
something approaching a subtle form of starva-
tion occurs ; conversely that women absorb from
the seminal fluid of the man some substance,
" hormone," " vitamine " or stimulant which
affects their internal economy in such a way
as to benefit and nourish their whole systems.
That semen is a stimulant to a woman was long
ago recognized as probable, and is now the
opinion of several leading doctors. Reference
to this will be found in Havelock Ellis, vol. 5,
1912. See also the paper by Toff in the Cen-
The Union of Three 105
tralblatt Gynakologie, April, 1903. Incidentally
the converse is true, and the man who conducts
himself properly during the sex union, and
remains for long in contact with his wife after the
ejaculation is completed, also benefits through
actual absorption from his wife. For this I
have the testimony of a number of men.
If, therefore, the woman who is becoming a
mother, and who is supporting a second life,
feels the need of union with her husband it
is, I maintain, an indication that her nature
is calling out for something not only legitimate
but positively beneficial and required, and that
it should be not only a man's privilege, but his
delight, to unite with his wife at such a time
and under such circumstances.
The maintenance of the right balance of the
internal secretions of the various glands which
re-act on sex activity is important to women
at all times, and particularly during the time
when a woman is becoming a mother. One
of the results of the growth of the child is the
increased activity of the thyroid gland in the
neck, which considerably increases in size.
A general account of the relation of such
glands to a woman's mental and physical balance
is found in Blair Bell's book (The Sex Complex,
1916), but he does not deal with the special
aspect of a woman's requirements which forms
the subject of this chapter.
io6 Radiant Motherhood
There is, even with the type of woman who
does feel the need of, and ardently desires some
sex unions with her husband during the long
.months, almost always a space of time, perhaps
as much as two or three months consecutively,
when she will have no such desires at all and
there are also times of special liability to lose
the child through premature birth, when unions
should be avoided. Unexpected abortions most
usually take place at the dates around the time
which would have been a monthly period.
When I consider the evidence which I have
before me, which is almost exclusively from
the very best type of women, and when I observe
that the most generally perfected, and finest
women of my acquaintance, and they in par-
ticular, desire occasional moderate intercourse
during pregnancy, I feel that one has a guide
to what is best for the race. In these women
and the conduct which their needs inspire, we
have an indication of the truest and highest
standard of all. The deviations of conduct may
at last return from both the grossness of
abuse and the reaction from it, and settle in the
right and middle path. After the excessively
virtuous, and perhaps undersexed type of woman,
in contrast to the totally base attitude of the
earlier and coarser type of man, has made the
thoughtful speed from baseness to an ascetic
absence of unions, we should be led back by
The Union of Three 107
these well developed and well balanced and
noble minded women to the right and middle
way. In this the spontaneous impulse of the
responsible mother will be the guide for her
husband and will benefit all three concerned.
For, let us realize what a profound mystical
symbol is enacted when the union is not that
of a single man and woman, but of that holy
trinity the father, the mother and the unborn
child. Only during these brief sacred months
can the three be united in such exquisite intimacy,
and during all these months when the child is
forming, it is only in the few infrequent embraces
of subdued passion that the husband and father-
to-be can come truly close to his child, that
he can, through additions to her system from
his own, assist the mother in her otherwise
solitary task of endowing it with everything its
growth demands.
Every woman who is bearing a child by a
man whom she loves deeply, longs intensely
that its father should influence it as much as
it is possible for him to do : in this way and
in this way alone can he give it of the actual
substance of his body.
This view of mine, in the present crude state
of scientific knowledge must, of course, be
stated as an hypothesis, but it will be proved
later on when science is sufficiently subtle to
detect the actual microscopic exchange of par-
io8 Radiant Motherhood
tides which takes place during proper and pro-
longed physical contact in the sex union.
Light on my thesis is also shown by the con-
verse : For instance, an interesting suggestion
was made by a distinguished medical specialist
as a result of his observation of two or three of
his own patients, where the prospective mother
had desired unions and the husband had denied
them thinking it in her interest : the doctor
observed that the children seemed to grow up
restless and uncontrollable, with a marked ten-
dency to self-abuse. To these two or three
instances I have added some which have come
under my own observation and, although as yet
the evidence is insufficient to support a dogmatic
attitude, I incline to think that not only the
deprivation of the mother of proper union during
pregnancy, but also the after effects of some
years of the use of coitus interrupts tends to
have a similar effect upon later children. That
is to say that mothers whose natural desire for
union has been denied, and mothers who are
congenitally frigid rather tend to produce
children with unbalanced sex-feeling liable to
yield to self-abuse. Immoderate and excessive
desire for sex union during pregnancy so far
as I am aware is rare, and where it occurs it
should of course be treated as an abnormality.
The mother of the higher type, such as I
have indicated in the paragraphs above who
The Union of Three 109
does desire unions, will probably only require
them infrequently during these months.
It should be obvious, but as the general public
often lacks a visualizing imagination, I ought to
add, that for the proper consummation of the act
of union, particularly during the later months
of coming parenthood, the ordinary position
with the man above the woman is not suitable
and may be harmful. The pair should either
lie side by side, or should lie so that they are
almost at right angles to each other, so that
there is no pressure upon the woman. Or the
man should lie on his side behind the woman,
which makes penetration easy and safe and free
from pressure. I might point out here a fact
which is of general importance in all true con-
summations of the sex union, and that is that
all the preliminaries and even the final act of
ejaculation itself do not constitute the whole of
the truest union. A truth on which I lay great
stress, although I have not yet dealt with it
fully in any publications, is the fact that an
extremely important phase of each union is the
close and prolonged contact after the culmination
takes place. The benefit to both of the pair
of remaining in the closest possible physical
contact for as long a time as is possible after
the crisis is almost incalculable.
A whole chapter could be written upon this
theme, and indeed it should be written. In
no Radiant Motherhood
the union during pregnancy, a woman is by
nature debarred from the complete and intense
muscular orgasm and for her, indeed, the union
must essentially consist almost solely of the
close contact of skin with skin and of the ab-
sorption of molecular particles as well as the
resolution of nervous tension as the result of
so close and prolonged a contact.
Among the children known to me personally,
several of the most beautiful were the children
^of mothers and fathers who had unions during
the months of their development. The following
quotation from a young husband may be of
interest in this connection :
The day before the birth of our baby, we went for a six-
mile walk over country ground, and I slept with my wife the
very night before he was born. . . . We had unions, but
not in the ordinary position ; she would be on her side with
her back to me, and after union would quietly go off to sleep
in my arms, and in the morning would wake with a joyful
and passionate kiss. Now our baby is one of the finest of
babies from all points of view.
As I have seen photographs of the child,
I can endorse the parent's opinions.
Tolstoy's condemnation of any sex contact
while the wife was pregnant or nursing may
have influenced some serious men, but, as in
many other respects, Tolstoy's teaching is
so widely contradictory, and depends so much
The Union of Three 1 1 1
upon his own age and state at the time, one
cannot but regret the unbalanced influence his
literary power has given him.
While this chapter may be taken as an indica-
tion that sex union is, in my opinion, not only
allowable but advisable for certain types during
the time they are carrying a child, nevertheless
I do not wish it to be misinterpreted in such
a way that a single act of union which is repug-
nant to the prospective mother should be urged
upon her " for her good/'
There is undoubtedly a large body of most
excellent women who are as individuals distinctly
rather undersexed, but who are on the whole
good mothers, profoundly well meaning and
right minded and virtuous women to whom
the time of prospective motherhood is an in-
tensely individual period, during which they
feel an active repugnance to any sex union.
Women of this type are not able to give the
completes! dower to their children, but are im-
mensely superior to the average and baser type
which forms the majority. If such women do
not spontaneously desire unions they should
be left unharried by any suggestion that they
would benefit by them, and the husbands of
such women should, in their own interests,
curb any natural impulses which may conflict
with the intense feeling of the wife. Husbands,
however, should also be aware that such women
ii2 Radiant Motherhood
generally feel as they do because they have
never been wooed with sufficient grace and
tenderness.
To sum up, I am convinced that unless there
is any indication of a disease or abnormal appetite
in any respect, that the natural wishes and
desires of the mother-to-be who is bearing a
child should be the absolute law to herself
and her husband, for during these months
she is on a different plane of existence from the
usual one. She is swayed by impulses which
science is as yet incapable of analysing or com-
prehending, and experience has again and again
proved that she is wise to satisfy any reasonable
desire, whether for the spiritual, bodily or mental
contributions to her growing child's requirements
or those which would strengthen her own power
of supporting that child.
Fortunate indeed is the husband of the best,
well-balanced and developed mother-to-be, who
with intense emotion shares with him in the
closest and most exquisite intimacy, the creating
of a life which has every prospect of adding
beauty and strength to the world.
CHAPTER XIII
The Procession of the Months
"The mother is the child's supreme parent."
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
AT first invisible, with no outer changes to
indicate the vital internal processes, from
the moment of conception an intense
activity has begun within the mother. Some-
times women are aware of the actual moment
of conception, and faintly perceive for the first
two or three days sensations too delicate to be
called pain and yet intense and penetrating as
though of the lightest touch upon the inward
and most sensitive consciousness. . I have read
reports of women, and know one personally,
who felt the process of conception, although
this will probably be generally received with
incredulity. The majority of people are less
completely cognisant of the voices of their own
organism, and perhaps for two or three months
are almost unaware that anything different from
the usual course of their life is taking place.
9
H4 Radiant Motherhood
If, as seems to me unquestionably the best
and happiest relation, the man and woman who
are creating a child are doing so deliberately,
consciously and with acute interest, a mutual
knowledge of the principal stages through which
their child passes should add greatly to their
interest and the intensity of their feeling.
From the first moment of its conception,
indeed often for months before this has been
possible, their child is to the loving pair a living
entity of whom they may speak.
The active egg cell, which is ready for fertili-
zation, is produced in one or other of the two
ovaries, which lie internally and cannot be
touched or reached in any way without operating
upon the mother ; they have no direct contact
with the outer world. These two ovaries each
communicate with the central chamber, which
is called the womb or uterus and this is a strong
muscular organ, into the walls of which the
attachment of the minute embryo fastens, and
within this chamber the growing embryo
gradually fills the space reserved for it. The
womb or uterus has a connection with the outer
world through the lower mouth called the os,
which opens into the vaginal channel. This os
or mouth with its rounded lip can just be felt
at the end of the vaginal channel.
Fertilization consists in the actual penetration
of the egg cell by the male sperm, the nuclei
The Procession of the Months 115
of which unite. As I have elsewhere described
(Married Love, Chap. V) the numbers of male
sperm provided in any act of union outnumber
by millions those actually required, because for
each single fertilization one egg cell combines
with one sperm cell. The egg cell or ovum
is very large in comparison with a single sperm ;
nevertheless it is itself a minute, almost in-
visible protoplasmic speck, measuring rather
less than i/i2oth of an inch in diameter, and
roughly spherical in its shape a minute pellet
of jelly-like protoplasm with a concentrated
centre or nucleus. The single sperm which
unites with it is a still more minute fleck, and is
little more than a nucleus with a film of proto-
plasm round it, and a long cilium or hair-like
continuation which it lashes to and fro, and thus
propels itself or swims towards the egg cell.
Judging by analogy, it leaves this tail outside
the egg cell on the mutual fusion. The nucleus
of the sperm and of the egg unite in a very
complex and precise manner. In other organ-
isms, and probably also in human beings, the
entry of a single sperm to the egg cell shuts
out the possibility of other sperms fusing with
them, because directly it has been fertilized,
the egg cell exudes a film of substance which
antagonizes the other sperms, and which ulti-
mately forms a filmy skin around itself.
From the moment of the fusion of the nuclei
n 6 Radiant Motherhood
of the male and female cells, active changes
and nuclear divisions are in progress. The
egg cell, which is free, travels slowly to the
allotted place in the womb or uterus of the
mother, and there it settles down in the tissue
of the wall and attaches itself. Until it has
attached itself firmly to the wall of the uterus,
conception proper has not finally taken place,
and a fertilized egg cell may be lost through
want of a capacity to attach itself to the womb,
or through some nervous or other disturbance
of the walls of the womb, which throw it off
after it has been attached. The distinction
between the actual moment of fertilization (or
union of the male and female nuclei) and of the
final attachment which secures true conception
is an important one, though frequently over-
looked. Sometimes the failure to conceive a
child may not at all be due to lack of fertility
and readiness to unite on the part of the egg
cell and sperm cell, but may be due to some
nervous or other influence on the wall of the
uterus, which consequently throws off the ovum
before it has firmly settled into its place
there.
A few days after conception, and when the
ovum has attached itself to the proper place, a
definite zone of tissue begins to form which,
growing and altering with the growth of the
tiny developing child (which is now called the
The Procession of the Months 117
embryo), forms a medium of transmission between
it and the mother through which pass the sub-
stances used and excreted by the embryo in its
growth. <
After fertilization, intense and rapid activity
takes place in the nuclei of the cells, first in the
united nucleus of egg and sperm cell, and later
in the nuclei of all the resulting division cells.
The nucleus of the sperm cell is supposed to
contain twelve chromosomes which go through a
formal rearrangement and mingling with the
corresponding chromosomes in the egg cell.
As a result of the complete fusion and inter-
mingling of the male and the female factors
on fertilization, all the resulting divisions of
cells which follow derive their nuclei partly
from the male and partly from the female nucleus
of the parents. Thus, if it were possible to
trace the history of every tissue cell in the body
of your child, we should see that each nucleus
of all the myriads that compose its structure
would ancestrally consist of part of the many
sub-divisions of the nuclei of both father and
mother. Thus to speak of one side of the
body as being male in its inheritance and the
other female, is the most unmitigated nonsense,
though this idea formed the basis of a recent
book.
The rapidity with which the first cells grow
to form tissues, once they have been stimulated
1 1 8 Radiant Motherhood
by union is very great, and from the ovum,
which on the day of fertilization is only i/i2oth
of an inch in size, the growth is so rapid that
it is ten times as big at the end of fourteen days.
By that time the length is one-twelfth of an
inch, and it weighs one grain. By the thirtieth
day the tiny embryo is already one-third of an inch
big, and were it practicable, which, of course,
it is not, to remove it living from its bed of
tissue in the mother's womb and examine it,
even with the naked eye, and still more with
a magnifying glass, it would be possible to see
the rudiments of the legs, head and arms which
are to be.
By the fortieth day the embryo is about one
inch in length, and the shape of the child, which
it is to be, is quite clearly visible. Dark points
are to be seen where later it will have eyes,
nose and mouth, and there is already a hint of
its backbone.
Meanwhile, as may be realized, although to
have grown in forty days to the size of an inch
from a minute speck i/i2oth part of an inch
is a great and rapid achievement, nevertheless
the existence of a thing one inch big within her
makes little outer difference to the mother,
and all the earlier weeks and months of the
growth of this tiny organism do not yet take
more visible effect on the mother's body than
to enhance its contour. After the first child
The Procession of the Months 119
this effect is less noticeable, and a woman may
be unaware that she is about to become a mother.
The first sign in a really healthy woman generally
is in the form of her breasts, which sometimes
begin to enlarge by the second or third week.
It is said that the more healthy and perfectly
fitted for motherhood a woman is, the sooner
her breasts show signs of the effect of the
developing embryo but, particularly with a
woman who has already borne a child, there
may be no external sign until at least three
months have passed.
By the sixth week, the limbs and most essential
parts of the child are apparent, and there are
the minute indications of the beginning of its
future sex organs. It is evident, therefore,
that if there is any desire to control the sex of
the coming child, it is already too late by the
sixth week to do anything, were it ever possible
reliably to control sex at any time. It is, there-
fore, apparent that any passionate desire for a
child of one or the other sex which the mother
may indulge in when she knows she is about
to be a mother, say by the third or fourth month^
is futile. It may also be injurious (see Chapter
XIV).
By the second month, nearly all the parts
are fully apparent, even the eyelids are visible
in the embryo and a tiny nose begins to pro-
ject ; fingers and toes can be seen, and some
I2O Radiant Motherhood
centres of bone begin to harden, as for instance,
in the ribs.
By the third month the embryo reaches an
average length of three or more inches, and
weighs on an average about i\ ounces. In
this month the sex organs of the future baby
are rapidly developing, and indeed are rather
unduly prominent in proportion to the other
parts which enlarge relatively later.
Between the third and the fourth month,
or often not till a little after the fourth month, the
active muscular movements of the embryo's limbs
can be felt by the mother. The experience of
this, like the consciousness of the moment of
conception, depends very much upon the sen-
sitiveness and delicate balance of the mother's
conscious control of herself.
