Motherhood and the State

I

WHILE I was dining with a friend in a New York restaurant not long ago, a little family of five — father, mother, and three children — came in and took the next table. The parents were very young, hardly out of the twenties apparently, and there could not have been much more than two years between the oldest child and the youngest. The children were clearly quite accustomed to their parents: their manners did not reflect the nursery, and the mother looked after them with the indefinable tact and handiness that mark a person born to his trade. She gave the impression of a great, free natural talent for motherhood, as specific and unmistakable as Turgenieff’s talent for writing or Rembrandt’s for painting. Altogether, the sight of the little group was as pleasant and reviving an experience as one could have.

After looking at them a long time, my friend remarked, ‘I tell you, that woman is earning her living!’ There was no doubt about it. One who can ply a trade the year round and put the indisputable stamp of a master on each day’s work turned out, may be held entitled to a living at least, and perhaps also some measure of gratitude from a world which is not overblessed with efficiency. The thought occurred to me that if I, for instance, could write and edit as well as this woman was doing the work of motherhood, I should expect to hear from my publishers and the public. And, in fact, I should hear promptly from both. I mention this economic comparison because there is a significance in it which will appear later.

For this little woman who was earning her living, earning it by the inspired work of genius, was not hearing from her employers or from the public in any substantial sense. Her husband gave her a living, no doubt, and yet could one say that her husband employed her to bear and rear children as my publishers employ me to write and edit? Hardly. Collaterally, her work brought him, I hope, such affectional gratification that, he felt that he had his money’s worth; but the economic profit of her work, the thing that she should be paid for, flowed elsewhere. He got none of it. In fact, one must conceive quite an improbable combination of circumstances to bring him even a return of one twentieth of one per cent on his investment in all three children. To begin with, he was evidently well-to-do, so probably he would never need a return or expect one. Moreover, two of the three children were girls; and while we may hope for a day soon coming in which girls will have an equal opportunity to work and earn money and keep what they earn, girls are comparatively a poor investment at present. Considering the initial cost of a place to live, or commutation of its interest in the form of rent, and counting in upkeep and improvements with the overhead charge for food, clothing, and education, it is plain that the young father had no chance, in the world, of economic profit or even of getting any of his money back. Nor is this an exceptional case. Children are seldom an economic asset nowadays as they were in times by no means out of memory, when the family was a self-dependent group. Oftener than not, they are a liability.

And yet there is an economic profit flowing from them somewhere, for they have a potential wealth-producing power. The three children we were considering will have some kind of ability or labor to sell, and largely by reason of their mother’s genius for motherhood it is likely to be of a rather high order. Who will profit by this? Most certainly the State. Our common remark that a child-bearing woman has ‘ done something for her country’ shows how much truer our instincts are than our practical interpretation of them. This little woman was working for the State, turning her superb genius to the benefit of the State in a unique and indispensable service; and yet she is paid for it only indirectly, or rather, not paid for it at all, since, gloze the fact as you will with whatever sentimental talk about ‘sharing’ or the ‘spending partner,’ it remains a fact that what she gets from her husband is not pay but largesse.

This does not seem fair or self-respecting or at all calculated to encourage good work. I take it that when some of our socialist friends proclaim that child-bearing and child-rearing are the State’s most intimate concern, they have a proposition which logically is sound to the core. If so, the State should pay for the service, and pay for it in some kind of rough proportion to its value. No one would minimize the affectional delights of parenthood, but yet it seems a niggardly policy for the State to capitalize them in order to get out of paying its debts for services rendered. Why should the State take a mercenary advantage of this little woman’s delight in her talent for childrearing, any more than my employers, for instance, take advantage of my pleasure in writing? Some inkling of this unfairness has been getting into a good many minds lately. Some nations, frightened into recognition of it by a falling birth-rate, have put a bounty on children. Our nation has here and there made a timid beginning, such as it is, with mother’s pensions. But these are chiefly for poor widows with dependent children; hence the principle is obscured and nothing has got very far.

Probably one reason is because it is so hard to see how a compensation for motherhood should be paid. If all mothers were like this one, it would be a simple matter. The best way to compensate Turgenieff, Michael-Angelo, Beethoven, Edison, would be to hand over the money and think no more about it. Any attempt to direct their genius would be a hindrance and no help. All they need is to be let alone; and this is quite so too with this little mother. Her genius, interest, and devotion to her trade could be relied on to produce the best results, and give the State its money’s worth in full of future citizenship.

