Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Non-development, similar atrophy, or other deterioration of the mammary
glands precludes the vast majority of our young mothers from nourishing
their babes--a deplorable injury to these as well as to the mothers
themselves; physical and psychical function being closely and subtly
allied.
Women who fence or play hockey and other rough games during girlhood,
become, owing to such degenerative atrophy, incapacitated for lactation.
The following is an interesting example of the manner in which cruder
and lower-grade power may be increased at the cost of higher faculties.
A patient told me that, having been naturally a poor walker--two miles
having been her limit--she had determined to train herself out of this
which she regarded as an infirmity. Accordingly, by persistent practice,
she succeeded in raising her walking-power to ten miles daily. She
mentioned incidentally--seeing no relation of cause and effect--that,
for several years (the years during which her walking-powers had been
increasing) _she had become progressively deaf_.
That she had been, in point of fact, sapping the potential of the
complex, invaluable faculty of hearing, in order to equip her
leg-muscles, was confirmed for me a few weeks later, when I
read of a number of cyclists, who, after one of those deplorable
pacing-exhibitions common to-day, came in, one and all, stone deaf: a
consequence of nervous strain. The deafness in these cases passed off
with rest. But it is easy to understand that from such temporary
functional depletions frequently recurring, permanent structural
deterioration must result inevitably. Thus it is that over-use, in
sports and games, of the muscles of shoulder and chest, occasions
atrophy of mammary glands.
By no other way than by artificially inducing in them a premature
(partial) climacteric, by perverting their young organisations to the
quasi-masculine type of the middle-aged woman, and thereby releasing,
for available output, power which should have remained conserved for
many years in organisation, can women be fitted for masculine pursuits.
And such sterilisation, where it is not producing actually diseased and
degenerate offspring, is producing a pitiful race of pallid and
enfeebled babes and children; dyspeptic and spectacled,
adenoid-afflicted, unchildlike and generally deteriorate.
That other factors contribute to the wave of Racial decline now menacing
our modern civilisations, great and small, is true. Yet mothers of fine
vital potential are able to counteract and to minimise the effects of
constitutional disease in the other parent to degrees but little
realised. Because such mothers are so lamentably rare.
IV
It is the natural release of vital forces, consequent upon the normal
wane of mother-power at middle-age, that has been mainly responsible for
the errors of the Woman's Movement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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