Some are insensitively, though perhaps com-
fortably, unaware of what is going on in their
systems ; others are conscious, not of what is
properly going on, but of what is going wrong
in their systems owing to disease or maladjust-
ment; but there are others who, in perfect health,
are yet so acutely sensitive and conscious that
they can at will detect, as it were, the condition
of their whole organs. Such women as these
will sooner feel the active movements of the
embryo than those who are less perceptive.
As a rule, medical practitioners estimate that
about half-way between the date of conception
The Procession of the Months 121
and the date of birth, which should be a full
nine calendar months, that is to say about 4^
months from the date of conception, muscular
movements of the child are detectable and
distinct.
In the third month, however, some women
are conscious of the most delicate fluttering
sensation.
By the end of the third month, a definite
enlargement of the mother's body becomes
visible, because not only the actual child within
her has to be accounted for in the space among
her organs, but all the accessory growth of the
chamber which accommodates the child in the
womb has to find its place, the womb growing
rapidly and containing not only the child, but
the large amount of fluid by which the child
is surrounded, and in which it partly floats.
The visible changes in the mother to some
extent depend on the proportion of this fluid
which develops, some having much more than
others, and it is to this rather than to the actual
size of the child for the first four or five months
that any outward change is due.
About the end of the third month the soft
and cartilaginous beginnings of the vertebral
column begin to harden in various centres, and
afterwards the hardening of the bones (or ossifica-
tion) slowly spreads throughout the whole skeletal
system. For some other bones in the body,
122 Radiant Motherhood
however, the hardening is not fully completed
by the time of birth.
By the fifth month, the child weighs six to
eight ounces, and is from seven to nine inches
long. By this time its movements are very
active and almost continuous except when it
sleeps. It should be trained to sleep at the
same time as its mother, and thus give her rest.
My phrase " it should be trained to sleep "
may arouse incredulous smiles from medical
men, even from mothers who have borne children,
but it is not impossible to. train a child even
so young as an unborn embryo, strange as it
may sound. From about this month (the fifth)
to the time of birth, the child appears to have
a strong and definite personality, and sometimes,
in some strange and subtle way, it seems
possible to communicate with it. If there is
that sweet and intense intimacy between mother
and father which there should be if the full
beauty of parenthood is to be realized, the
child is apparently to some extent conscious
of the nearness of its father, and I know at
least of one or two couples who spoke to their
coming child as though it were present, and who,
by a touch of the hand could to some extent
control and soothe it so that it would sleep
during the night when the mother desired to
sleep.
About the fifth month the actual nails begin
The Procession of the Months 123
to grow, although the local preparations for
their growth took place much earlier.
After the fifth mcfnth, the child grows rapidly
in weight, in the sixth month weighing nearly
two pounds and during the seventh nearly three.
If it is placed in the best possible position,
its head would be directed downwards, and it
should be lying so that its arms and legs are
tucked in much as a kitten curls up when it is
asleep. It will move, however, sometimes com-
pletely round, entirely altering its position.
By the eighth month it weighs about four
pounds and averages perhaps sixteen inches or
so long. It should by this time be very active,
so that its movements are not only strongly
felt by the mother, but are externally quite
perceptible.
By the ninth month, at birth, the child weighs
between six and eight or more pounds. It is
better for the mother that it should not be too
heavy, as, unless she is a large and strongly
built woman, the actual weight of the child
becomes a great strain upon her, however strong
she may be.
A child may be born during the seventh month,
and children born during the seventh month
live and have sometimes even grown up learned
and important men. Sir Isaac Newton is an
illustration of a premature child. Usually,
however, a seventh month infant is terribly
124 Radiant Motherhood
handicapped ; its skin is not yet fully developed,
and in many respects it is quite unfitted to face
the world.
Many claims are made that a child is seven
months at birth which are based on the mis-
counting of the date of conception or a desire
to conceal a pre-marital conception. When one
is shown, as one sometimes is, a bouncing,
healthy, ordinary baby, and told that it was
" a very forward seven months child," those
who know can only smile or sigh, according to
the circumstances, for an ordinary, healthy,
bouncing baby with nails and well formed skin
has never yet been generated in seven months.
The seventh month is the time of greatest
danger for a late miscarriage, and many have
been the diappointments of parents who ardently
desired a child, but who lost it through prema-
ture birth at the seventh month. I have often
wished to know why this should be so, and have
found no satisfactory answer or indication of
any scientific reason for this, but when revolving
all the possibilities of ancestral reminiscence, it
occurred to me that possibly our earlier ancestors,
ancestors in fact so early as to be scarcely
human, were born at the seventh month. I
was, therefore, interested to find that for some
of the monkeys seven months is the date
of normal birth. Possibly some such ancestral
characteristic may make the seventh month a
The Procession of the Months 125
critical time in the development of the human
embryo, a time when it inherits the reminiscence
of the possibility of separating itself from its
mother and coming into the outer world.
The times, moreover, when birth is most
liable are those few days in each month which
correspond to the regular menstrual flow in
the woman, the periods which would have
taken place at each twenty-eight days had not
the child been developing. It is, therefore,
often desirable, particularly for the later months,
for the woman to take one or two days of complete
rest, or even to remain in bed during that
dangerous day or two, so as to minimize the
possibility of a miscarriage.
The same applies of course to some extent
to the eighth month, but curiously enough,
miscarriages in the eighth month appear to
be less frequent. It is also popularly said that
it is more difficult to rear a child born in the
eighth month than one born in the seventh,
though this does not appear to be true.
The last week or two of the child's antenatal
existence are used by it in finishing itself off ;
growing its tiny shell-like nails, losing the
downy hair which covered its body earlier in
its existence, and in a sense preparing itself,
and particularly its skin, for contact with the
outer world which is to come. Its movements
are very active, and if it is in the most perfect
126 Radiant Motherhood
position, the head tends to sink deep down
towards the canal approaching the circle of
bone through which it will have to pass (see
Chapter II).
The question is often asked as to which is
the time when the embryo is most sensitive to
outward impressions, but as yet there is no
sufficient body of evidence to show that at any
particular time more than another (unless it be
on the actual day of conception, see Chapter II)
is the power of influence greater than any other.
Is it possible to pre-arrange, to determine
the sex of the child which is voluntarily con-
ceived ? Since earliest human experiences have
been recorded, this has formed the theme of
some writers and thinkers, and a variety of
opinions have been expressed, theories pro-
pounded, and rules for the production of a girl
or boy at will have been given. Each of the
views, however, still remains far from being
established, and damaging exceptions may be
found to every theoretic rule. The impartial
observer must feel that we are still unable to
control the sex of the child.
There are three main theories on this subject :
(a) one is that the nature of the child which will
be produced is already pre-determined in the
ovum and sperm cell before they have united ;
(b) the second theory is that the critical moment
which settles the sex of the future offspring is
The Procession of the Months 127
the moment of fertilization and the changes in
the nucleus immediately resulting from it ;
(<:) and the third theory is based on the view
that the differentiation of the organs, which
makes the difference in sex, take place at some
stage in the embryo's development after it is
already a many-celled organism.
The first named theory lies behind the advice
which varies around the theme that according
to whether the conception takes place from the
egg cell grown in the right or the left ovary
and testicle so will the child be a boy or a girl.
Instances of the desired child proving to be of
the sex " arranged for " by following out some
such methods are of comparatively frequent
occurrence, but to the scientist are completely
counter-balanced by other and negative results.
The second and third theories do not offer
the same explicit application in practical advice.
But all the practical advice, on whatever basis
it is builded, appears to me to be laid on insecure
foundations. In my opinion, the complexities
of the factors which determine sex are such
that it depends much less on the outward
and visible nutrition of the mother, than on the
inner and almost inscrutable quality of the
nutrition of the ovum and spermatozoon before
and immediately after fertilization has taken
place.
That sex, even in some vertebrate creatures
128 Radiant Motherhood
is actually controllable through nutrition can be
easily demonstrated with a batch of frogs' eggs.
These can be divided into two portions and by
simple differences in the feeding of the young
tadpoles male or female frogs can be obtained ;
the richly nourished ones produce the female
frogs, those on sparser diet the male. The human
embryo, however, developing in and through
its mother, will depend to some extent on her
diet, but in a much less direct way, for, as all
know, the actual nutrition of the system does
not depend merely on the quantity and valuable
nature of the food taken into the mouth ; it
depends equally or even more on the digestive
power, on the circulatory system, even on the
mentality of the person who eats, and to add
still further to the complexity, the tissues and
organs of one part of the body may be receiving
fully sufficient nutriment, while owing to some
hindrance or difficulty some other tissues may
be wasting and under-nourished. It is conse-
quently necessary before we can theorize, to
determine, even in the healthiest woman, whether
or no a very rich and abundant nutriment is
reaching the developing embryo in its earliest
and most critical days, for, on the other hand,
just iij this critical time, a woman relatively
ill-fed and in relatively poorer health may be
digesting her simple diet well and may be so
stimulated as to provide for the minute develop-
The Procession of the Months 129
ing embryo a richer and more nutritious environ-
ment than her better fed sister. Consequently,
even if, as I incline to believe, the pre-determina-
tion of sex depends on the nutriment procurable
by the early dividing cells of the embryo, it is
still almost beyond the realm of scientific in-
vestigation or of human control to determine
whether or not the embryo is surrounded with
such stimulating food as will produce a girl,
or the rather sparser diet which will produce
a boy.
10
CHAPTER XIV
Prenatal Influence
"To leave in the world a creature better than its
parent this is the purpose of right motherhood."
CHARLOTTE OILMAN : Women and Economic*.
ON the power of the mother directly to
influence her child while it is still un-
born, diametrically opposite opinions
have been expressed, and without exaggeration
I think one may safely say that the tendency
of biological science has been to scout the idea
as " old wives' tales " and incredible super-
stition. Fortunate indeed it is that though
our immature and often blundering science has
in many ways permeated and influenced our
lives, yet this denial of profound truth by those
incapable of handling it in the true terms of
science, has not entirely barred this avenue of
power to the mother. Fortunately there are
innumerable children who owe their physical
and spiritual well-being to the profound racial
knowledge still dormant in the true woman.
130
Prenatal Influence 131
As I said when I touched upon this question
in Married Love :
Yet all the wisest mothers whom I know vary only in the
degree of their belief in this power of the mother, All are
agreed in believing that the spiritual and mental condition
and environment of the mother does profoundly affect the
character and spiritual powers of the child.
Alfred Russel Wallace, the great naturalist
and co-discoverer with Darwin of the principle
of Evolution, was in many respects a pioneer of
unusual foresight and penetrating observation,
who thought that the transmission of mental
influence from the mother to the child was
neither impossible nor even very improbable.
In 1893 he published a long letter detailing
cases, which he prefaced by saying :
The popular belief that prenatal influences on the mother
affect the offspring physically, producing moles and other
birth-marks, and even malformations of a more or less serious
character, is said to be entirely unsupported by any trustworthy
facts, and it is also rejected by physiologists on theoretical
grounds. But I am not aware that the question of purely
mental effects arising from prenatal mental influences on the
mother has been separately studied. Our ignorance of the
causes, or at least of the whole series of causes, that determine
individual character is so great, that such transmission of mental
influences will hardly be held to be impossible or even very
improbable. It is one of those questions on which our minds
should remain open, and on which we should be ready to
132 Radiant Motherhood
receive and discuss whatever evidence is available ; and should
a prlmd fade case be made out, seek for confirmation by some
form of experiment or observation, which is perhaps less
difficult than at first sight it may appear to be.
In one of the works of George or Andrew Combe, I
remember a reference to a case in which the character of a
child appeared to have been modified by the prenatal reading
of its mother, and the author, if I mistake not, accepted the
result as probable, if not demonstrated. I think, therefore,
that it will be advisable to make public some interesting cases
of such modification of character which have been sent me
by an Australian lady in consequence of reading my recent
articles on the question whether acquired characters are in-
herited. The value of these cases depends on their differential
character. Two mothers state that in each of their children
(three in one case and four in the other) the character of the
child very distinctly indicated the prenatal occupations and
mental interests of the mother, though at the time they were
manifested in the child they had ceased to occupy the parent,
so that the result cannot be explained by imitation. The
second mother referred to by my correspondent only gives
cases observed in other families which do not go beyond ordinary
heredity.
. . . Changes in mode of life and in intellectual occupa-
tion are so frequent among all classes that materials must exist
for determining whether such changes during the prenatal
period have any influence on the character of the offspring.
The present communication may perhaps induce ladies who
have undergone such changes, and who have large families,
to state whether they can trace any corresponding effect on
the character of their children. Nature, August 24 1893,
PP- 389> 39-
Yet this suggestive pronouncement of the
Prenatal Influence 133
world-famous naturalist has never been seriously
followed up by scientists.
I think the time is now ripe for a definite
statement that : The view that the pregnant
woman can and does influence the mental states of the
future child is to-day a scientific hypothesis which
may be shortly -proved. I make this definite state-
ment, in conjunction with the cognate and
illuminating facts from other fields of research,
a few of which are discussed in the following
pages.
That our mental states can affect, not only
our spirits and our points of view, but actually
the physical structure of our bodies, is demon-
strable in a hundred different ways, and appears
either to be proved or merely suggested accord-
ing to the bias and temperament of the one to
whom the demonstration is made. But there
is one at least of these physical correlations
which can be demonstrated with scientific
thoroughness, and which proves beyond doubt
that the mental state of the mother has a re-
action upon her infant even after it has severed
its physical connection with her, and is a baby
of a few months old. This fact is that a nursing
mother who is subjected to a violent shock
which results in a paroxysm of temper or of terror
in her own mind, conveys the physical result
of this to her infant when next she nurses it,
so that the child has either an attack of indi-
134 Radiant Motherhood
gestion or a fit. The effect of the mother's
mental state is transmitted by the influence
on the milk, the chemical composition of which
is subtly altered by her nervous paroxysm,
and which thus acts as a poison to the infant.
A much more subtle and closer correlation
must exist between the mother's mental states
and the child when it is still not yet free and
independent in the outer environment of the
world but while it finds in her body its entire
environment, its protection and the resources
out of which it is building its own structure,
while the blood and the tissues of her body
form its whole world, while through them and
through them alone can it obtain all its nourish-
ment.
True, the result of the mental state of the
mother which we can see is, apparently, merely
the physical result on the child's digestion of
the milk which has become poisoned : but to
stop at this point like a jibbing mule, and to
refuse to take the further step in the argument
because the child is yet too young for us to
understand its resulting mental states, which
reason indicates must be correlated with its
poisoned digestive system, is to defraud the
mind of the logical conclusion of a sequence
of ideas.
The argument is as follows :
(a) The mother's intense mental experience
Prenatal Influence 135
and consequent nervous paroxysm has a physical
result upon the composition of her milk
(presumably, therefore, upon other portions
of her body, though this is irrelevant for the
moment) ;
() This physically altered milk has a physical
effect upon the infant who shows other and
more extreme forms of physical distress;
(c) This physical distress must obviously to
some greater or lesser degree, affect the child's
nervous system ; and (which is the point where
the old-fashioned will break off);
(d) Consequently the child's mental state will
be affected although it is too young to trans-
late this into conscious forms.
Were I to make this the main thesis of my
book, examples of the effect of mental states on
bodily functions could be readily multiplied,
and illustrations drawn from facts quoted in other
connections could be found in a great number
of medical works. I here bring together a few
which when placed in juxtaposition offer if
not proof, yet such strong support of my theme
as to place it in the realm of the scientifically
ascertainable. For instance, Blair Bell in The
Sex Complex, 1916, says :
Religious manias may lead to ideas which fill the patient
with abhorrence of sexual intercourse, and in this wav directly
136 Radiant Motherhood
interfere with the genital functions. There is indeed no doubt
whatsoever that the mind influences function just as function
influences the mind ; for example, it has been shown that
fright leads to an immediate increase in the output of
suprarenin, and we know well from constant clinical obser-
vations that hypothyroidism leads to mental depression (pp. 209
and 210).
and Havelock Ellis in The Psychology of Sex,
vol. 5, 1912, says :
We can, again, as suggested by Fere, very well believe that
the maternal emotions act upon the womb and produce various
kinds and degrees of pressure on the child within, so that the
apparently active movements of the foetus may be really con-
secutive on unconscious maternal excitations. We may also
believe that, as suggested by John Thomson, there are slight
incoordinations in utero, a kind of developmental neurosis,
produced by some slight lack of harmony of whatever origin
and leading to the production of malformations. We know,
finally, that, as Fere and others have repeatedly demonstrated
during recent years by experiments on chickens, etc., very
subtle agents, even odors, may profoundly affect embryonic
development and produce deformity. But how the moth . j>
psychic disposition can, apart from heredity, affect specifically
the physical conformation or even the psychic disposition of
the child within her womb must remain for the present an
insoluble mystery, even if we feel disposed to conclude that
in some cases such action seems to be indicated.