II

But all mothers are not like this, any more than all writers are like Turgenieff. In fact, so far as my observation goes, first-class talent for motherhood is quite as rare and precious as first-class talent for writing. I am aware that in making this statement one steps on burning ground, yet I believe that if one counted up the number of people engaged in the trade of motherhood and the number engaged in the trade of writing, the proportion of genius would be found to run about the same in both. Nay more, I believe the proportion of those who are acceptably doing what we may call the journeyman-work of motherhood is no higher than of those who are acceptably doing the journeyman-work of literature. These are they who in both trades are working conscientiously, with the affections deeply engaged, but more or less incompetently. Now, if the State contemplated paying writers, it certainly would, and perhaps should, take this fact into account. In the great majority of cases, it would have to administer the compensation in some less direct way in order to avoid doing more harm than good.

Just so with motherhood. The State imperatively needs a birth-rate. It must have citizens. Mothers bear and rear citizens; hence mothers should be paid for the service. So far, so good. But if the State is paying for citizens it should have something more than the mere raw material of citizenship. It may fairly ask for a certain average training and discipline; and this is precisely what the great, majority of journeyman-mothers are unqualified to provide. It is only our turbid and mawkish sentiment about motherhood that prevents our seeing how unreasonable it is to expect this of them, — the sentiment that keeps us continually confusing a biological function with a social talent. Suppose all men could write: still we could all see the absurdity of supposing that more than one in a hundred million could write the Annals of a Sportsman, or one in ten thousand ever even be taught how to report, a fire in a fashion to satisfy the most lenient city editor. But we do not see the equivalent absurdity of assuming that if every woman could be a mother (and probably the number of sterile women in the United States is no greater than that of illiterates), she would be ipso facto able to turn out an order or quality of work that presupposes either genius or considerable ability.¹

However, women unquestionably have what our friends the economists call a ‘natural monopoly’ of motherhood, and their work is, with negligible exceptions, about as good as they can make it. The most pathetic sight, I think, in a world which rather industriously specializes in pathetic sights, is the grim acquiescence of so many women in a lifetime of work for which they are not fit, and their heroic effort to make an inflexible conscientiousness do duty for the genius or the ability which they do not possess. There are compensations in this, too, as there always are in processes of discipline and abnegation. The work of these women, unsatisfactory as it may be, is better than we with our blundering social arrangements based on impossible sentimental expectations, ever deserve. But life enforces discipline enough even when we make it as easy for each other as we can; and there is no doubt that the State would secure a far better quality of citizenship if it offered terms that took more account of human happiness and did not virtually prescribe such a dreadful sacrifice of body and soul.

III

But again, how? Direct, payment for motherhood, as we saw, is perhaps impracticable except in a few special cases. Well, then, why not attack the problem at the other end, by lightening the mother’s labor? If we cannot see our way to give her more pay, we can give her less work. If we cannot furnish straw, we may at least cut down the tale of bricks to a minimum. The best compromise at present appears to be for the State to give opportunity whereby the mother may be relieved of labor and responsibility in childrearing, as far as possible, and left free with a larger portion of her life to regulate and occupy as she sees fit. This does not settle the State’s debt to her, but it goes so far toward it that the State would no doubt find her a complaisant and delighted creditor.

Proposals of this kind have been made by the socialists and are invariably met with a cry of distress over the ‘institutional child’ whose fate of being state-bred instead of parent-bred makes him as it were a monster unto many. I cannot see the logic of this; not because of any tenderness toward socialism, for I have none, but because of the fact, which those who talk in this way apparently overlook, that our children are state-bred to a great extent already. Probably the truth is that when we speak of the institutional or state-bred child we think at once of reformatories, almshouses, workhouses and the like. We do not think of public schools as State institutions. Yet that is precisely what they are; and every child who attends one is an institutional child. Our public-school system is the first effort by the State to afford the mother a partial measure of the very relief we are talking about. In establishing the public schools, the State had not perhaps full sight of this object; yet their establishment tended directly and powerfully toward it. Now, while the public-school system has come in for a great deal of criticism lately, one observes with interest that the complaint is always that it does not do enough, does not touch the child’s life at enough points. We never hear complaint that the schools are usurping the function of the mother or ‘undermining the home’ — to borrow a phrase much used by our conservative friends. The public-school system has been greatly extended in our day: at one end by the kindergarten and at the other by vocational training, manual training, trade-schools, continuation schools, and so on. Every one thinks that the schools should go yet further. No one, so far as I know, thinks that they should be restricted or abolished, — as it seems one should think if one’s concern about the institutional child were logical or even intelligent.

