Taboo and genetics : $b A study of the biological, sociological and psychological foundation of the familyKnight, Melvin M. (Melvin Moses)
Science
Taboo and genetics : $b A study of the biological, sociological and psychological foundation of the family
Knight, Melvin M. (Melvin Moses)
Sex (Biology); Sex (Psychology); Taboo; Women
In whatever races finally survive, the women of good stock as well as
poor--perhaps eventually the good even more than the poor--will
reproduce themselves. Because of our ideals of individual liberty, this
may not be achieved by taboo, ignorance or conscription for motherhood.
But when it is found to be the personal interest to bear children, both
as a means of complete physical and mental development and as a way of
winning social approval and esteem, it will become as imperative for
woman to fulfil the biological function to which she is specialized as
it was under the old system of moral and taboo control. The increasing
emphasis on the necessity of motherhood for the maintenance of a normal,
health personality, and the growing tendency to look upon this function
as the greatest service which woman can render to society, are manifest
signs that this time is approaching. There is little doubt that woman
will be as amenable to these newer and more rationalized mores as human
nature has always been to the irrationally formed customs and traditions
of the past.
To ignore the female specialization involved in furnishing the
intramaternal environment for three children, on an average, to the
group, is simply foolish. If undertaken at maturity--say from
twenty-two to twenty-five years of age--and a two-year interval left
between the three in the interest of both mother and children, it puts
woman in an entirely different relation toward extra-reproductive
activities than man. It does imply a division of labour.
In general, it would seem socially expedient to encourage each woman to
have her own three children, instead of shifting the burden upon the
shoulders of some other. If such activities of nursing and caring for
the very young can be pooled, so much the better. Doubtless some women
who find them distasteful would be much more useful to society at other
work. But let us not disregard fundamentals. It is obviously
advantageous for children of normal, able parents to be cared for in the
home environment. In a _biologically healthy_ society the presumption
must be that the average woman has some three children of her own. Since
this obviously includes nurses and governesses, we see at once the
futility of the oft-proposed class solution of hiring single women to
care for the children of the fortunate. If such a servant is
undesirable, she is not hired; if normal, in a biologically healthy
society she would have her own children.
The female handicap incident to reproduction may be illustrated by the
case of Hambletonian 10 mentioned in Chapter II. We saw that a female
could not have borne the hundredth part of his colts. This simply means
that the effort or individual cost of impressing his characters upon the
new generation is less than one one-hundredth that required of a female.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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