Direct evidence of the physical aspect of
thesis is found in the fact quoted by Marshall
in The Physiology of Reproduction^ 1910, p. 566 :
Prenatal Influence 137
So also it has been found that immunity from disease may
be acquired by young animals being suckled by a female which
had previously become immune, the antibody to the disease
being absorbed in the ingested milk.
Further argument upon these lines might
well be brought forward in favour of the view
that the potential mother, during the months
whilst she is acting as the child's total environ-
ment in all physical ways, is also through her
mental states and conditions affecting the child's
ultimate mentality and artistic and spiritual
powers.
This subtle control exerted over the forma-
tion of the child may be visualized as more
like some effect parallel to the remote influences
of the internal secretions in controlling the
other organs of the body than the more mechanical
picture of things visualized by the Mendelians
and those who concentrate on the purely physical
and material aspects of heredity as related to
chromosome structure.
The tendency in recent years in biological
work has been far too much to lay stress upon
the curiously mathematical laws Mendel dis-
covered, and consequently to concentrate atten-
tion upon the physical chromosomes as con-
taining the factors which carry hereditary
qualities. Physiologists arc now making an
attempt to bring back into the treatment of life
a more rational outlook, and nothing has con-
138 Radiant Motherhood
tributed more to the scientific basis of this than
the recent following up of the suggestions made
so long ago as 1869 by Brown-Sequard. Since
Starling named the internal secretions Hormones
(see the Croonian Lecture, 1 905) they have been
much discussed by physiologists and some
medical men (see for instance the recent work of
Blair Bell, The Sex Complex, 1916 already quoted).
To form a rough mental picture of what
is happening one must combine the physio-
logical and the mechanical outlooks. One then
obtains the idea that the mother is, through
her mental states, affecting and to some extent
controlling the production of the various
internal secretions, and other more subtle
and still undetected influences from various
organs upon other organs, and that, in so doing
she is making the environment for the various
hereditary factors, in which their potentialities
find it possible to develop or to be suppressed
according to the circumstances which she thus
creates. As is now beginning to be realized,
we all have an immense number of latent poten-
tialities, which may lie dormant and develop
only under suitable circumstances.
Thus in my view the mother may actually
and in every sense fundamentally influence and
control the character of her child, working
through the remote effects of internal secretions
which play on the complex material factors of
Prenatal Influence 139
hereditary qualities which form the material
basis of the child's potentialities.
Thus both heredity and environment have a
vital part to play in building character, but
greater than either is the subtler environment within
the prospective mother created by her during the
nine antenatal months.
Sometimes people who would otherwise like
to believe that a mother has this power, are
deterred by their own experience or that of others,
who have, under conditions of distress and un-
favourable circumstances, had children whose
dispositions seem not to have suffered, but
appear as sunny and happy as a child ap-
parently conceived under more favourable cir-
cumstances. Here, however, one is immediately
faced by the difficulties of accurate observation
entailing a large number of data which tend
to cancel out ; for the mother who may per-
sonally have been below her usual standard of
health and spirits while bearing the child may,
nevertheless, actually be in such a good physical
condition, or be a member of such a sound,
healthy stock that the child's heredity was better
than that of the average human being, and
consequently that the child itself was provided
with a healthy well-run body.
While to contrast with it and apparently to
refute my thesis, there may be a mother full
of the most ardent hopes and buoyant spirit,
140 Radiant Motherhood
looking forward with supreme joy to the advent
of her baby, doing all she can to give it every
beautiful mental impression and physical health,
whose work may yet be undone by some cruel
chance, such as venereal infection, or some local
malformation which has resulted in weakness
in, let us say, the child's digestion. We all
know how peevish mere indigestion will make
anybody. Or she, the well-intentioned and out-
wardly well-circumstanced mother may, unknown
to herself, have been battling against the cruel
handicap in some racial, heritable defect in her
husband ; the child, therefore, may, with all
her efforts, yet fail to be joyous owing to the
too strong physical bias which chance or
heritable disease has given it.
The existence of such apparently conflicting
and contradictory individual instances in no way
refutes my main thesis, which is that granted
equal conditions of clean and wholesome ancestry,
granted equally favourable conditions of health
and nutrition for the mother during her period
of carrying the child, that that child benefits
and is superior to the other who has had the
advantage of a happy mother's conscious effort
to transmit to it a wide and generally intel-
lectual and spiritual interest in the great and
beautiful things of the world.
This fact is often illustrated in the different
children of the same parents. Of children
Prenatal Influence 141
born under as nearly identical circumstances
as may be possible within a year or two of time,
the one may have a totally different disposition
with totally different qualities from the other.
The chance of birth, the inheritance of the in-
numerable possible characteristics latent in both
parents might be sufficient to account for this
were chance alone at work, but very often in-
formation may be obtained from the observant
mother which correlates her own state while
carrying the child with the after condition of
the child itself.
One rather striking instance of such a corre-
lation is by a curious chance known to me,
and should be of general interest. Oscar Wilde,
whose genius was sullied by terrible sex crimes,
which he expiated in prison, is known to all
the world as a type whose distressing perversion
is a racial loss. His mother once confided to
an old friend that all the time she was carrying
her son Oscar, she was intensely and passionately
desiring a daughter, visualizing a girl, and, so
far as was possible, using all the intensity of
purpose which she possessed to have a girl,
and that she often in after years blamed herself
bitterly, because she felt that possibly his per-
verted proclivities were due to some influence
she might have had upon him while his tiny
body was being moulded.
Evidence upon this subject of the power or
142 Radiant Motherhood
otherwise of the mother to influence her coming
child is wanted 5 and it is very difficult to obtain,
partly because of the reticence of those who
have been through the dim and secret mysteries
of motherhood, and partly because their accuracy
cannot well be tested until after the child has
reached j maturity. In these after years the
mother is likely to be swayed by the course the
child's life has taken, into unconsciously laying
stress upon one or other point which may seem
correlated with its after achievements.
Evidence, however, in the form of notes
kept during the time the mother is carrying
the child which may be compared with the
child's life in later years are very valuable, and,
if any readers have such with which they would
entrust me, a sufficient body of such evidence
might possibly be accumulated to assist materially
in the formation of a strong spiritual asset in
the creation of the best possible human
beings.
>The father who desires to influence his child
must do so through the mother : had clever
men more generally realized this we should
have heard less of the lament that clever men
so often have stupid sons.
Of the more physical aspects of the mother's
power to influence the form of the development
of her growing child we have abundant evidence.
If the mother is starved, and by starved I mean
Prenatal Influence 143
less the actual starvation from want of food
than the subtler starvation of improper food or
food lacking in the truly vital elements, then
the child visibly suffers. For instance, rickets,
a disease of grave racial significance to which
reference has already been made (see Chapter
II), is due to the lack of certain necessary
elements in the food.
A simple diet, the simpler the better, is sufficient
adequately to provide all the essentials of nourish-
ment for the mother and her coming child,
and much indeed may be done for the general
health and beauty of the child by providing the
mother with the best form of material from
which the embryo may build itself. The use
of foods containing large quantities of vitamine
(real butter and oranges, for instance, are specially
good) is very advisable. They are not only
enriching in their action in assisting true assimi-
lation of other foods, but they probably tend to
make good the general drain on the mother's
vitality which would naturally take place were
she not amply provided with these most subtle
ingredients, which, though present in such
minute quantities in fresh food, are yet of in-
calculable value. The effect of proper and
specially adapted dieting, not only on the health
of the mother, but also on the beauty and general
vigour of the child, is a thing which is particu-
larly expressed by various writers who have
14-4 Radiant Motherhood
followed up the early experiments on diet made
by Dr. Trail. 1
There is also Dr. Alice Stockham's book,
Tokology, to which I have previously drawn
attention. Although, as I then said, it contains
errors of a comparatively trivial nature such as
calling carbonaceous material " carbonates,"
which may have been sufficient to prejudice the
scientific mind against the rest of her work, it
contains the profound and valuable message Mr.
Rowbotham published in England in 1841,
amplified, and to some extent enriched by this
woman doctor's experience.
Those lovers who ardently desire their child
and have a mental picture of it long before its
birth may delight in speaking of it to each other
as though it were, as indeed it is, alive. For
this a name is required, but in order to avoid
the danger suggested on page 141, it is wiser
perhaps to choose the name of both a girl and
a boy, the name which the child would be called
by according to its sex after birth, and, while it
is still unseen, to link the two together in
speaking of the coming child.
Sometimes for private reasons a girl in par-
1 This book has been reprinted in a modern expurgated
and mutilated edition, which deprives the reader of the most
valuable portions of the author's work. I should advise
readers to see one of the original early editions if they desire
to read the book intended by the author for the public.
Prenatal Influence 145
ticular or a boy in particular may be desired,
but the well-balanced mind of a parent, particu-
larly of the first child, should welcome either a
son or a daughter, each of whom has its peculiar
charms, and neither of whom can be described
as more valuable than the other. Our false
estimate of boys as superior is largely due to
economic conditions and the custom of male
entail. This should, and of course will, be
altered. It is the first child, whether boy or
girl is no matter, who is " the first-born " with
all that that connotes in rapture and wonder to
its parents.
Owing to the fact that more boys are born
than girls, there is always the greater chance
of the birth of a boy than a girl. From this
point of view it would appear that girls are
more precious, but boys are oftener ailing and
feeble and difficult to rear, so that it is perhaps
well that more of them should be born than
of their stronger sisters.
Throughout its coming, the little one should
be thought of in such a way that it will be
equally welcome whichever its sex, and thus be
given the best chance of developing fully and
naturally in its own way.
XI
CHAPTER XV
Evolving Types of Women
Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the
embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.
Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine
of various colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel
to the brim.
No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The
delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy
delight.
Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination 01
joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.
TAGORE: Gitanjati.
ONE of the great sources of disharmony in
our social life is the extent of the extra-
ordinary ignorance about ourselves which
still persists. From this spring our conflicting
opinions and diametrically opposed views, and
also the apparently self-contradictory evidence
on almost any point of fundamental importance
which is brought before the public.
In no respect is there more conflict of opinion
than concerning the age at which a woman
14$
Evolving Types of Women 147
should marry and become a mother. On the
one hand, we have advocates of very early
motherhood, and they point to the fact that a
girl of seventeen is often already a woman and
strongly sexed ; they point to the hackneyed
statement " that a girl matures sooner than a
boy " ; they point to the fine and healthy babies
which very young mothers may bear and to the
greater pliability and ease of birth, and these
facts and their arguments may appear con-
clusive. On the other hand, the actual experi-
ence of many people conflicts with these
apparently justified conclusions.
All the highly evolved races tend to prolong
childhood and youth. All tend to replace early
marriage by later marriage and parenthood to
the obvious advantage of the race.
Marriage and parenthood at fourteen, fifteen
and sixteen, which once were common in almost
every country, are being replaced by later mar-
riage and parenthood. As Finot 1913 says :
A mystic chain appears to attach the age for love to the
consideration enjoyed by women. In the Far East, woman
is offered very young to the passion of man, and disappears
from existence at|the time her contemporaries are just beginning
to live. Love, for this very reason, has a purely sensual stamp,
degrading to man and to woman. The lengthening of the
age of love elevates the dignity, and at the same time increases
the longevity, of woman. Beyond the age of thirty or forty
the woman, dead to love, was fit only for religion or witch-
148 Radiant Motherhood
craft. Her life was shattered. Prematurely aged she went
out of the living world. The prolonged summer of Saint-
Martin in women will doubtless have consequences which we
should be wrong to fear. There is a solidarity of ages. The
cares bestowed on the child benefit the old man. The enlarge-
ment of the age of maturity allows the child longer to enjoy the
years of life that are intended to form bodies and souls. . . .
The sentimental life of the country has undergone similar
results. Balzac, in proclaiming the right to love on the part
of the woman of thirty, aroused in his contemporaries astonish-
ment bordering on indignation. In his day, was not a man of
forty-four considered an old man ? l Let us not forget that
forty or fifty years before Balzac, a philosopher like Charles
Fourier, despairing of the sentimental fate of young girls who
had not found a husband before the age of ... eighteen years,
claimed for them the right to throw propriety to the winds.
According to the author of the Thforie des Quatre-Mouve-
ments* this was almost the critical age {Problems of the Sexes,
transl. Jean Finot 1913).
The relative ages of husband and wife also
have their influence, but should, to some extent,
depend more on their physiological age than on
their actual years. They should, however, not
be widely different. As Saleeby says :
The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widow-
hood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency,
every demand for a higher standard of life, every agggravation
for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden
of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age
1 Balzac : Physiologic du Manage.
* Charles Fourier, Leipzig, 1808.
Evolving Types of Women 149
at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his
seniority contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.
We, therefore, see that, as might have been expected, this
question of the age ratio in marriage, though first to be con-
sidered from the average point of view of the girl, has a far
wider social significance. First, for herself, the greater her
husband's seniority, the greater are her chances of widow-
hood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous pre-
ponderance of married women. But further, the existence
of widowhood is a fact of great social importance because it
so often means unaided motherhood, and because, even when
it does not, the abominable economic position of women in
modem society bears hardly upon her. It is not necessary
to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it
is well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter
consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked
(Woman and Womanhood^ 1912).
I have observed many girls, who were in every
true sense of the word girls (that is unconscious
of personal sex feeling, still growing in bodily
stature and still developing in internal organiza-
tion) until they were nearly thirty years of age.
In my opinion, the girl who is thoroughly well-
balanced, with an active brain, a well-developed
normally sexed body, natural artistic and social
instincts is not more than a child at seventeen,
and to marry her at that age or anything like
it is to force her artificially, and to wither off
her potentialities.
The type of woman who really counts in our
modern civilization is, as a rule, not of age
150 Radiant Motherhood
until she is nearly thirty. Not only does she
not mature sooner than a boy ; she matures
actually later than a large number of men. I
have now accumulated a wide and varied amount
of evidence in favour of the view which I here
propound, namely, that there is a most highly
evolved type of woman in our midst. This
type, which it will be agreed is the most valuable
we possess, encompasses women of a wide range
of potentialities ; they have beautiful entirely
feminine bodies, with all feminine and womanly
instincts well developed, with a normal, indeed
a rather strong, sex instinct and acute personal
desires which tend to be coricentrated on one
man and one man alone. I will provisionally
call this the late maturing type, for such a woman
is generally incapable of real sex experience
till she is about twenty-seven or thirty. I think
that she is in line with the highest branch of
our evolution, that she represents the present
ffower of human development, and that through
her and her children the human race has the
best hope of evolving on to still higher planes
but, and this is very important, she is not fitted
for marriage until she is at least twenty-seven,
probably later, her best child-bearing years may
be after she is thirty-five, and her most brilliant
and gifted children are likely to be born when
she is about forty.
Personal evidence, and also facts in the in-
Evolving Types of Women 151
teresting letters sent me by my readers have
brought to my knowledge the existence of an
important proportion of women who are abso-
lutely unconscious of personal localized sex
feeling until they are nearly or over thirty
one woman was nearly fifty before she felt and
knew the real meaning of sex union though many
years married.
From outward observation of the general
physique of such of these women as I have
seen face to face, I may say that, as a rule, they
retain their youth long ; they retain also a buoy-
ancy and vitality which, if they are properly
treated, and have the good fortune to be married
at the right time to the right man, may remain
with them almost throughout their lives. Such
women not only prolong their girlhood, they
defer their age. Such women have, of course,
throughout the centuries appeared from time to
time, and I fancy have generally in the past,
and still often in the present, suffered acutely
through marrying too young. When they marry
too young they tend, by the forcing of their
feelings, by the deadening through habit of
their potentialities, by the trampling on the
unfolded possibilities within them, to be turned
artificially into a " cold type of woman.*'
Women now older tell me of the fact that
for the first years of their married life they
could give no response, but when they were
152 Radiant Motherhood
respectively twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one or
more, they began first to feel they were truly
women. Young husbands have written to me
of their distress that their wives (aged about
twenty to twenty-three), delightful girls in every
respect, seemed utterly incapable of any response
in the marital orgasm. Sometimes this depends
on her conformation, but such an incapacity I
often attribute to the girl's marriage being
premature. When she is twenty-seven or twenty-
eight perhaps her internal development will be
complete, and she will then be ripe for the full
enjoyment of marriage : but if instead of a
considerate husband she marries one who merely
uses her, she stands little chance ever of knowing
the proper relation of wifehood and motherhood.