Well, then, why not resolutely extend the public-school system to its logical length? This would not only satisfy every one who complains of the system’s present inefficiency, but would also incidentally be the largest practicable step the State can take toward readjusting its iniquitous business relations with the mothers who serve it. The school now represents only a certain limited type of activities, but the limitation is purely arbitrary. There is no natural reason why the school should not be a centre where all sorts of opportunities for intellectual, social, and industrial improvement are offered. On the contrary, it seems most natural and logical that, the school should include all possible factors of education such as are now furnished separately by various types of municipal and commercial institutions — libraries, parks, playgrounds, model gardens, gymnasiums, theatres, moving pictures, auditoriums, trade-schools, business-schools, apprenticeships. It is natural, too, that such an opportunity-centre should be available all day and every day in the year. The limitation of a six-hour day and an eight-month year is purely arbitrary.

By this simple and strictly logical enlargement of our conception of the public school, we should get what amounts to a new type of municipal institution. One could say a great deal about the general value of such an institution as compared with our present schools, but we are concerned, for the purposes of this paper, only with its reactions upon motherhood. We can trace these best, possibly, by considering such a practical example as the public-school system of Gary, Indiana, the only one, so far as I am aware, in which this radical development has been carried out in practice. The fable conveys a salutary warning to well-meaning outsiders who ‘in quarrels interpose nevertheless I must suggest to the feminists and socialists that, in consistently overlooking the Gary schools, they are losing some very fine campaign material.

Children are taken in the Gary schools at the age of six weeks, which is almost as soon as the mother can be about. The domestic-science classes need the babies to practice on, — if this phrase does not suggest vivisection or something of the kind. They get the advantage of the best equipment and the best care, and there are never half enough babies to go around. Gary could take care of half the babyhood of Indiana in its several schools. The limit of school age is lifetime. You can go to school as long as you live. That is to say, adults may and do use the schools as freely as children, and there are inducements for them to do so. The schools comprise every possible opportunity for industrial and cultural training, and moreover, they are social centres in a complete sense. Everything that happens in town is scheduled there. The parks, gymnasiums, libraries, public meetings, — every thing, so far as I could see, except churches, is there; everything free and wide open from eight in the morning until tenthirty at night, and all the year round.

It is impossible to go into details of management and administration. The object, in a word, is not to provide mere instruction, be it ever so diversified, but to provide a complete life, a superabundance of opportunity for every sort of good employment. The system depends on nothing but gravitation, the purely natural tendency which every one has to cleave to the better thing rather than the worse, when the two are put in free competition, to bring and hold children to these opportunities. And it works perfectly; just as any one with a true insight into human nature might know it would. There is no problem of truancy and no problem of juvenile leisure. Every moment of the day the school is in competition with the street and alley, the vacant lot, freight-yard, pool-room, and saloon; and it wins without effort.

Now, surely we can see at once the inevitable reaction of this upon all classes of mothers. Take first the born genius for motherhood whom we have been considering. Gravitation takes her children to the school a good deal of the time, — but it takes her there too. She enters the life of her children and lives it with them, sweetening and tempering it not only for them but for all other children with whom she is brought in contact; thus extending the scope of her genius beyond the limits of her own family in an effortless and natural way, with the aid of innumerable facilities which she could not otherwise have; and thereby enhancing the value of her service to the State.

Then the journeyman-mother, she of the vast and pitiful majority whose natural affection is sound but whose ability is slight and weak, she too is interested, but only by her affectional side. She may relinquish as much initiative and executive responsibility as she chooses, and be free to devote herself to her children with that portion of her nature only which is profitable for them. Then the unnatural mother (though why, why in the name of reason and justice do we call her unnatural? Is it unnatural that women, poor souls! any more than men, should not all like the same kind of work?), the mother to whom children are an accident, a nuisance, or a calamity, may be relieved from a crushing burden and her offspring kept from the profound misfortune of her rearing. The depraved and vicious mother may have her influence as far as possible counteracted, and her opportunities for harm sharply limited. The povertystricken or over-weighted mother may go about her toil with a lighter heart, conscious that her children are having a better chance than she could ever give them. Then, finally, the feminist mother, who wants economic independence and a larger place on the social or political stage, may go about her enterprise cheered by the agreeable thought that the State, which has been so long the unimpressionable and stodgy object of her spirited attentions, at last is measurably ‘squaring’ her and enabling her children ‘to live their own lives’ as largely and profitably, perhaps, as she is living hers.

