Lysistrata : $b or, Woman's future and future womanLudovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Philosophy
Lysistrata : $b or, Woman's future and future woman
Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Women; Women -- Social and moral questions
It has been a great pleasure for me to read _Lysistrata_—it is so
stimulating. Whether one agrees with your views or not (and I disagree
with many of them), the book impels one to re-examine one’s standards of
value, and that is the highest function a book can perform.
Perhaps I am prejudiced, but to me you seem very hard on the medical
profession. With the present idiotic system of paying the doctor better
for illness than for health the wonder is, not that we doctors have so
many faults, but that we have so few. In a saner age we shall get a
retaining fee for keeping each person or group of persons well, and so,
in order to avoid excessive work, if for no higher motive, we shall aim
at preventing disease rather than at alleviating it. To a large extent
we do that now, in spite of the fact that it takes money out of our
pockets.
Your exhortation to breast-feed babies is backed by all but a few
cranks, and I find your suggestion to make confinement easier by proper
diet during pregnancy very interesting. I remember that at the obstetric
hospital at which I was trained we used to notice that patients who had
been on special treatment for albuminuria had, in general, easy
confinements. It is very significant, from the standpoint of your
suggestions, that in the diet of these patients the protein element had
been very greatly reduced. I shall follow up your idea and let you know
the result.
I am sure you are right when you say “Sound and desirable women cannot
be happy unmated.” The fact that there are some women who can does not
invalidate the general truth—they are atypical.
Another of your phrases I would that you should trumpet forth in a voice
that should reach to the uttermost ends of the earth: “Strictly
speaking, moral depravity is no more voluntary than physiological
depravity.” I am confident that as Science advances the former will be
found always to depend on the latter.
In speaking of the unfit, infanticide, and concubinage, your frankness
is splendid, though on my pet subject, Birth-Control, I disagree with
you. There can be no doubt that much of our present-day
“humanitarianism” only results in wasting on the hopelessly unfit money
and care which might be spent very profitably on the fit, and in keeping
alive those who should never have been born. With the decay of
sentimentalism, infanticide must come to be practised on those who at
birth are obviously below a (variable) minimum standard, and
sterilization (destruction of fertility without interference with sexual
potency or pleasure) on those whose deficiency becomes unmistakable only
at a more advanced age. Contraception will be used mainly to ensure an
optimum interval between births in the interest of both mother and
child, and to limit the offspring to a (variable) number most suitable
in the individual, financial, and social circumstances of each family.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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