These facts which I could vary with details
from individual experiences, in my opinion, in-
dicate a profound truth in the development of
the human race. It is this : not only do the
higher races of human beings have a prolonged
childhood and youth, but the most highly
evolved, mentally, physically and racially, of
our girls have not finished their potential growth
into maturity until they are in the neighbourhood
of thirty years of age.
Does this then mean that all marriage should
be deferred till so late ? By no means, nor is
the above conclusion any reflection on the type
of girl who ripens much more quickly. I
Evolving Types of Women 153
fully recognize that from the point of view of
their sex potentialities some girls are complete
women at seventeen or eighteen, and that they
may then be very strongly sexed indeed. Such
women should marry young.
The marked differentiation of type of these
very notably different women can be traced
through many other aspects of their lives.
I consider, for instance, the type of whom I
spoke in Chapter XII (who has a natural desire
for union, representing the highest and most
complex human union, the union of three)
belongs very frequently to the late maturing
and the most highly evolved form of femininity.
It should be recognized that there are among
us not only different races, but that in the same
stock, sometimes in the same family of appar-
ently no specially mixed ancestry, we may find
one or more members of the late maturing,
others of the early maturing type. Sometimes
of two sisters, the elder may perhaps be still
in mind a girl while her younger sister is a
woman, as can be observed by any one with a
large circle of acquaintances. It would be
well, I think, if humanity, whose proper study
is mankind, were at least to know themselves
sufficiently well to realize the existence of such
different types, and their possible potential
value as well as their differing needs. The
energy at present wasted in the acrid statement
154 Radiant Motherhood
of conflicting views would be so much better
spent on the careful recording and recognizing
of varying types.
The advice to marry young, which is in every
respect socially wise and physiologically correct
for some, should not be hurled indiscriminately
at all women, because for the late maturing
such advice is socially disadvantageous and
physiologically wrong.
I am now ready to consider the question of
the proper age for motherhood about which an
immense variety of opinion is expressed. The
general tendency has been, even in the last
few years, to raise the age at which a girl may
marry, and to raise the age which the medical
profession advises as the earliest suitable for
motherhood. But still one often hears of elders,
whom one would in other respects like to follow,
advising the early bearing of children.
Now I should like every potential parent to
consider what type of child they want. Do
they want to secure healthy, jolly little animals
with no more brains than are sufficient to see
them creditably through life ? If so, let them
have their children very early. Such healthy
sound people with no special gifts are valuable,
and there is much work in the world for them to
to do. On the other hand, do they want to
take the risk for their child of a possibly less
robust body, but with the possibility, indeed, in
Evolving Types of Women 155
healthy families, almost the certainty, of an
immensely greater brain power, and a more
strongly developed temperament ? Then let
them have their children late. And if a man
desires to have a child who may become one
of the master minds whose discoveries, whose
artistic creations, whose ruling power stamps
itself upon the memory of our race, whose name
is handed down the ages, then let the father
who desires such a child mate himself with the
long-young late-maturing type of woman I
have just described, and let her bear that child
some time between the age of thirty-five and
forty-five.
How often one hears some version of the
phrase : " Yes, it is so sad, poor, dear Lord
So-and-So, a charming man, but no brains at
all ; his younger brother such a brilliant man ;
but that is always the way, the eldest sons in
the aristocracy do seem to get the gift of property
balanced by the lack of brains." Now I enquire,
and I should like my readers to enquire, into
the secret of this phenomenon, which is by no
means universal, but is sufficiently common to
be endorsed. In my opinion, the interpretation
of this fact is that the earlier children were born
when the mother was still too young to endow
them with brains, particularly if the mother
was one of the gifted and cultivated women of
the late-maturing type.
156 Radiant Motherhood
This also leads me to consider another gener-
ality which is frequently used as an argument
by those who oppose conscious and deliberate
parenthood. Some people say that by the direct
control of the size of the family to a small
limited number which the parents definitely
desire, we would be eliminating genius from
our midst, and their argument runs : Look at
Nelson, he was a fifth son ; look at Sir Walter
Scott, he was a third son ; and so on. This to
the uncritical seems conclusive, and many people
of great capacity, ideals and heart, who other-
wise would be wholly on my side in my claim
that every child born shall be deliberately desired,
and that all other conceptions shall be consciously
prevented, are swayed by this argument and
say : * Yes, your position would be obviously
the right one for the race if it were not that
later children are so often the better." I turn,
therefore, to a consideration of the life histories
of these men's mothers. Why was Nelson the
genius of his family ? Because his mother
was too young to bear geniuses at the time
she was bearing her elder children. But this
is not yet a sufficiently accurate consideration of
the subject ; I want to know also of which type
the mother was, for, in my opinion, the right
age for the parenthood of a woman depends
also on the type to which she belongs, whether
the early maturing or the late maturing. If
Evolving Types of Women 157
she knows herself to be the latter, after it is
patent, as it must become patent to every one
once the idea is placed before them, that such
women are in our midst, then that woman and
her husband should usually defer parenthood until
she has reached at least thirty years of age.
If this were done, then not the fourth, fifth or
seventh but the first child would stand a very
great chance of being a world leader, a powerful
mind, perhaps even a genius. First children
have been geniuses (Sir Isaac Newton was an
only child) ; all depends on the age, the conscious
desire, the general type and the surrounding
conditions during prenatal state of her infant,
of the mother who bears him and the father
from whom he also inherits potentialities.
A few investigations bearing on the effect
of the parent's age have been published by the
Eugenics Society and some individuals, but
none of these appear to me to be of any value,
for none take into account the necessary data
concerning the type of the mother which I
here point out, and in all the calculations
crude errors occur.
The best woman, with comparatively few
exceptions, is already and will still more in the
future be the woman who, out of a long, healthy
and vitally active life, is called upon to spend
but a comparatively small proportion of her
years in an exclusive subservience to motherhood.
158 Radiant Motherhood
A woman should have eighty to ninety active
years of life ; if she bears three or perhaps
four children, she will, even if she gives up all
her normal activities during the later months
of pregnancy and the earlier of nursing, still
have cut out of her life but a very small proportion
of its total. She should, indeed, after she once
is a mother, always devote a proportion of her
energies to the necessary supervision of her
children's growth and education, but with the
increasing number of schools and specialists,
nurses, teachers and instructors of all sorts,
the individual mother has much less of the
purely physical labour of her children than
formerly. That this is not only so, but is
approved by the State can be seen at once by
imagining a working class mother insisting on
keeping her child at home all day under her
personal supervision the School Inspector would
step in and take the child from her for a certain
number of hours every day. But this book is
primarily for middle and upper class women,
and for them motherhood increasingly should
mean a widening of their interests and occupations.
The counter-idea still expressed, even by
leading doctors and others, is that the whole
capability of the individual mother should be
devoted solely to contributing to her children.
This is exemplified in the recent statement of
Blair Bell : " A normal woman, therefore, would
Evolving Types of Women 159
not exploit her capabilities for individual gain,
but for the benefit of her descendants. 1 ' This
view is a false one and is based on a narrow
vision.
This pictures an endless chain of fruitless
lives all looking ever to some supreme future
consummation which never materializes. By
means of this .perpetual sinking of woman's
personality in a mistaken interpretation of her
duty to the race, every generation is sacrificed
in turn. The result has not been productive
of good, happiness or beauty for the majority.
No ; the individual woman, normal or better
than the average, should use her intellect for her
individual gain in creative work ; not only because
of its value to the age and community in which
she lives, but also for the inheritance she may
thus give her children and so that when her
children are grown up they may find in their
mother not only the kind attendant of their
youth, but their equal in achievement. With a
woman of capacities perhaps still exceptional,
but by no means so rare as some men writers
would like to pretend, the pursuit of her work
or profession and honourable achievement in
it is not at all incompatible with but is highly
beneficial to her motherhood. As Charlotte
Gilman says :
No, the maternal sacrifice theory will not bear eiamination.
160 Radiant Motherhood
As a sex specialized to reproduction, giving up all personal
activity, all honest independence, all useful and progressive
economic service for her glorious consecration to the uses of
maternity, the human female has little to show in the way
of results which can justify her position. Neither by the
enormous percentage of children lost by death nor the low
average health of those who survive, neither physical nor mental
progress, give any proof to race advantage from the maternal
sacrifice. Women and Economics.
CHAPTER XVI
Birth and Beauty
" Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like
flowers. Thou knowest how to wait.
Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small
wild flower."
TAGORB : Gitanja/i.
WHEN all goes well and there is no acci-
dental hastening of the birth by shock
or jar which dislodges the child too
soon, the birthday finds its place in the ordinary
rhythm of the woman's existence. We speak
generally of the " nine months " during which
the child is borne by its mother, but this nine
months is a fictitious number depending on our
calendar months, and the developing child is
actually ten lunar months within its mother.
Just as the average almost universal period of
the woman's rhythm has twenty-eight days
cycle, so on this number of days does the circle
of months leading to birth depend. Ten months
of twenty-eight days each is the full period of
development, at the close of which the child
12 *"
1 62 Radiant Motherhood
seeks its exit through birth. As a rule the day
of birth corresponds to some extent, if not
quite accurately, to the former rhythm of her
menstrual waves.
An interesting paper containing various scien-
tific data (not all of which are universally ac-
cepted) is to be found in the Anat Anzeiger of
1897 by Beard. What is actually the spring
behind this rhythm is as yet largely unknown,
but recent work on the internal secretions from
the ovary such as was described by Starling
in the Croonian Lecture, 1905 (who quotes
Marshall and Jolly and other workers), appears
to indicate that this function like so many others
in our system is due to the activities of certain
glands yielding internal secretions. These,
penetrating the whole system, have a controlling
influence upon activities remote from their source.
For the birth itself, the mother should be
in experienced hands, preferably those of a
highly trained and certified midwife or mater-
nity nurse such as Queen Charlotte's or the
London Hospital supplies, one who is experi-
enced in all that has to be done in normal, healthy
circumstances, and who can detect at once any
necessity for specialized help. If the mother
has lived rightly and wisely, dieted as I suggest
and is properly formed (as, of course, should be
assured through examination some time before
the birth is expected), the birth should be, how-
Birth and Beauty 163
ever terrible an experience, yet one which is
safely passed.
In the days which follow she will have much
to endure, and instead of the peace and quietness
which she expected, she will find that she has
constant disturbances incidental to the nursing
of one who is, in essentials, a surgical case.
Possibly due to the inconveniences involved
in staying in bed, there is a tendency at present
to encourage the mother to get up and at least
walk about the room and be up for an hour or
two within ten days or less of the date of the
birth. Almost every one with whom I have
come in contact, advises this, and in a certain
school, particularly those who go in for what
is called " Twilight Sleep," there is not only
an effort to get the mother up early, but a pride
on the part of the mother and her advisers
when she gets up perhaps within two or three
days of the birth.
Some women who have had a good many
children boast of how they are up and about
in ten days. I glance critically at all who tell
me that, examining both their figures and their
general appearance. Only one woman* of all
who have ever discussed this matter with me urged
the entirely old-fashioned month in bed following
the birth. But, and this is very important, she
was the only one who, having had many children^
at the same time had done most notable and arduous
164 Radiant Motherhood
Irain work, and also retained her youthful figure
and general appearance.
This quite exceptional and old-fashioned ad-
vice is what I would hand on to women to-day.
The modern craze for getting up quickly is
absolutely wrong, and has a fundamentally dele-
terious effect on the general health of our women.
I should go so far as to say that not only should
a woman stay in bed the entire month, but that
she should for two weeks longer scarcely put
her foot to the ground. She may lie out of
doors or on sofas, but, after a birth, she should
lie about for the whole of six weeks.
This may startle my readers. I, who look
so keenly into the future, who am so progressive,
so modern and so desirous of the great and
rapid evolution of women, to return to the old
custom of our grandmothers, and demand, not
only the month in bed, to ask even more, that
there should be six weeks spent practically lying
about all the time ! Is this not an anachron-
ism ? No. It will be observed that throughout
this and my other books, my advice always has
a biological basis, depending on the actual
structure or the history of our bodies, and there
is a very profound and physiological basis for
the advice I now give. * It is this that not
only during the birth is the whole system of
the mother to some extent jarred and shaken ;
she suffers in all her nerves the sudden relief from
Birth and Beauty 165
the strain upon her muscles and in the whole
readjustment of her system an extremely pro-
found shock, and the treatment for shock entails
rest. More than that, the womb which lies
centrally and is so important an organ in her
body, so enormously enlarged during the last
months through which the child inhabited it,
returns to its permanent size slowly ; its strong,
muscular walls tensely contract, but this con-
traction which reduces its size very much in
the first day or two does not complete kself,
does not bring the tissues back to the size which
they will afterwards permanently maintain, until
six weeks have elapsed. For the whole of six
weeks, therefore, the womb will be larger and
heavier than normal and with a tendency to
get out of place, while all the muscles of the
body wall are weakened and out of condition
by being so long stretched. A woman, there-
fore, should not put any strain on her muscles
like standing or walking or taking any active
exercise before the six weeks has elapsed, though
she should, lying both on her back and on her
face, do exercises calculated to restore the strength
of these muscles and fit them to take on their
work directly she rises. One exercise, particu-
larly valuable and but little known, is to raise
the diaphragm without breathing. This can
be done during the six weeks in bed, but is
particularly valuable on first rising and standing
1 66 Radiant Motherhood
or walking. This internal pull upwards of all
the organs strengthens both the internal and
the outer body wall muscles. Such control
deliberately and frequently exerted throughout
the day does more perhaps than any one other
thing to retain a slender well-formed trunk.
It has also a curiously bracing and exhilarating
mental effect, and as the action can be done
at any time unobserved, its effect can be utilized
at will. The ancient Greeks laid great stress
on the value of control of the diaphragm.
It may be argued that during the time the
child was within it the womb was very much
larger than it is after birth, and nevertheless
then active walking exercise was recommended.
Yes : but during that time the womb was
supported by the increased tension on the front
muscles of the body wall against which it pressed
and was thus assisted in maintaining its position ;
but after birth, while it is so very much smaller
than quite recently it has been, and, at the same
time, while still much larger than normal, and more
than the weakened internal muscles are prepared
to support, it is no longer held firm by the tense
body wall, for the body wall is now limp, crumpled
and almost incapable of supporting any strain.
If, therefore, the woman stands too soon, the
inner organs which are again beginning to find
their natural place the long digestive tract
and other organs tend to flop downwards, to
Birth and Beauty 167
bulge out the still loose and strained abdominal
muscles, and press the still too heavy womb
out of its normal position, the position to which
it must return, and must permanently take up
if the woman is to have her general health main-
tained throughout the rest of her life. Hence,
before she sets foot to the ground she must
lie the nature-decreed six weeks, and meanwhile
exercise the abdominal muscles so as to prepare
them to act properly.
When I see and hear of women either forced
or lured or eagerly getting out of bed in ten
days or a week after child birth, I wonder
what will happen to all those women ten or
fifteen years hence. They will be fortunate if
they do not have what is now so increasingly
prevalent, namely some form of displacement
of the womb with all its attendant miseries of
handicapped motherhood and wifehood. I main-
tain that it is nothing short of cruelty and
criminality to allow the modern woman to get
up quickly in the way she does. It may possibly
be claimed by some of the foolish and hardy
pioneers of getting up rapidly, that when she
is a middle-aged or elderly woman she will not
be suffering from the slow relaxations and dis-
placements which result from putting pressure
too soon on abdominal muscles unprepared to
bear the strain. This will not make things
safe for the average woman however. It is
1 68 Radiant Motherhood
not realized how appalling is the prevalence of
womb displacements among the lower working-
class women, those who are forced by circum-
stances to get up in a week or ten days and go
back to work. I think the modern increase in
displacements in middle and upper class women
is partly to be traced to the tendency to get up
too soon, and also to the impatient practi-
tioner's use of instruments to hasten a birth
which would come naturally in good time.
When once the perineal and inner supporting
muscles have been torn, they are too often
mended superficially, but inner tears are left
which make the perineum an insufficient support
for the womb, of which the result is its slow
and gradual dropping out of place, which some
years afterwards may acutely handicap the un-
fortunate woman.
In the name of all the fond and happy mothers
that I hope the future may contain, I would
urge every one who possibly can to insist on
having six weeks of " lying ia." This is not
only in the interests of general health but of
beauty. Too long have we become tolerant of
the hideous formation of the body which is
common in older women. We have domesti-
cated some animals l solely for our own purposes,
and they are hideous indeed. Why should we
1 The sow normally breeding once a year, artificially forced to
breed two or three times a year. Its appearance is proverbial.
