What is the goal of woman's upward struggle? Is it voluntary
motherhood? Is it general freedom? Or is it the birth of a new race?
For freedom is not fruitless, but prolific of higher things. Being the
most sacred aspect of woman's freedom, voluntary motherhood is
motherhood in its highest and holiest form. It is motherhood
unchained--motherhood ready to obey its own urge to remake the world.
Voluntary motherhood implies a new morality--a vigorous, constructive,
liberated morality. That morality will, first of all, prevent the
submergence of womanhood into motherhood. It will set its face against
the conversion of women into mechanical maternity and toward the
creation of a new race.
Woman's rôle has been that of an incubator and little more. She has
given birth to an incubated race. She has given to her children what
little she was permitted to give, but of herself, of her personality,
almost nothing. In the mass, she has brought forth quantity, not
quality. The requirement of a male dominated civilization has been
numbers. She has met that requirement.
It is the essential function of voluntary motherhood to choose its own
mate, to determine the time of childbearing and to regulate strictly
the number of offspring. Natural affection upon her part, instead of
selection dictated by social or economic advantage, will give her a
better fatherhood for her children. The exercise of her right to
decide how many children she will have and when she shall have them
will procure for her the time necessary to the development of other
faculties than that of reproduction. She will give play to her tastes,
her talents and her ambitions. She will become a full-rounded human
being.
Thus and only thus will woman be able to transmit to her offspring
those qualities which make for a greater race.
The importance of developing these qualities in the mothers for
transmission to the children is apparent when we recall certain
well-established principles of biology. In all of the animal species below
the human, motherhood has a clearly discernible superiority over
fatherhood. It is the first pulse of organic life. Fatherhood is the
fertilizing element. Its development, compared to that of the mother
cell, is comparatively new. Likewise, its influence upon the progeny
is comparatively small. There are weighty authorities who assert that
through the female alone comes those modifications of form, capacity
and ability which constitute evolutionary progress. It was the mothers
who first developed cunning in chase, ingenuity in escaping enemies,
skill in obtaining food, and adaptability. It was they also who
attained unfailing discretion in leadership, adaptation to environment
and boldness in attack. When the animal kingdom as a whole is
surveyed, these stand out as distinctly feminine traits. They stand
out also as the characteristics by which the progress of species is
measured.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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