OCR Rendition - approximate

76 EUGENICS ITS DEFINITION, SCOPE AND AIMS 77 FROM V. LADY WELBY. The science of Eugenics as not only dealing with "all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race," but also "with those that develop them to the utmost advantage," must have the most pressing interest for women. And one of the first things to do-pending regulative reform-is to prepare the minds of women to take a truer view of their dominant natural impulse towards service and self-sacrifice. They need to realise more clearly the significance of their mission to conceive, to develop, to cherish and to train-in short, in all senses to mother the next, and through that the succeeding generations of Man. As things are, they have almost entirely missed the very point both of their special function and of their strongest yearnings. They have lost that discerning guidance of eugenic instinct and that inerrancy of eugenic preference which, broadly speaking, in both sexes have given us the highest types of man yet developed. The refined and educated woman of this day is brought up to countenance, and to see moral and religious authority countenance, social standards which practically take no account of the destinies and the welfare of the race. It is thus hardly wonderful that she should be failing more and more to fulfil her true mission, should indeed too often be unfaithful to it, spending her instinct of devotion in unworthy, or at least barren, directions. Yet, once she realises what the results will be that she can help to bring about, she will be even more ready than the man to give herself, not for that vague empty abstraction, the " Future," but for the coming generations among which her own descendants may be reckoned. For her natural devotion to her babe-the representative of the generations yet to come-is even more complete than that to her husband, which indeed is biologically, though she knows it not, her recognition in him of the means to a supreme end. But it is not only thus that women are concerned with the profound obligation to the race which the founder of the science of Eugenics is bringing home to the social conscience. At present, anyhow, a large proportion of civilised women find themselves from one or another cause debarred from this social service in the direct sense. There is another kind of race-motherhood open to, and calling for, the intelligent recognition of and intelligent fulfilment by, all women. There are kinds of natural and instinctive knowledge of the highest value which the artificial social conditions of civilisation tend to efface. There are powers, of swift insight and penetration-powers also of unerring judgment-which are actually atrophied by the ease and safety secured in highly organised communities. These, indeed, are often found in humble forms, which might be called in-sense and fore-sense. While I would lay stress on the common heritage of humanity which gives the man a certain motherhood and the woman a certain fatherhood in outlook, perhaps also in intellectual function, we are here mainly concerned with the specialised mental activities of women as distinguished from those of men. It has long been a commonplace that women have, as a rule, a larger share of so-called "intuition " than men. But the reasons for this, its true nature and its true work and worth, have never, so far as I know, been adequately set forth. It is obvious that these reasons cannot be properly dealt with-indeed can but barely be indicated-in these few words. They involve a reference to an extensive range of facts which anthropology, archaeology, history, psychology and physiology, as well as philology, have brought to our knowledge. They mean a review of these facts in a new light-that which, in many cases, the woman who has preserved or recovered her earlier, more primitive racial prerogative, can alone throw upon them. I will only here mention such facts as the part primitively borne by women in the evolution of crafts and arts, including the important one of healing; and point out the absolute necessity, since an original parity of muscular development in the animal world was lost, of their meeting physical coercion by the help of keen, penetrative, resourceful wits, and the "conning" which (from the temptation of weakness to serve by deception) became what we now mean by " cunning." To these I think we may add the woman's leading part in the evolution of language. While her husband was the "man of action," and in the heat of the chase and of battle, or the labour of building huts, making stockades, iweapons, etc., the "man of few words," she was necessarily the talker, necessarily the provider or suggester of symbolic sounds and with them of pictorial signs, by which to describe the ever-growing products of human energy, intelligence and constructiveness, and the ever-growing needs and interests of the race-in short, the ever-widening range of social experience. We are all, men and women, apt to be satisfied now-as we have recently been told, for instance, in the Faraday Lecture-with things as they are. But that is just what we all came into the world to be dissatisfied with. And while it may now be said that women are more conservative than men, they still tend to be more adaptive. If the fear of losing by violent change what has been gained for the children were removed, women would be found, as of old, in the van of all social advance. Lastly, I would ask attention to the fact that throughout history, and I believe in every part of the world, we find the elderly woman credited with wisdom and acting as the trusted adviser of the man. It is only in very recent times, and in highly artificial societies, that we have begun to describe the dense, even the imbecile man as an " old woman." Here we have a notable evidence indeed of the disastrous atrophy of the intellectual heritage of woman, of the partial paralysis of that racial motherhood out of which she naturally speaks ! Of course, as in all such cases, the inherited wisdom became associated with magic and wonder-working and sybilline gifts of all kinds. The always shrewd and often really originative, predictive and widereaching qualities of the woman's mind (especially after the climacteric had been passed) were mistaken for the uncanny and devil-derived powers of the sorceress and the witch, Like the thinker, the moralist, and the healer, she was tempted CIibPDF - www.fastio.com