Birth and Beauty 169
women permit a comparable standard for our-
selves ? Why not insist on at least as much
care as is devoted to the race-horse ? Why
not take a period of rest after the great effort
of maternity proportionately as long as a she-
wolf or tigress takes in her cave, fed by her
mate while she lies about and plays with her
cubs ? J The standard of beauty of the racing
mare, of the wild tigress or she- wolf is slender
and not markedly different from that of its
virgin state. Such a standard, and not that of
the over-taxed, man-used, domesticated animals
should be that on which we women should insist.
In this connection should be mentioned one
other way in which the following of Nature
and obedience to her law works for good. In
the next chapter I mention the baby's right
to be fed by nature's food, and while the
infant is nursing from its mother it stimulates
contractions in the womb which very much
assist in bringing it to its right size and position,
and so the act of nursing benefits not only the
infant but its mother. .>
A number of researches by various experts
have been made, which proves that the womb
reacts to the stimulus of suckling by the child.
Pfister (Beit. z. Geb. u. Gyn.> 1901, vol. v, p. 421),
for instance, found that very definite contrac-
1 This has been reported to me by travellers and others, but
I cannot get an authoritative scientific record for the fact.
i yo Radiant Motherhood
tions took place during the baby's suckling,
particularly for the first eight days after its
birth ; also Temesvary (Journ. Obstet. and Gyn.
Brit. Ernp., 1903, vol. iii, p. 511) found that
the natural involution of the womb after birth
was distinctly more rapid in those who nursed
their babies than in those who did not.
Prolonging the nursing period does un-
doubtedly not tend to increase the beauty of
the woman's bosom but to deteriorate it, but,
for at any rate the first few months, it is very
advantageous both to the mother and to the child
that she should feed it naturally. If throughout
the nursing period she slings her breast properly
from above, and if when the nursing period
ceases she massages and treats the breast properly,
it should not lose its beauty in the way which
is alas, to-day, too general.
Mothers, in the self-sacrifice involved in
their motherhood, too often forget their duty
to remain beautiful. All youth is revolted by
ugliness, consciously or unconsciously. A girl
should not be indirectly taught to dread mother-
hood herself by seeing the wreckage her own
mother has allowed it to make of her. A high
demand for beauty of form by mothers is not
selfishness but a racial duty.
CHAPTER XVII
Baby's Rights
" The nation that first finds a practical reconciliation
between science and idealism is likely to take the front
place among the peoples of the world."
DEAN INGE : Outspoken Essays.
BABY's rights are fundamental. They are :
To be wanted.
To be loved before birth as well as
after birth.
To be given a body untainted by any herit-
able disease, uncontaminated by any of the
racial poisons.
To be fed on the food that nature supplies,
or, if that fails, the very nearest substitute that
can be discovered.
To have fresh air to breathe ; to play in the
sunshine with his limbs free in the air ; to crawl
about on sweet clean grass.
When he is good, to do what baby wants
to do and not what his parents want ; for in-
stance, to sleep most of his time, not to sit up
171
172 Radiant Motherhood
and crow in response to having his cheeks pinched
or his sides tickled.
When he is naughty, to do what his parents
want and not what he wants : to be made to
understand the " law of the jungle." From his
earliest days he must be disciplined in relation
to the great physical facts of existence, to which
he will always hereafter have to bow. The
sooner he comprehends this, the better for his
future.
Most young mothers, even those who have
had the advantage of highly trained maternity
nurses to assist them at first, later require
authoritative advice about how to treat the
baby for whom they have given so much,
and to whom they wish to give every possible
advantage. Many books give advice to the
young mother and to these she may turn. I
do not wish to duplicate what they say, but
advise every one who has an infant, even if they
think they know all about the best method of
bringing it up, to possess a copy of Dr. Truby
King's Baby and How to Rear It for reference.
It is the most practical, sensible and best illus-
trated book of its kind.
- There is, therefore, on the subject of baby's
material rights not very much more that I need
to say, but there is one elementary right very
generally overlooked, and that is the right to
love in anticipation.
Baby's Rights 173
Baby's right to be wanted is an individual
right which is of racial importance. No human
being should be brought into the world unless
his parents desire to take on the responsibility
of that new life which must, for so long, be
dependent upon them.
Far too many of the present inhabitants of
this earth who are not wanted because of their
inferiority, were children who came to reluctant,
perhaps horror-stricken, mothers. To this fact,
I trace very largely the mental and physical
aberrations which are to-day so prevalent ; to
this also I trace the bitterness, the unrest, the
spirit of strife and malignity which seem to be
without precedent in the world at present [see
also The Control of Parenthood, final section,
and, for the remedy, my book, Wise Parenthood^
both published by Putnam],
The warped and destructive impulse of revo-
lution which is sweeping over so many people
at present must have its roots in some deep
wrong.
Revolution is not a natural activity for human
beings. Though the revolutionary impulse has
swept through sections of humanity many times
in its history, it is essentially unnatural, an
indication of warping and poisoning, and a
cause of further and perhaps irreparable damage.
Happy people do not indulge in revolution.
Happy people with a deep sense of underlying
174 Radiant Motherhood
contentment and satisfaction in life may yet
strive ardently to improve and beautify every-
thing round them. They strive in the same
direction as the main current of life that is the
growth and unfolding of ever increasing beauty.
The revolutionaries bitter, soured and pro-
foundly unhappy pit their strength against
the normal stream of life and destroy, break down
and rob. Too long humanity has had to endure
such outbreaks owing to its general blindness
and lack of understanding of their causes.
Until the scientific spirit of profound inquiry
into fundamental causes becomes general even
in a small section of the community, superficial
and apparently obvious explanations are ac-
cepted to account for results which really arise
from profound and secret springs.
The " divine discontent " which has impelled
humanity forward along the path of constructive
progress is a very different thing from the bitter
discontent which leads to revolutionary and
destructive outbursts. The village blacksmith of
the well-known song, using his healthy muscles
on hard, useful work which gives him a deep
physical satisfaction, may feel the former and help
forward the stream of progress in his village.
The aim of reformers to-day should be to
provide for every one neither ease nor comfort,
nor high wages nor short hours, but the deeper
necessities of a full and contented life, bodies
Baby's Rights 175
able to respond with satisfaction to the strain
of hard work performed under conditions which
satisfy the mind in the most fundamental way
of all the deep, sub-conscious satisfaction which
is given by the sweet smell of earth, by fresh
air and sunshine, and green things around one.
We draw from all these things some subtle
ingredient without which our natures are weak-
ened so that a further strain sends them awry.
To-day we are so deeply involved with the
hydra-headed monster of the revolutionary spirit
that there does not seem time to deal with it
radically, to attempt to understand it, and conse-
quently to conquer it for ever. Even now,
when for the first time humanity is on a large
scale beginning to tackle fundamental problems,
I have seen no indication that the source of
revolution is being sought for in the right place.
What is the source of revolution ?
The revolutionaries through the ages, feeling
themselves jar with their surroundings, have
been ensnared by the nearest obvious things,
the happier surrounding of others. These they
have endeavoured to snatch at and destroy,
thinking thereby to improve their own and their
comrades' lot. Their deductions, though pro-
foundly false, have appeared even obviously
right to many.
External grievances are what the revolutionary
is out to avenge : external benefits are what
176 Radiant Motherhood
he is out to gain. Generally this is expressed
in terms of higher wages, a share, or all, of the
capital of those supposed to be better off, or
the material possessions of others. These are
the things that nearly all strikers and revolu-
tionaries are upsetting the world to get, thinking
perhaps sincerely that these things will give
them the happiness for which, consciously or
unconsciously, they yearn. The truth is, how-
ever, that it is a much more intimate thing than
money or possessions which they need. They
need new bodies and new hearts.
Most of the revolutionaries I have met are
people who have been warped or stunted in
their own personal growth. One sees upon
their minds or bodies the marks and scars of
dwarfing, stunting or lack of balance. They
have known wretchedness both in themselves
and in their families far more intimate and pene-
trating than that of mere poverty.
That, they may answer, is an external griev-
ance which has been imposed upon them by
society. In effect they say : " Society has
starved us, given us bad conditions." Thus
they foster a grievance against " society " in
their minds. One bitter leader said to me :
I wai one of fourteen children, and my mother had only
a little three-roomed cottage near Glasgow. We nearly
starved when I was young. I know what the poor suffer at
the hands of society.
Baby's Rights 177
But it was not society that put fourteen
children into that cottage ; it was - the mother
herself. Her own ignorance, helpless ignorance
perhaps, was the source of her children's misery.
The most for which society can be blamed
concerning that family is in tolerating such a
plague-spot of ignorance in its midst. Nor is
this pestilential ignorance by any means only
confined to the financially poor.
This country, and nearly all the world, has
innumerable homes in which the seed of revolu-
tion is sown in myriads of minds from the
moment they are conceived. Revolted, horror-
stricken mothers bear children whose coming
birth they fear.
A starved, stunted outlook is stamped upon their
brains and bodies in the most intimate manner
before they come into the world, so oriented
towards it that they must run counter to the
healthy, happy constructive stream of human life.
What wonder at the rotten conditions of
our population when these are common experi-
ences of the mothers of our race :
For fifteen years I was in a very poor state of health
owing to continual pregnancy. As soon as I was over one
trouble it was started all over again. 1
I refer the reader to that poignant book, Maternity, Letters
from Working Women, collected by the Women's Co-operative
Guild. Bell, 1915.
13
178 Radiant Motherhood
Again : c
During pregnancy I suffered much. When at the end
of ten years I determined that this state of things should not
go on any longer.
Again :
My grandmother had twenty children. Only eight lived
to about fourteen years ; only two to a good old age.
Again :
I cannot tell you all my sufferings during the time of mother-
hood. I thought, like hundreds of women to-day, that it
was only natural, and that you had to bear it. I had three
children and one miscarriage in three years.
Need I go on ?
There lies the real root of revolution.
The secret revolt and bitterness which per-
meates every fibre of the unwillingly pregnant
and suffering mothers has been finding its
expression in the lives and deeds of their children.
We have been breeding revolutionaries through
the ages and at an increasing rate since the
crowding into cities began, and women were
forced to bear children beyond their strength
and desires in increasingly unnatural con-
ditions.
Also since women have heard rumours that
Baby's Rights 179
such enslaved motherhood is not necessary,
that the wise know a way of keeping their
motherhood voluntary, the revolt in the mother
has become conscious with consequent injury
to the child.
Increasingly, the first of baby's rights is to be
wanted.
Concerning baby's right to be fed on the food
that nature supplies, or if that fails on the very
nearest substitute that can be discovered, there
are to-day so many who urge that an infant
shall be fed by its own mother, that it is perhaps
needless to repeat arguments so impressive.
Nevertheless, perhaps it is as well to remind
young mothers of two or three of the most
vital facts. The first is that no artificial sub-
stitute, however perfectly prepared and chemically
analysed, can possibly give those very subtle
constituents which are found in the mother's
own milk and which vary from individual to
individual. These probably are in the nature
of the vitamines now so well known in fresh
food, but they are something more specifically
individual than can be scientifically detected.
The fresh milk of its own mother has a peculiar
value to the child which is greater than that
of any foster mother.
For this reason alone, were it the only one,
every young mother should nurse her own
baby if possible ; but, on the other hand, to-day
180 Radiant Motherhood
it not infrequently happens that the mother may
have an apparent flow of milk, quite sufficient
for the infant in quantity, but that milk may be
devoid of the necessary supply of fat or sugars
or some other ingredient for complete nutri-
ment. When this is so, it is often wisest to
allow the mother to nurse the child partly and
to supplement its diet by other milk.
Various schools of doctors and maternity
nurses have differed even on this matter, but
it is quite obvious that if the actual food value
of the mother's milk is below a certain point
then the added value of its individual vitamine-
like qualities will not wholly compensate for the
loss of actual nourishment.
Among baby's rights, I should perhaps also
make it clear that there is his right that he
should not be used as a bulwark between his
mother and another baby in a way which is
sometimes recommended so that a mother may
go on nursing her infant for a very long time,
sometimes even into its second year, in the hope
that this nursing may prevent her conceiving
again. Such a course of action is very harmful
both to the child and to her and should never
be followed. Such a practice is, of course,
much less common in this country (except
among aliens) than it is abroad where I have
seen healthy children of even three or four
years of age nursing upon their mother's knees.
Baby's Rights 181
In these days, perhaps it is hardly necessary
to accentuate baby's other rights since the
century of the child dawned a generation ago.
To-day it is perhaps almost more important
to accentuate the rights of others who exist
in the neighbourhood of a baby. But on the
other hand if one looks penetratingly at the
whole problem of character development, one
sees that among baby's rights is its right to be
trained from the very first so that its life shall
be as little hindered by friction as may be pos-
sible: that it should be taught the elementary
rules of conduct and necessary conformity with
the hard material facts of existence from the
very first. A wise nurse's or mother's training
from the earliest weeks of infancy may make
or mar a future man's or woman's chance of
getting on in the world and making a success
of their lives, by making or marring the character,
the capacity to obey, the formation of regular
and hygienic habits and the realization of the
physical facts of the world.
The ancient Greeks taught their youth to
reverence that which was beneath them, that
which was around them, and that which was
above them. In my opinion this right of youth
to be placed in its proper orientation in relation
to the world has been neglected of late. We
are suffering from the wayward revolt from an
earlier and perhaps harsher type of mistake, that
1 82 Radiant Motherhood
of too greatly controlling and thwarting the
child's impulses. We must maintain a just
balance and return to the due mean in* which
the right of a child, not only to be well born
but well trained, is universally recognized.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Weakest Link in the Human
Chain
" This shall be thy reward that the ideal shall be real
to thee." f
OLIVE SCHREINER: Dreams.
PROVERBS innumerable and daily experi-
ence have familiarized every one with
the idea that the citizen is moulded
and his or her essential characteristics deter-
mined in childhood, and as a result of childhood's
training. The most profoundly operative of
all his qualities is his potential sex attitude,
because it is that which determines his experi-
ence of sex and marriage, which colours his
thoughts towards women throughout his life,
which inclines his mind nobly towards his own
racial actions or which leaves him weak and
frivolous in his attitude towards the greatest
profundities of life.
Children, otherwise brought up with every
care and forethought, surrounded by all that
I8 8
184 Radiant Motherhood
love and money can give them, are too generally
left, without their mother's guidance or their
father's wisdom, to discover the great facts of
life partly by instinct and partly from the vulgar
talk of servants or soiled children a little older
than themselves. Worse even than this takes
place, because most generally in this connection
they not only do not hear the truth from their
mother's lips, but they learn from her their
most influential and earliest lesson in lying.
The curious thing about the particularly
pernicious form of lying which deals with racial
things in the presence of childhood is that we
have the habit of thinking it quite innocent.
Indeed we have even acquired the habit of think-
ing it one of the charming form of lies ; hence
when we are in a reforming mood, seeking for
the origins of the wrongs we are trying to put
right, we pass these " charming " lies by, think-
ing them harmless.
Where did each one of us first learn to lie ?
"Nearly every one who is now groivn up got his
(or her) first lesson in lying at his mothers knee.
To the little child, in his narrow but ever widen-
ing world, the mother is the supreme ruler,
the all-wise provider of food, clothes, pleasures
and pains. The mother (the child instinctively
feels) must be also the source of wisdom.
Question after question about himself and
his surroundings springs up in the baby mind.
The Weakest Link 185
Mother is asked them all, and for every one
she has some sort of an answer. Then inevit-
ably, at three or four, or five years old comes
the question : " Mother, where did you find
me ? " " Mother, how was I born ? "
Then comes the lie.
The child is told about the doctor bringing
him in a bag or a stork flying in through the
window or the accidental finding under the
gooseberry bush.
All children delight in fairy tales, but in-
stinctively they know very well the difference
between a fairy tale which is recounted to them
as a story in answer to their mood of " make-
believe " and a fiction which is putting them
off when they are seeking the truth.
If the mother who feels herself too ignorant
or too self-conscious to answer the truth to the
child's questions takes him on her knee and
deliberately tells him in a " make-believe "
mood a fairy tale, the child will then not feel
that the mother has lied. He will fee /, however,
that he must ask some one else for the truth.
But most mothers give the answer containing
the fiction of the gooseberry bush, or whatever
it may be, in a manner indicating that that is
what the child must believe, and the child
receives the information as a serious answer
to his serious question. It is then a lie, and a
pernicious lie.
1 86 Radiant Motherhood
Racial knowledge, instinct, whatever you like
to call it, is subtler and stronger in baby minds
than we dulled grown-ups are inclined to think.
The youngest child has a half-consciousness
that what its mother said in answer to this
question was not true.
Nurse, or auntie, a friend's governess, or
any one else who seems wise and powerful, is
asked the same question when mother is not
there, and the chances are that if mother had
given the stork version auntie gives the goose-
berry bush or some other fiction which she
particularly favours.