IV

And what, finally, is the reaction on the home? I could answer that question better if I knew what it means in the mind of those who ask it. When people speak of the home as though the term were one of precision and definiteness, like speaking of St, Paul’s Cathedral or the House of Representatives, I confess that I cannot follow them. When they declare that this or that ‘menaces the home’ or ‘disrupts the home,’ I can only reply, ‘Possibly; — but first tell me what you mean by the home, and then I will tell you what I think.’ If home is a place, it is practically nonexistent in a nation of migrants like ourselves. Few Americans have ever had the fortune to

or are even sensible of the nostalgic charm pervading this profound and admirable verse of Sainte-Beuve. If home means a house, I point to the millions of Eastern desert-wanderers who have never heard of a house. If it means a household, a group of people whom choice in marriage plus the accident of birth has segregated, I call attention to two things. First, that the household was never organized with reference to children and is now less so than ever. It is organized with reference to adults. There is relatively little opportunity, little doing, for children in the household. This is inevitable and cannot be changed. Second, that we should carefully distinguish between the economic and sentimental reasons for the solidarity of the household.

Formerly, when the household was a self-dependent economic unit, these reasons were in a sense interrelated. Well within the memory of men now living, all the washing, cooking, baking, butchering, canning, preserving, gardening, tailoring, haircutting, carpet-weaving, dyeing, candle-making, soap-boiling, and so on through the long subsidiary list of ‘chores,’ — all were done in the household. There was an immense unifying and cementing power in this. Members of a family got at and knew each other by that noblest side of character that expresses itself in coöperative work. They learned compromise, adjustment, selfsurrender; and their love for those from whom and with whom they learned could not help increasing. This school was an unmercifully hard one, but it carried incentives to mutual affection and esteem as great as the Nertchinsk mines or Libby Prison carried for their graduates, or as any hard, unyielding situation carries for those who make common cause against it. And here probably, we have the one drop of truth in all the ocean of verbiage which, from Payne’s song down to last night’s anti-suffrage speech, has weltered round the name of home.

But when the economic character of the household changed, these cementing and unifying influences disappeared. Regret them as we may, they are gone. No power can restore them. No power can reproduce the precise sentiment which grew from them. Two graduates of Libby Prison will always feel a deep and peculiar regard for each other, but they cannot bequeath that regard to their sons and still less to their grandsons. At the present time we have the possibility (and of course in most cases, the fact) of a distinct affectional life obtaining between members of a household. But where affection obtains, it must now obtain per se. It is no longer sustained and shaped by the household’s economic circumstances, since the household is no longer an economic unit.

If I were asked therefore whether or not the State is likely to ‘disrupt the home’ by pushing its public-school system to the limit of logical development, I should be very sure, sure as one can be of any matter which one judges before the fact, that it would not. A household pervaded by a disinterested affectional life lived and enjoyed for its own sake, — well, nothing can disrupt that — it is bomb-proof; and any situation short of that will be cleared and improved, it seems to me, by encouraging the children to cultivate outside the home such measure of affectional life as they cannot, for whatever reason, cultivate at home. Loving unlovely people and unlovely things is up-hill work, too much for the initial practice of a child’s tender fibre, and he should not have it to do. It is work for the mature and toughened moral sinew. And really, it is not important that a child should love this particular person or that; the important thing is that he should learn to love. And he will learn this best where his opportunities are best: best of all from the genius for motherhood, and next best from the journeyman-mother whose responsibility is permitted to end with imparting that lesson, as the only one she is in any degree qualified to teach. From any other order of parenthood it is unlikely that he will learn much about the great power and philosophy of love. Better by far that his affectional life should develop among the contacts and incentives to disinterested sentimental attachments, which he would find abounding in the new type of public school.

Experience shows how wise it is to leave the settlement of all this kind of thing which we adults find so knotty and debatable, to the instinct of the children themselves. Of such is the kingdom of heaven, — free to move in the midst of opportunity, they will always go where it is best, for them to be. This is their divine, inerrant wisdom, so uncomprehended of our logic-worn souls. The children of the genius or the journeyman-mother will spend much time at home, almost as much perhaps as at the school, — enough, at any rate, to get its unadulterated advantages. Children in the other categories (pace the feminist mother for cavalierly lumping her off with the unnatural and vicious,— it is by way of logic not of insult) will perhaps go home no more than to eat and sleep. If so, so best: best for them, and for the household whose organization virtually excludes them.

Every consideration of self-interest seems to point to the complete development of the public-school system; and in its development the State would find itself for the first time approximating fair play with the army of motherhood which is giving it an indispensable and at present wholly unrequited service.