to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a barbaric age.
Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the
solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together,
are right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out
from our IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to
say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of
individual passions but a service rendered to the State. Women must
become less and less subordinated to individual men, since this
works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and
sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become
more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to
the collective purpose. Or, to express the thing by a familiar
phrase, the highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it
is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled
family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and
freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.
After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows
clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and
mothering is their special function in the State, and that a
personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power
of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No
contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to
recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her
freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of her choice
and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession.
This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.
Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a
pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.
Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood
struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears…
I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the
matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I
want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full
participation in the collective purpose of mankind. Women, Iam
convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are
capable of far greater devotion than men. I want to see them
citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for
their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's
satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good children
in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service,
choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way
enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social
consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched
mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to
change the respective values of the family group altogether, and
make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner
and responsible guardian of her children.
It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it
is. The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social
organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human
expericnce-as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.
Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage
profoundly. To me that is a secondary consideration. I do not
believe that particular assertion myself, because Iam convinced
that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass
of civilised people. But even if I did believe it I should still
keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will
prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological
decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way
which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at
which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in the
life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must
be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove
insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is
not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral
inadaptability. The old code fails under the new needs. The only
alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human
quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented
rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must
presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as
Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim
Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may be in the
attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
6
I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price
of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt
monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a
politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The