The baby ponders intermittently, inconse-
quently, perhaps at long intervals, perhaps after
years, but ultimately it realizes that its mother
lied to it.
In this way infinite injury has been done to
the whole human stock, and more particularly
women have suffered from the dishonesty and
the inherent incapacity of our society to be
frank and truthful about the most profound
and the most terrible aspects of sex, namely,
its diseases. A wife or a mother has the right
to be told the truth.
Women, and particularly mothers, have been
outrageously wronged by the deliberate lies
and untruthful atmosphere about the greater
problems of sex in which the learned have
enshrouded them : but mothers have themselves
The Weakest Link 187
given the first bent to the little sprouting twig
of that tree of knowledge, and they have bent
it away from the sunlight of truth and clean
and happy understanding.
The mother's excuse is, or would be if she
felt herself in any way to blame (which, by the
way, deplorably, she very seldom does) that
these terrible mysteries of origin are not suitable
for the little innocent child to ponder over.
She thinks they would shock him. But here
the mother is profoundly mistaken.
The age of innocence is the age when all know-
ledge is pure. At three, four, or five years old,
everything is taken for granted everything in
the universe is equally a surprise, and is at the
same time accepted without question as being
in the natural course of events. If true answers
were given to the tiny child's questions, they
would seem quite rational not in the least
more surprising than the fact that oak trees
grow from acorns, or that the cook gets a jam
tart out of a hot oven.
All the world's events seem magic at that
age, and if no exceptional mystery were made
of the magic of his own advent, the child would
feel it as natural as all the rest, and having
asked the question and obtained satisfactory,
simple unaccentuated answers, would let his
little mind run on to the thousand other ques-
tions he wants to ask. The essential racial
1 88 Radiant Motherhood
knowledge would slip naturally and sweetly
into his mind mingled with a myriad other
new impressions.
There is no self-consciousness, no personal
shamefacedness, about a tiny child. It accepts
the great truths of the universe in the grand
manner.
If the mother has never failed her child, has
always given it what she could of wisdom, she
will retain his trust and his confidence. When
he gets a little older she can teach him to go to
no one else for talk about the intimacies of life,
which the child is quick to realize are not dis-
cussed openly amongst strangers.
Then, later on, when personal consciousness
and shyness begin, there need not be the acute
constraint and tension of the shame-faced elder
speaking to a mind awakening to itself. Deep
in the child's consciousness, deeper even than
its conscious memory goes, the true big facts
are planted.
To tell a child of twelve or fourteen the truth
is, for most parents, an impossibly difficult
matter. The reason for this is that it is then
too late for essentials ; only details are then
suitable or necessary.
Little children spend much of their early
time in exploring themselves and their immediate
surroundings all is mysterious, all at first
unknown. Their own feet and hands, their
The Weakest Link 189
powers of locomotion and of throwing some
object to a distance, the curls of their own hair,
the pain they encounter in their bodies when
explorations bring them in contact with sharp
angles : all are equally mysterious, together
forming a wonder-world. And babies are very
young indeed when they explore with all the rest
of their bodies, the rudiments of those of their
racial organs with which they can acquaint
themselves. In my opinion, the attitude of a man
or woman through life is largely determined by the
attitude adopted by the mother towards the racial
organs BEFORE the child was old enough consciously
to remember any instruction that was imparted.
Advice is often given in these more enlightened
days to instruct your boy or girl in his racial
power or duties when he or she is ten or twelve
years old. This to many seems very young,
and they hesitate and defer it till they are older
and " can understand better." In my opinion,
this is already eight or ten years too late.
The child's first instruction in its attitude towards
its sex organs, its first account of the generation of
human beings, should be given when it is two or
three years old ; given with other instruction,
of which it is still too young to comprehend
more than part, but which it is nevertheless old
enough to comprehend in part. Very simple
instruction given reverently at suitable oppor-
tunities at that early age will impress itself upon
i go Radiant Motherhood
the very texture of the child's mind, before the
time of actual memories, so that from the very
first possible beginnings its tendencies are in
the direction of truth and reverent understanding.
A Mid so tiny will usually not remember one
word of what was said to //, but the effects on his
outlook will be deep. For at that early age, chil-
dren are meditatively absorbing and being im-
pressed by the psychological states and feelings
of their instructors and companions, and if, in
these very earliest months, the mother or
guardian makes the mistake of treating ribaldly
the tiny organs or of speaking lightly in the
child's presence, or of directly lying to the child
about these facts, that child receives a mental
warp and injury which nothing can ever eradicate
entirely, which may in later years through
bitter and befouling experiences be lived down
as an old scar that has healed, but which will
have permanently injured it.
I hold this to be a profound truth, and one
which it is urgent that humanity should realize.
I trust that my view will establish itself on every
hand. '*"" If that were my way, I could easily
write a whole volume on this theme, and coin
a polysyllabic terminology in which to mould
and harden thought on the subject. But I
prefer that a few simple words should slip like
vital seed into the hearts of mothers, and that
they may mould the race.
The Weakest Link 191
It is ignorance of this truth which has led
to the dishonouring and befouling of pure and
beautiful youth, which is the original source
of the greater part of all the social troubles and
the sex difficulties of adolescence.
* The tiny child of two or three years old, just
beginning to perceive and piece together the psycho-
logical impressions stamped upon it by its environ-
ment and the mind-states of those around it, is the
weakest link in the chain of our social consciousness.
Physically, the new born babe for the first few
days of its life is the weakest link in the chain,
the most liable physically to extinction, but
spiritually, socially the link most liable to warp-
ing, even destruction, is the awakening mind,
the still half-sleeping consciousness, of the child
between two and three years old.
The mother or guardian then who desires
her son or daughter to face the great facts of
life beautifully and profoundly should begin
from the first to mould that attitude in the child.
It may appear to the unthinking like building
castles in the sand even to hint at truths which
it cannot comprehend to a child who remembers
nothing of the words used in later years. This
is not so. What the child absorbs is less the
actual words than the tone of voice, the mode
of expression that spiritually impresses itself
upon its own little soul.
Then there comes a later stage for most
1 92 Radiant Motherhood
civilized human beings, usually after they are
three years old, when there arises the possi-
bility of permanent consciousness through per-
manent and specific memory of things seen,
done or heard. Most grown-ups of the present
generation will have some vivid memory, dating
back to when they were between three and four
years old, when they received a strong mental
impression that grown-ups were lying to them
or that there was something funny or silly in
questions which they asked. Perhaps they
noticed that whilst Jack the Giant Killer was
taken seriously, questions about where pussy got
her kittens were laughed at. Almost each one
of us who is to-day grown up then received some
grievous injury. This time is of great import-
ance in the psychology not only of the child,
but of the whole adult race arising from the
growing up of each child, for one's earliest
memories are few but very vivid. As things
are to-day, generally between the ages of three
and four or so, in the months which are likely
to yield a lifelong memory, the spirit is wounded
by the shock of a serious lie.
When as a mother or father you are with
your children it is vital to be most careful to
answer truly, and if possible beautifully, the
questions which arise. No one can foresee
which question and answer may make that
terrible impression which lasts for a lifetime.
The Weakest Link 193
When your little son or daughter is about
the age of three or four or five, the day will
come when you are asked questions about the
most fundamental facts in human life, and then
the answers to these questions contain the prob-
ability of a lifelong memory. Answer with
the truth.
Many parents are anxious to tell their children
the great truths in a wise and beautiful manner.
But few feel that they know how to do it, for it
is a most difficult thing to know how to answer
searching questions about profound subjects,
and particularly about those which the com-
munity wrongly considers shameful. Each mother
knows, or should know, the temperament and
needs of her child, so that the adaptation of the
advice I give should be varied to suit the indi-
vidual child. In essence, however, children's
demands at an early age are remarkably similar,
and the questions of children on birth and sex
differ in form, though seldom in substance.
The following conversation between a mother
and her little son indicates what seems to me the
best way first to tell a child who has reached
the age when he may have lasting memory of
the facts that he is blindly seeking in his baby
questions. It will not suffice to learn the answers
off by heart ; the baby will then soon confound
his elders, but the substance of the conversation
should prove useful.
14
194 Radiant Motherhood
The very first time the query comes : " Mother
where did you get me ? " the mother must not
divert the child's interest, or hesitate, but should
be ready at once to answer :
" God and Daddy and I together made you, because we
wanted you. 1 "
"Did God help? Couldn't He do it all Himself?"
" You know when you and I are playing with bricks to-
gether, you like Mummy to help, but not to do it all. God
thought Daddy and Mummy would like Him to help, but
not to do everything, because Daddy and Mummy enjoyed
making you much more than you enjoy playing with bricks."
That may suffice for the time, because little
children are very readily satisfied with one or
two facts about any one subject, and the talk
could easily be diverted. The little mind may
brood over what was told, and some time later
perhaps a few days, perhaps even a few
months or more this question will come up
again, possibly in a different form:
" Mummy, when was I born ? "
The mother should give the day and say :
" You know your birthday comes every year on the 1 8th of
April. That birthday is what reminds us of the day you
were born, and each birthday you are a whole year older."
1 At the request of many readers this conversation was
published in the Sunday Chronicle.
The Weakest Link 195
" I'm five now."
" Yes, so you were born five years ago on your birthday."
" Where was I before I was bom ? "
" Don't you remember I told you that God and Daddy
and I made you ? "
" Yes . . . Did you make me on my birthday ? "
" Not all in one day ; you took much longer to make than
that."
" How long did I take to make ? "
" A long, long time. Little children are so precious they
cannot be made in a hurry."
" How long did I take ? "
" Nearly a year nine whole months."
" Did baby take as long ? "
" Yes, just the same time. Baby is just as precious as you
are."
" I'm bigger."
" Now you are, but you were baby's size when you were
baby's age. You are bigger because you have grown since
your first birthday."
Again the subject may perhaps drop, or it
may be carried directly forward.
" What is being born ? "
" Being born is being shown to the world and seeing the
world for the first time. At the end of nine months after
God and Daddy and Mummy started to make you, you were
ready to open your eyes and breathe and cry, and be a real
live baby, and that day they showed you to somebody and you
saw the world. That was being born."
" Where was I before you finished making me ? "
" Mummy kept you hidden away so that nobody at all
should see you."
196 Radiant Motherhood
" Where was I hidden ? "
" You were hidden in a most wonderful place, in the place
where only quite little babies can be while God and their
mummies are making them."
" Show me ; I want to go back there."
" You can never go back ; it is only while you are being
made you can be there. After your first birthday, you can
never go back."
" Where was I ? "
" Well, you know, little babies that are being made are
very, very delicate, and they have to be kept very warm and
comfortable, and nobody must see them, and they must be
close, close up to their mummies."
The child may interject, " And their daddies too ? "
" Yes, if they have got loving daddies, the daddy keeps
close to the mummy ; but while babies are being made it
is God and mummy that have most of the work to do. That
is why you must always love your mummies and obey them."
The child may be temporarily satisfied, or
may continue at once:
" But where was it that I was while you were making
me ? "
" What is the warmest, softest, safest place you can think
of ? Mummy's heart : that is all warm with love. The
place Mummy hid you while God and she were making you
was right underneath her heart."
" Her real heart the heart that beats like a clock ticking ? "
" Yes, her real heart, just here."
The mother should lay the child's hand on
her heart and let him feel it beating.
The Weakest Link 197
"And just inside, right underneath here, Mummy kept
you while God was helping her to make you."
The child who has been brought up in a home
of love and tenderness and beauty will find this
a thrilling and beautiful thought, like a little
boy whom I know personally, and to whom
this fact was told in this way. Solemnly, and
without a word, he went away from his mother
into the middle of the room and stood deep in
thought for several minutes. Then he turned,
looked round, and rushed across the room,
threw himself into his mother's lap, his arms
round her neck and cried : " Oh, Mummy,
Mummy, then I was right inside you."
For days afterwards he was filled with a
rapturous joy, and at times used to leave his
play and come to his mother and put his arms
round her neck, saying : " Oh, Mummy, that
is why I love you so."
Whatever form the child's feeling may take,
the opportunity should not be allowed to pass
without a little addition to the conversation,
and the mother should say :
" And you see that is why you must never talk to any one
but Daddy and Mummy, or God through your prayers, about
such things. As God and Daddy and Mummy, and no one
else made your little body, so every thing you want to know
about it, all the questions you want to ask, you should ask of
them and no one else. You see, you are different from any
198 Radiant Motherhood
other child in the world, and as Daddy and Mummy helped
to make you, only they know your works. So whatever it
is you want to know, or whatever it is that goes wrong, it is
Mummy and Daddy who can tell you about it."
Once may be sufficient for a child to be told
the greater truths it desires to know, but it is
seldom that the child will leave so wonderful
a subject entirely alone after first learning of it,
and many portions of the beautiful facts will
have to be repeated in a variety of forms, or in
just the same words, as are repeated again and
again the beloved fairy tales. The child, however,
will be quick to know the difference between
this story and fairy tales, for children have an
instinct for truth at a much earlier age than
grown-ups generally remember.
A further series of questions will probably
arise when the child is about twelve.
The essential difficulties of these later ques-
tions, and the shamefaced self-consciousness so
usual between parent and child will never arise
if from the first the deep truths have been known
to the child.
The child so instructed is not supplied with
all necessary facts, and instruction of a more
specific and exact nature will have to be repeated
at further intervals throughout its life, but on
this foundation, further knowledge can be built
without having to wipe out anything already
implanted, without having to contradict earlier
The Weakest Link 199
instruction, or to acknowledge the gravest error
of having lied. Life teaches much to a quick
child trained to observation, particularly in the
country, where all children should spend much
of their time. If the little one has been told
what has been given in the previous pages it
will have all the essential truths on to which it will
fit in for itself the other data which daily life
will bring it ; thus it may garner a harvest
of facts one by one.
Concerning the later instruction which will
be necessary, the information can be given in
many ways. Some advocate school instruction
of children of twelve or more in the physiology
of all the members of the body, so that the racial
powers are treated in their proper place in con-
junction with the digestive organs, brain, lungs,
etc. Some parents prefer to give the instruction
themselves, for none but they can know so well
the individual needs of the child.
Much has already been written and is avail-
able in the voluminous literature about the
presentation of the facts to be imparted at the
various later ages, and almost every book advises
comparisons with flowers. For the later ages of
ten years and after, this is probably the best
introduction for specific details, but ' for the
first and earliest instruction of the baby mind,
such direct simple answers as I have indicated
are, I am sure, the best.
2OO Radiant Motherhood
Children whose parents have treated them
as I advise in this chapter are essentially safe
whatever form later instruction may take. They
will then have the vitality to survive lies, although
ever to lie to them will be putting a cruel and
useless strain on their recuperative powers. If
the little child is started upon its life with a
beautiful and true conception of its relation to
its mother, and of man's relation to woman,
it will be unlikely indeed that it will grow up
a hooligan who flouts his parents or a loose and
lascivious destroyer of women.
CHAPTER XIX
The Cost of Coffins
He only is free who can control himself.
EPICTETUS.
The imposition of motherhood upon a married
woman in absolute despite of her health and of the
interests of the children is none the less an iniquity
because it has at present the approval of Church and
State.
SALEEBY : Woman and Womanhood.
WHY do poor slum mothers buy more
coffins than do the same number of
rich women ?
The incredulous may answer this question
by asserting that they don't, but as a matter
of fact they do. The Registrar-General's Re-
port for 1911 shows that of every thousand
births in the upper and middle classes, 76*4
babies die, while of a thousand births in the
homes of unskilled workmen (this would be
the class of the " poor " mothers) 152*5 babies
die.
2O2 Radiant Motherhood
So that it is clear that if each member of this
poorest class of mothers had exactly the same
number of babies as each mother of the rich
class, she would have to purchase about two
coffins for every coffin bought by those whose
babies are not so prone to die.
There is, however, another fact which com-
pletes the proof of my first sentence.. The
upper and middle classes do not have so many
children per family as do the poorest class.
To a thousand married people in the upper
and middle classes there were born in 1911
119 babies, but to the poor mothers the wives
of the unskilled workmen there were born
213. So that in addition to buying twice as
many coffins per thousand children born, these
poor mothers have nearly twice as many coffins
again, owing to the fact that nearly twice as
many children are born to them.
I wonder if poor women have ever asked
themselves if they can afford coffins at this rate ?
Of course the coffins of these poor little
babies are very small, and do not require very
much wood to make them. But let us think
in what other ways they cost : To the mother
they cost not only all the little the baby had
eaten, and used in the way of clothes before its
death, but all the wastage of her own vitality
while she was bearing it ; she could not work
so well, at any rate towards the end of the time.
