Woman and Womanhood: A Search for PrinciplesSaleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams)
Science
Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
Saleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams)
Eugenics; Women
"A woman is only a woman,
But a good cigar is a smoke."
If a man takes that point of view he is not good enough for a woman, I
think; she may remember Dogberry, Take no note of him but let him go ...
and thank God she is rid of a ---- fool.
Certainly, I am not saying anything which will be grateful to all ears,
but while we are at it, and since this book is written in the interests
of women, I must say what I believe. I counsel the girl to stop her
lover's smoking; a thousandfold more strongly would I counsel her to
stop his drinking. In a former volume on eugenics, some of the effects
of parental drinking have been dealt with at length, and that subject
need not be returned to here. But also from the point of view of the
individual, a girl may be counselled to stop her lover's drinking. An
excellent eugenic motto for a girl, as my friend Canon Horsley pointed
out in discussing my paper on this subject read before the Society for
the Study of Inebriety in 1909, is "the lips that touch liquor shall
never touch mine."
There are always plenty of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who
make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves
naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the
teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. _But there is one great class
of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at
teetotalers, and that is the wives._ They know better, nay, they know
best, and their verdict stands and will remain against that of all
others. I am now addressing the girl who may become a wife, and I tell
her most solemnly that from her point of view she cannot afford to laugh
at the teetotaler; and if she can stop her lover's drinking, whether he
drinks much or little, she will do well for him and herself. She should
know what the effect of alcohol is upon a man, and she should have
imagination enough to realize that his hot breath, coming unwelcome,
will not be more palatable in the future for its flavouring of whisky.
It may be admitted that in saying all this the interests of the future
are perhaps paramount in my mind. I am trying to do a service to the
principle, "Protect parenthood from alcohol," which I advocate as the
first and most urgent motto for the real temperance reformer. Yet the
question of parenthood may be entirely left out of consideration, and
even so the advice here given to the girl about to choose a
husband--alas, that only a small proportion of maidenhood can be in that
fortunate state, which is yet the right and natural one!--is warranted
and more than warranted. We may go so far as to declare that it is a
great duty, laid upon the young womanhood of civilization, to protect
itself and the future, and to serve its own contemporary manhood, by
taking up this attitude towards alcohol. Would that this great
missionary enterprise were now unanimously undertaken by these most
effective and cogent of missionaries, whose own happiness so largely
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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