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