The Cost of Coffins 203
Home duties had to be somewhat neglected ;
the older children had to go to school dirtier
and less cared for ; the husband had less com-
fort and fewer smiles ; every one in the family
was poorer, not only in material things and in
the work that might make material things,
but in happiness and buoyancy.
It needs no imagination to realize, when you
have once grasped these facts, that poor people
are much less able to spare the cost of a doomed
baby than are the better class people. Then
why do they so often indulge in this tragic
luxury ? Chiefly through lack of knowledge,
through ignorance, particularly on the part of
the mother.
Often ignorance is blind and unaware that
it is ignorance, stupidly blundering through
life ; but this is not always the mother's attitude.
She may, indeed she often does, passionately
desire knowledge and seek for it wherever she
thinks she may find it in her restricted circle.
Too tragically often she is baffled in her search.
Some years before the war, when I was lectur-
ing at a Northern University, a little incident
opened my eyes to this fact. I was young
and had not encountered this aspect of life
before, and it burnt itself into my consciousness
as one of the most vivid impressions of my life.
It was this :
One of my students was a woman who was
ZO4 Radiant Motherhood
hoping to qualify as a medical doctor, and she
was having tea with me and chatting about the
events of the day. As part of her training she
had been assisting the doctor in dealing with
out-patients at a hospital, and a woman had
brought in a miserable little baby, which wailed
all the time and which the mother explained
wouldn't put on any flesh or grow into a nice,
healthy baby whatever she did with it.
The mother, with tears in her eyes, made an
intensely earnest appeal to the doctor to tell
her what was to her unaccountably wrong with
the infant.
She was a fine strapping woman, and thought
her babies ought to be large and healthy. She
said this was her third or fourth, and the others
had all died when they were very little.
This happened more than seven years ago.
Thank God our racial attitude has changed
since then.
The doctor put her off with some soothing
platitudes, but the woman driven to despair
said : "I believe there's something wrong with
my man. If there's something wrong with my
man I won't have babies no more it's just
cruel to see them miserable like this and have
them dying one after the other. Won't you,
for God's sake, tell me whether there's anything
wrong with my man or not ? " This appeal
was met by the assurance that there was nothing
The Cost of Coffins 205
wrong, and she should go on having babies
and do her duty by her husband.
My medical woman student said that it was
glaringly obvious that the baby was syphilitic.
I asked her why she did not immediately
tell the mother the truth. She shrugged her
shoulders and said : " I've got my exam, to
pass ; if I did a thing like that Dr. would
stop me going to the hospital. I can't afford
to take risks like that. Why, he might not
only stop me, but it would do the other women
students a lot of harm too."
This was before the war, and England was
less enlightened, less eager for medical women's
assistance than the war has made her, and it
was then a fight for a girl to get a footing in
the hospitals for the wide experience she needed
for a general practice.
I vowed to myself that I would never forget
that mother, and that some day I would batter
at the brazen gates of knowledge on her behalf.
Here was a mother with a glimmering of
the truth, seeking passionately for knowledge
from the one person she had a right to turn
to for this knowledge, and she was put off with
lies, encouraged again to bear the cost of a
hopelessly doomed birth ; to risk the agonies
of child-birth, to bring into the world a creature
who for a short spell would be tormented and
then would cost her a coffin.
206 Radiant Motherhood
By refusing his scientific advice, that doctor
in reality sent that woman, whose desire to know
was stirred, to the gossip of the slum alley and
the street corner. There she would get a
blurred and inaccurate, if not actually harmful,
idea of what he should have been able to tell
her in a clean, simple language based on scien-
tific fact.
When this is put down on paper, I feel as
though it would be ridiculous to begin to point
out the monstrous cruelty and the monstrous
folly of such an action as that doctor's. Yet
such action was not isolated, it did not depend
on one man's warped conceptions of loyalty to
another unknown man, " the husband." Since
the war a public realization of the racial de-
structiveness of such diseases has been increased
and the woman and her husband would to-day
be more likely to receive medical treatment.
But even to-day if a mother is truly told
that there is " something wrong with her
man," would she also certainly be told how in
wise and healthy fashion she can herself sup-
plement what his criminal negligence neglected ?
If a husband is careless and callous a woman
must save herself and the community from
the waste and the misery of irretrievably doomed
births.
She will indeed be an exceptionally lucky
woman if she to-day finds in public hos-
The Cost of Coffins 207
pitals doctors to whom she could turn for know-
ledge how best to control conception, though
such knowledge is not only essential to her
private well-being, but essential to her in the
fulfilment of her duties as a citizen.
This little incident is but one illustration
of many aspects of the subject. It is not only
disease which necessitates restraint on parenthood.
No healthy woman can bear a long series of
infants in rapid succession without loss both
to them and to herself. This is discussed in
my Wise Parenthood.
Any one who thinks will see clearly that no
civilized country, not even the richest in the
world, can afford babies' coffins. Though they
are smaller than grown-up people's they are
more costly, for they are waste and nothing
but waste. A grown-up individual, man or
woman, has, we hope at any rate, given some
return to the community in work or in ideas
for all that his life has cost. But the infant's
death is sheer unmitigated waste.
If all the mothers who realize this and who
feel their need for the best help that science
can give them, would insist and persist in their
enquiries for a knowledge of the most reliable
results of modern science, they would in the
end succeed in getting them. 3 There is enough
knowledge now in the world for the race to
transform itself in a couple of generations.
CHAPTER XX
The Creation of a New and
Irradiated Race
Ah, Love ! could thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart's desire.
OMAR KHAYYAM.
ON parents' love for the helpless child
depends the existence of our race.
Human parenthood necessitates not only
the desire for offspring, but the willing care
of them during the long years while they are
helpless and dependent. Were this desire and
willingness not deeply implanted in us our race
would become extinct, as in some strange way,
the higher type of ancient Greeks vanished from
the world.
Not only throughout the lower creatures do
we find the responsibilities of parenthood in-
creasing as we go up the scale towards the
higher, but, even in the various grades of highly
208
A New and Irradiated Race 209
civilized man, the responsibility for the children
is ever greater in proportion with the general
culture and position of the parents.
Not many years ago the labourer's child
could be set to work early and could very shortly
earn his keep ; while at the same time the
young gentleman was an expense and care to
his father and mother until he had passed through
the University of Oxford or Cambridge, and
amongst some even until he had made his " finish-
ing " world tour. The trend of legislation has
continuously extended the age of irresponsible
youth in the lower and lower middle classes,
until it now approaches that of the middle and
upper class youth. A stride in this direction
was taken by the last Education Act, which has
made education compulsory throughout the whole
country to an age which is nearly university
age.
I need not labour the resulting effect of the
ever increasing prolongation of youth. It is
not only apparent but has received sufficient
treatment from the hands of various authors
and thinkers.
Its corollary, however, has still not received
that clear and direct thought which its signi-
ficance demands. Parenthood under the present
rtgime, is not only an increasing responsibility
and expense, it has become so great a strain
upon the resources of those who have for them-
'5
2 ic Radiant Motherhood
selves and their children a high standard of
living that it is tending to become a rare privilege
for some who would otherwise gladly propagate
large families.
As Dean Inge reminded us (Outspoken Essays,
1919), there was a stage in the high civilization
of Greece when slaves were only allowed to rear
a child as a reward for their good behaviour.
I find a curious parallel to this in the treat-
ment of a section of our society by our present
community.
Crushed by the burden of taxation which
they have not the resources to meet and to
provide for children also : crushed by the
national cost of the too numerous children of
those who do not contribute to the public funds
by taxation, yet who recklessly bring forth
from an inferior stock individuals who are not
self-supporting, the middle and superior artisan
classes have, without perceiving it, come almost
to take the position of that ancient slave popula-
tion. It is only as a reward for their thrift
and foresight, for their care and self-denial
that they find themselves able (that is allowed
by financial circumstances) to have one or per-
haps two children. Hence by a strange parallel
working of divers forces, the best, the thriftiest,
the most serious-minded, the most desiring of
parenthood are to-day those who are forced by
circumstances into the position of the ancient
A New and Irradiated Race 211
slave and allowed to rear but one or two children
as a result perhaps of a lifetime of valuable ser-
vice and of loving union with a wife well fitted
to bear more offspring. While on the other
hand, society allows the diseased, the racially
negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-
minded, the very lowest and worst members
of the community, to produce innumerable tens
of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior
infants. If they live, a large proportion of these
are doomed from their very physical inheritance
to be at the best but partly self-supporting,
and thus to drain the resources of those
classes above them which have a sense of re-
sponsibility. The better classes, freed from the
cost of the institutions, hospitals, prisons and
so on, principally filled by the inferior stock,
would be able to afford to enlarge their own
families, and at the same time not only to save
misery but to multiply a hundredfold the con-
tribution in human life-value to the riches of
the State.
The immensity of the power of parenthood,
both on the personal lives which it brings into
existence, and on the community of which
each individual is to form a part, is not yet per-
ceived by our Statesmen in its true perspective.
The power of parenthood ought no longer
to be exercised by #//, however inferior, as an
" individual right." It is profoundly a duty
212 Radiant Motherhood
and a privilege, and it is essentially the concern
of the whole community. It should be the
policy of the community to encourage in every
way the parenthood of those whose circum-
stances and conditions are such that there is a
reasonable anticipation that they will give rise
to healthy, well-endowed future citizens. It
should be the policy of the community to dis-
courage from parenthood all whose circumstances
are such as would make probable the introduc-
tion of weakened, diseased or debased future
citizens. It is the urgent duty of the community
to make parenthood impossible for those whose
mental and physical conditions are such that there
is well-nigh a certainty that their offspring must
be physically and mentally tainted, if not utterly
permeated by disease. That the community
should allow syphilitic parents to bring forth
a sequence of blind syphilitic infants is a state
of affairs so monstrous that it would be hardly
credible were it not a fact.
Parenthood, with the divine gift of love in
its power, with the glorious potentialities of
handing on a radiant, wholesome, beautiful
youth should be a sacred and preserved gift,
a privilege only to be exercised by those who
rationally comprehend the counter-balancing
duties. But so long as parenthood is kept
outside the realm of rational thought and reasoned
action, so long will we as a race slide at an ever-
A New and Irradiated Race 213
increasing speed towards the utter deterioration
of our stock through the reckless increase of
the debased, which is necessarily counter-
balanced by the unnatural limiting of the families
of the more educated and responsible, whose
sense of duty to the unborn forbids them to
bring into the world children whom they cannot
educate and environ at least as well as they
themselves were reared.
In earlier generations the child was taught
to speak of its parents in a respectful and grateful
tone as the " august authors of its being," but
this right and proper instruction in reverence
was coupled with an arbitrary disposal of the
child, and a certain harshness in its training
against which the later generations have revolted.
As is usual the reformers have deviated from
rectitude in the opposite direction, so that to-
day to find children with deep respect for their
parents is uncommon. Reverence is being
exacted by some rather from the parent towards
the child as a fresh, new and unspoilt being.
This too often results in spoiling the child, which
is an equally foolish and hampering proceeding.
The child should be taught from its earliest days
profound respect, reverence and gratitude to-
wards its parents, and in particular towards its
mother, for of her very life she gave it the
incomparable gift of life. True parents give
the child the best and freshest and most beautiful
214 Radiant Motherhood
impulses of their lives, and, at the cost of bodily
anguish the mother bears it, and its parents
for long years nurture it, sacrificing many enjoy-
ments which they might have but for the cost
and care of rearing it. This should be realized
by the child, who then cannot but feel gratitude
to and reverence for the authors of its being.
The sheer beauty of the world, were there no
other gain from living, is so great that the gift
of eyes and a mind to perceive it should place
the recipient of that gift for ever in a reverential
debt towards the pair who gave.
But the value of the beauty of life, and a just
appreciation of the immense gift which parent-
hood confers cannot be realized by all. To-day
alas, millions are born into circumstances so
wretched that life can scarcely involve a per-
ception of beauty, or a probability of moral
action and social service. Also many myriads
of children are born of parents to whom they
can feel that they owe nothing, because they
know or inwardly perceive that they were not
desired, that they were not profoundly and
nobly loved throughout their coming, that they
were hurled into this existence through accident,
self-indulgence or stupidity. Yet parenthood
which grants life even on these terms is a
wonderful power, a cruel and relentless force
perverted from its divine possibilities.
Youth tends ever to right itself if it but
A New and Irradiated Race 215
escape the taint of the profound racial diseases,
and the gift of a well-conditioned body is the
creation of an incomparable set of co-ordinated
powers in a world in which the potentialities
for the use of those powers is magical.
Innumerable are the efforts at present being
made by countless different societies, official
bodies and individual reformers to diminish the
ever increasing ill-health and deterioration of
our race, but their efforts are a fight on the
losing side unless the fundamental and hitherto
uncontrollable factors which make for health
are there.
Doctors may cure every disease known to
humanity, but while they are so doing, fresh
diseases, further modifications of destructive
germs, may spring into existence, the possibility
of which has recently been demonstrated by
French scientists who have experimented on
the rapid changes which may be induced in
"germs."
Prisons and reformatories, municipal milk,
the feeding of school children, improvement
in housing, reform of our marriage laws, schools
for mothers, even schools for fathers, garden
cities not all these useful and necessary things
together and many more added to them will
ever touch the really profound sources of our
race, will ever cause freedom from degeneracy
and ill-health, will ever create that fine, glorious
2i6 Radiant Motherhood
and beautiful race of men and women which
hovers in the dreams of our reformers. Is then
this dream out of reach and impossible ; are
then all our efforts wasted ? No, the dream
is not impossible of fulfilment; but, at present,
our efforts are almost entirely wasted because
they are built upon the shifting sand and not upon
the steady rock.
The reform, the one central reform, which
will make all the others of avail and make their
work successful is the endowing of motherhood,
not with money but with the knowledge of her own
power.
For the power of a mother, consciously exerted
in the voluntary procreation and joyous bearing of
her children is the greatest power in the world.
It is through its conscious and deliberate exercise,
and through that alone, that the race may step
from its present entanglements on to a higher
plane, where bodies will be not only a delight
to their possessors, but efficient tools in the
service of the souls which temporarily inhabit
them.
I maintain that this wonderful rejuvenescence
and reform of the race need not be a dim and
distant dream of the future. It is hovering so
close at hand that it is actually within reach of
those who to-day are in their young maturity ;
we, at present in the flesh may link hands with
grandchildren belonging to a generation so
A New and Irradiated Race 217
wonderful, so endowed, and so improved out of
recognition that the miseries and the depravity
of human nature, to-day so wide-spread, may
appear like a black and hideous memory of the
past, as incredible to them as the habits of
cannibals are to us.
An ideal too distant, too remote, may interest
the dreamer and the reformer possibly, but it
cannot inspire a whole nation. An ideal within
the range of possibility, that each one of us
who lives a full lifetime may actually perceive,
such an ideal can spur and fire the imagination,
not only of our own nation, but of the world.
It is my prayer that I may present such a racial
ideal, not only to my own people but to humanity.
It is my prayer that I may live to see in the genera-
tion of my grandchildren a humanity from which
almost all the most blackening and distressing
elements have been eliminated, and in which
the vernal bodily beauty and unsullied spiritual
power of those then growing up will surpass
anything that we know to-day except among
the rare and gifted few. This is .not a wild
dream ; it is a real potentiality almost within
reach. The materialization of this vital racial
vision is in the hands of the mothers for the
next twenty or thirty years.
If every woman will but consciously and de-
liberately exercise the powers of her motherhood
after learning of those powers ; if she bear
218 Radiant Motherhood
only those children which she and her mate
ardently desire ; if she refuse to bear any but
these, and if she so space these children that
she herself rests and recovers vitality between
their births, and during their coming she lives in
such a way as I have indicated in the preceding
chapters, and if at the same time the deadly
and horrible scourges of the venereal diseases
and the multitude of ramifications of racial
baseness are eliminated as they can be, then with
a comparatively small percentage of accidents
and unforeseeable errors, the quality of those
born will enormously improve, and by a second
generation all should be already far on the
highway to new and wonderful powers, which
are to-day almost unsuspected.
What are the greatest dangers which jeo-
pardize the materialization of this glorious dream
of a human stock represented only by well-
formed, desired, well-endowed beautiful men
and women ? Two main dangers are in the
way of its consummation ; the first is ignorance
It is difficult to reach the untutored mind,
to teach a public hardened and deadened to
callousness and the lack of dreams of their
own ; even though if one could but reach them
it would be possible to make them understand.
A second and almost greater danger is not
a simple ignorance, but the inborn incapacity
which lies in the vast and ever increasing stock
A New and -Irradiated Race 219
of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced
who are now in our midst and who devastate
social customs. These populate most rapidly,
these tend proportionately to increase, and these
are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping
its vitality. These produce less than they
consume and are able only to flourish and re-
produce so long as the healthier produce food
for them ; but by ever weakening the human
stock, in the end they will succumb with the
fine structure which they have destroyed.
There appear then two obstacles which might
block the materialization of my racial vision ;
on the one hand the ignorance of those who
have latent powers. This only needs to be
stirred by knowledge and the inspiration of
an ideal, to become potent. This obstacle is
not unsurmountable. If one but speaks in
sufficiently burning words, if one but writes suffi-
ciently contagiously, the ideas must spread with
ever increasing acceleration. Ignorance must
be vanquished by winged knowledge. I hold
it to be the duty of the dreamer of great dreams
not only to express them in such a way that
cognate souls may also perceive them. It is
the duty of a seer to embody his message in
such a form that its beauty is apparent and the
vision can be seen by all the people. The in-
fectiousness of disease, the contagion of des-
tructive and horrible bacterial germs have be-
22O Radiant Motherhood
come a commonplace in our social consciousness,
and we have forgotten, and our artists have in
recent years tended ever more and more to
forget that the highest form of art should also
be infectious. Goodness, beauty and prophetic
vision have as strong a contagious quality as
disease if they are embodied in a form rendered
vital by the mating of truth and beauty.
To overcome mere ignorance in others is,
therefore, by no means a hopeless task, and it
is the valiant work of the artist-prophet. Youth
is the time to catch the contagion of goodness.
To youth I appeal.
The other obstacle presents a deeper and more
difficult task. It must deal with the terrible
debasing power of the inferior, the depraved
and feeble-minded, to whom reason means
nothing and can mean nothing, who are thriftless,
unmanageable and appallingly prolific. Yet
if the good in our race is not to be swamped
and destroyed by the debased as the fine tree
by the parasite, this prolific depravity must be
curbed. How shall this be done ? A very few
quite simple Acts of Parliament could deal with it.
Three short and concise Bills would be suffi-
cient to afford the most urgent social service
for the preservation of our race. They should
be simply worded and based on possibilities well
within the grasp of modern science.
The idea of sterilization has not yet been very
A New and Irradiated Race 221
generally understood or accepted, although it is
an idea which our civilization urgently needs
to assimilate. I think that a large part of
the objections to it, often made passionately
and eloquently by those from whom one would
otherwise have expected a more intelligent
attitude, is due to complete ignorance of the
facts. Even otherwise instructed persons con-
fuse sterilization with castration. The argu-
ments which to-day in a chance discussion of
the subject are always brought forward against
sterilization have been, in my experience, only
those which apply to castration. To castrate
any male is, of course, not only to deprive him
of his manhood and thus to injure his personal
consciousness, but to remove bodily organs,
the loss of which adversely affects his mentality
and which will also affect the internal secretions
which have a profound influence on his whole
organization. I fully endorse the views of
the opponents of this process.
It is, however, neither necessary to castrate
nor is it suggested by those who, like myself,
would like to see the sterilization of those
totally unfit for parenthood made an immediate
possibility, indeed made compulsory. As Dr.
Havelock Ellis stated in an article in the
Eugenics Review, Vol. I, No. 3, October 1909,
pp. 203-206, sterilization under proper conditions
is a very different and much simpler matter and
222 Radiant Motherhood
one which has no deleterious and far reaching
effects on the whole system. The operation is
trivial, scarcely painful, and does not debar the
subject from experiencing all his normal reaction
in ordinary union ; it only prevents the pro-
creation of children.
It has been found in some States of America,
and as I know from private correspondents in
this country, there are men who would welcome
the relief from the ever present anxiety of poten-
tial parenthood which they know full well would
be ruinous to the future generation.
There is also the possibility of sterilization
by the direct action of " X " rays. At present
sterility is known as an unfortunate danger to
those engaged in scientific research with radium,
but it might, under control, be wisely used as
a painless method of sterilization. This may
prove of particular value for women in whom
the operation corresponding to the severance of
the ducts of the man is more serious. It appears
however, not always to be permanent in its effect.
In some circumstances this may be an advantage,
in others a disadvantage.
With reference to the sterilizing effect of
" X "-rays, the following quotation from F. H.
Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction, 1910,
is pertinent :
A more special cause of sterility in men is one which operates
in the case of workers with radium or the Rontgen rays. Several
A New and Irradiated Race 223
years ago Albers-Schonberg noticed that the X-rays induced
sterility in guinea pigs and rabbits, but without interfering
with the sexual potency. These observations have been con-
firmed by other investigators, who have shown, further, that
the azoospermia is due to the degeneration of the cells lining
the seminal canals. In men it has been proved that mere
presence in an X-ray atmosphere incidental to radiography
sooner or later causes a condition of complete sterility, but
without any apparent diminution of sexual potency. As
Gordon observes, for those working in an X-ray atmosphere
adequate protection for all parts of the body not directly
exposed for examination or treatment is indispensable, but,
on the other hand, the X-rays afford a convenient, painless
and harmless method of inducing sterility, in cases in which
it is desirable to effect this result.
When Bills are passed to ensure the sterility
of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased,
and to provide for the education of the child-
bearing woman so that she spaces her children
healthily, our race will rapidly quell the stream
of depraved, hopeless and wretched lives
which are at present ever increasing in pro-
portion in our midst. Before this stream at
present the thoughtful shrink but do nothing.
Such action as will be possible when these bills
are passed will not only increase the relative
proportion of the sound and healthy among us
who may consciously contribute to the higher
and more beautiful forms of the human race,
but by the elimination of wasteful lives which
224 Radiant Motherhood
are to-day seldom self-supporting, and which
are so largely the cause of the cost and outlay
of public money in their institutional treatment
and their partial relief, will check an increasing
drain on our national resources. The setting
free of this public money would make it possible
for those now too heavily taxed to reproduce
their own and more valuable kinds.
The miserable, the degenerate, the utterly
wretched in body and mind, who when repro-
ducing multiply the misery and evil of the world,
would be the first to be thankful for the escape
such legislation would offer from the wretched-
ness entailed not only on their offspring but
on themselves. The Labour Party, all Pro-
gressives, and all Conservatives who desire to
conserve the good can unite to support measures
so directly calculated to improve the physical
condition, the mental happiness and the general
well-being of the human race.
Even to-day almost all the thriftiest and better
of the working class, and the artisan class in
particular, are already in the ranks of those
who are sponged upon, and to some extent
taxed, for the upkeep of the incompetent, and
it is just from among the best artisan and from
the middle class that the most serious minded
parents and those who recognize their racial
responsibilities are principally to be found.
There is throughout the whole Labour move-
A New and Irradiated Race 225
ment, as throughout the less vocal but deeper
feeling of the middle class, a passionate desire
to eliminate the misery and human degradation
which on every hand to-day saddens the tender
conscience. The limiting of their own families
to meet the pressure of circumstances will never
achieve their desires. The best to-day are
making less and less headway, and the inferior
are increasing more and more in proportion
to them.
Directly, however, the need for such legisla-
tion as I have outlined above is realized, and such
legislation is passed, then the tide will be turned.
Then, at last, we shall begin to see the elimina-
tion of the horror and degradation of humanity,
which at present is apparently so hopeless
and permanent a blot upon the world. And
then, and then at once, will the positive effects
of the conscious working of love and beauty
and desired motherhood begin to take effect.
The evolution of humanity will take a leap
forward when we have around us only fine
and beautiful young people, all of whom have
been conceived, carried and born in true homes
by conscious, powerful and voluntary mothers.
Meanwhile the prison reformers, psycho-
analysts, doctors, teachers and reformers of all
sorts will be going on with their reforms, and
will be claiming this and that wonderful im-
provement in the school children, and they will
16
226 Radiant Motherhood
probably never realize that it will not be their
reforms which have worked these apparent
miracles ; it will be the change in the attitude
of the mother, the return to the position of
power of the mother, her voluntary motherhood,
the conscious and deliberate creation by the
mother and her mate of the fine and splendid
race which to-day, as God's prophet, I see in
a vision and which might so speedily be
materialized on earth.
APPENDICES
A. PHYSICAL SIGNS OF COMING MOTHER-
HOOD.
B. ON BIRTH.
C. SUGGESTIONS FOR CALCULATING DATE
OF ANTICIPATED BIRTH.
APPENDIX A
PHYSICAL SIGNS OF COMING MOTHERHOOD
Sometimes a woman is doubtful whether or not she is
about to become a mother, and may be too shy to ask those
with whom she is associated. She should, if it is possible,
seek the advice of a highly qualified midwife or medical prac-
titioner, but this is not always possible, and it may be useful
for her to know the following signs :
The first and most widely recognized indication that con-
ception has taken place is " missing a period " or the cessation
of the menstrual flow, while, at the same time, there is no
ill-health. A woman may even feel unusually bright and
well.
There is generally an increase in the size of the breast,
followed as the months progress by a very noticeable increase
in the size and bright blue colour of the veins round the
breast, and also a darkening in colour and a changing from
pink to brownish tint of the area round the centre of the breast.
After the third month, there is visible a steadily increas-
ing enlargement of the lower part of the body, but, as this
also happens with some forms of illness, this alone and without
the other signs is not proof that motherhood has commenced.
" Quickening " or the movements of the child, are a much
better indication of motherhood, and these are generally to
be perceived about the twentieth week, or roughly half-way
through the whole period of prenatal life ; but see further
the remarks in Chapter XIII, p. 113.
229
230 Radiant Motherhood
The perception of the child's heart beats is absolute proof
of coming motherhood. These may be perceived after the
fourth or fifth month quite readily by a nurse or other
observer, though the mother herself can but seldom perceive
them.
"Morning Sickness," which is so often experienced, and
in most books for the " expectant mother " is quoted as one
of the first signs of pregnancy, should never occur at all see
Chapter XI although unfortunately it is true that it does
frequently occur in women who are bearing children under
present conditions.
APPENDIX B
ON BIRTH
The usual agonies of child birth vary greatly in extent
according to the structure of the woman. But, as was shown
in Chapter II, the tendency already is present, and probably
will increase, for this to be an almost intolerable strain upon
the woman. Tardily indeed have efforts to relieve her agonies
in child birth been made ; Queen Victoria took a grave and
adventurous step when she bore one of her children under
chloroform. Chloroform, however, only deadens consciousness
at a comparatively late stage in child birth, and its use through
the many long hours, even perhaps sometimes days of agony
which precede the later stages is not often possible. It is,
therefore, for some types of women a very insufficient narcotic.
Natural " painless Child Birth " is, of course, the ideal,
and is claimed to be the result of the " fruit and rice diet,"
see ^okology by Dr. Alice Stockham, but although this greatly
reduces the pain for many, and undoubtedly makes the months
of pregnancy easier, it cannot make birth anything but a torture
if the proportion of the child's head to the bony arch is above
a given limit. The " Christian Science " claim for not only
painless but bloodless birth has been reported to me, but never
at first hand, and I have not yet had the first-hand statements
of women who are said to have experienced it.
" Twilight Sleep," a comparatively recent discovery, has
been much advocated, much praised and much blamed. There
may be types of women who find it advantageous, but the
231
232 Radiant Motherhood
fact that it necessitates going to a nursing home, away from
home, is very much against its use under ideal circumstances.
For those who have no home, or a sordid and overcrowded
one, a nursing home may be a place of refuge. " Twilight
Sleep " (scopolamine-morphine) is, however, for the more
sensitive type of woman, an extremely unreliable drug, which
may frequently take no narcotic effect upon the patient, who
suffers added agony as the result of relying upon it, and it may
be very dangerous for the child.
There is also the method of birth through the soft part of
the body, avoiding the birth of the child through the bony
structure altogether. This operation is described as Cesarean
section, and involves incision both through the abdominal
walls and through the walls of the womb. For some women
with very small bones Cesarean section is necessary if they are
to produce living children. Even for women who, by paying
the price of agony, can produce children by normal birth,
this method may be found very advantageous. I see a possi-
bility of its widely extended future use. In hundreds, perhaps
thousands of years hence when the child's head will be pro-
portionately even larger in comparison with the mother's bones
than it is to-day, it may indeed be the only method which
will stand between the higher human races and their total
extinction.
There is a certain amount of rather gossipy opinion that
women who are spared the full torture of child birth do not
have equally passionate love for the child. This, however,
is nonsense. Love depends far more on the mother's desire
for parenthood at the time of the child's conception and her
feelings towards it all through the months of waiting than on
the hours of birth, although the appealing weakness and
fascination of a baby may win a deeper love than the mother-
to-be expected to feel for her child.
APPENDIX C
SUGGESTIONS FOR CALCULATING THE DATE OF ANTICIPATED
BIRTH
The leading authority in the Manual of Human Em6ryo/ogy,
edited by Franz, Keibel and Franklin P. Mall in two volumes,
London, 1910, says:
" In ancient times it was generally believed that the
duration of pregnancy in man, unlike that in lower animals,
was of very uncertain length ; and it was not until the
seventeenth century that it was more accurately fixed,
by Fidele of Palermo, at forty weeks, counting from the
last menstrual period. In the neit century Haller found
that if pregnancy is reckoned from the time of a fruitful
copulation it is usually thirty-nine weeks, and rarely forty
weeks in duration. In general these results are fully
confirmed by the thousands of careful data collected
during the nineteenth century."
" However, from thousands of records it is found
that the mean duration of a pregnancy varies in first and
second pregnancies, is more protracted in healthy women,
in married women, in winter, and in the upper classes.'*
" From these figures it is seen that most pregnancies
take place during the first week after menstruation, and
233
234 Radiant Motherhood
that the duration of pregnancy is longer if copulation
takes place towards the end of the intermenstrual period.
And this is explained if we assume that in the first week,
especially the first few days after the cessation of men-
struation, the ovum is in the upper end of the tube awaiting
the sperm and that conception immediately follows
copulation. When the fruitful copulation takes place in
the latter two weeks of the month the opposite is usually
the case ; the sperm wanders to the ovary and there
awaits the ovum ; and, therefore, on an average, pregnancy
is prolonged in this group of cases, when determined from
the time of copulation."
" In determining the age of human embryos it is
probably more nearly correct to count from the end of
the last period, for all evidence points to that time as
the most probable at which pregnancy takes place."
On the whole it is generally found that 280 days (/.*., 40
weeks) can be reckoned as the average period during which
the child develops internally if the date is counted from the
first day of the last menstrual period and 269 days if estimated
from the date of actual union.
Leuckart tabulated results from a large number of births
which took place within the first ten months of marriage, and
found that there was a maximum number of births on the
275th day, then a decrease and a second maximum on the
293rd day. Nevertheless, in spite of careful reckoning, there
are, as will be recognized, many sources of error, and medical
men and nurses are often wisely cautious of giving any exact
date for an anticipated birth ; sometimes too cautious even
to suggest the week within which the birth will take place.
Appendices 235
I have known a good many mothers, however, who were much
more accurately certain about this point than their attendants,
and have found that the birth took place exactly on the day
they anticipated. As an illustration of this, I give the answer
from one of my correspondents, both of whose children were
born on the exact day she anticipated. I asked her how she
estimated these periods, and she said :
" I simply took old Dr. Chevasse's rule which he gives
in Advice to a Wife ; you know how he puts the date
of conception and opposite it the probable date of birth.
I went by the first union after the last period. It so
happened that my husband was seedy and there was no
union for a fortnight after the end of the period. I took
that first union as the date of conception and looking up
the date in Chevasse and the corresponding date of birth
opposite, I found it to be August 2Oth, and sure enough
on August 2Oth he was born. With the second boy,
the union took place the day after the last period, and
I took that as the starting date and against it I found
January 2ist and on January 2ist he arrived in spite of the
doctors insisting in each case that it would be three weeks
earlier. What I do is, I always make a mark in my
diary against the date of first union after every period.
Then when I had missed a period and so knew that there
was probably conception, I could at once tell the probable
date."
The table Chevasse quoted from Galabin is as fellows
From Jan. ist to Oct. ist =273 (274) days, add 5 (4) days
Feb. ist to Nov. ist =273 (274) 5 (4)
Mar. ist to Dec. ist =275 3
Apl. ist to Jan. ist =275 3
May ist to Feb. ist =276 2
236 Radiant Motherhood
From June ist to Mar. ist =273 (274) days, add 5 (4) days
July ist to Apl. ist =274(275) 4(3),,
Aug. ist to May ist =273 (274) 5 (4)
Sep. ist to June ist =273 (274) 5 (4)
Oct. ist to July ist =273 (274) 5(4),,
Nov. ist to Aug. ist =273 (274) 5 (4)
Dec. ist to Sep. ist =274(275) 4(3),,
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