(2) The Mother
“In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man;
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth;
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her.”
John Masefield.

The neglected motherhood of England cried out for attention, and it is getting attention with a vengeance. A veritable Babel is being raised on the subject of mothers. Progressive women are all for more recognition and support of motherhood, but the difference between the reactionaries and them is that they hold the first thing necessary, to give intelligent support and recognition, is the liberation of the mother from all the antiquated rubbish of coverture law and from some of the worst results of economic servitude. Else indeed may women find that they have only exchanged King Log for King Stork. While King Log is reigning, little is done for the mothers directly by the State. Women, when they marry, are merged into their[79] husbands, who hold them as property, and have towards them certain legal responsibilities, of a nature somewhat analogous to those they have towards other living and sentient pieces of property, The State has always dimly known that in the quality of its citizens lay its true and lasting wealth; but penal laws, which used actually to mutilate men and women, and which still tend to reduce their vitality and to drive them to imbecility and madness, are plain witnesses of how imperfectly this truth has been grasped. Improvements in these respects are, however, on the way. This is said to be the age of the child, and through the child it is becoming also the age of the mother.

In England, at the present day, a working man has almost absolute power over his wife. That he uses this power in the main as humanely as he does, is a proof of how much better men are than the laws which they make or tolerate, and of how much real affection there is between men and women. The fact remains that, especially among working people, where the woman can have no money of her own unless she is in a position to earn it, the husband has the most awful powers of inflicting torture and wretchedness upon his whole family, and that it is distinctly safer for a working woman not to be married to the man she lives with. That working women so greatly prefer being married, again shows how strong in them is idealism and the love of social order. What may an Englishman do with his wife? His physical[80] force is supported by law as regards his “marital rights.” He can insist on his wife’s faithfulness to him, while using complete licence himself. He is supposed to maintain her in accordance with his station in life, but if he fails, it is very difficult for her to find redress. She can pledge his credit if he has any, but it may be refused, and she can then only get maintenance from him by leaving him and taking the children with her and throwing herself on the rates. The Parish will then take action, not for the sake of the woman or her children, but to save the rates! That is to say, she must become a pauper before she can get what he is supposed by law to give her. Even when the law has given her a maintenance order, the recovery of the money is made vastly difficult and precarious, and if the husband absconds, it is no one’s business to find him, unless, again, the woman becomes a pauper.

What would men say of a law which only allowed them to recover their debts on the same terms?

The husband can prevent his wife from earning, and he can claim any money she saves out of the housekeeping. He can bring up the children as he pleases, and control them even after his death, by will. He can leave the whole of his property as he pleases, even if it has been accumulated by the joint-work of his wife and himself, and if by doing so he leaves her and her children destitute. If he is wilfully idle and refuses to maintain her, she can “have the law of him,” and send him[81] to prison: much good that does her! The latitude allowed by the law in the matter of personal chastisement of the wife has been a byword ever since Truth published its weekly list. I have read this list on and off for over twenty years and I see no change. One week is very like another. Flogging a wife till she is covered with bruises, driving her out of the house on a winter’s night in her nightgown, kicking her when she is with child, and other assaults too abominable to mention have been held insufficient to entitle the wife to a separation. I repeat, it is safer for the woman to need no separation because she has never tied the knot.

By far the greater number of men do not by any means do what the law allows them, but are kind, toiling and fond husbands and fathers. But even when the father is the best of fellows, it happens in millions of cases that he is not able, under modern conditions, to make adequate provision for his family, and no working men can make adequate provision for the widows and young children they may leave. The State began to make serious provision when it introduced free elementary education. The next step was free meals for the needy, and this was rapidly followed by free medical inspection and treatment of children in schools. All these developments are undoubtedly socialistic, and involve the principle of giving, not according to deserts, but according to needs. And the interesting situation arises that—although we go on[82] saying that the man supports his family, and must, therefore, have a much larger wage than the woman—when the State pays for education, food, doctoring, nursing, it does so from the rates, which are paid by women as well as by men. No rate-collector troubles whether his rate is levied on a woman or a man; nor does he inquire whether the woman is supporting a family or no. Our experience of socialistic legislation so far goes to show that male politicians are disposed to say to women, “What’s yours is mine; what’s mine’s my own.” The Insurance Act is perhaps the most flagrant example of this, for by its provisions the State’s weekly twopence goes to nine million men and three million women; it is paid for out of the pockets of the taxpayers, and so is the whole of the cost of administering the Act. Practically all women feel the weight of taxation, yet here the men profit three times as much as the women, and by an extraordinary irony, the women who are selected to be left out of sickness benefit are the very women who are doing the admittedly womanly work of making a home, and nearly all women are left out of unemployment benefit.

It is easy to see how these anomalies arise. It is not by any means easy to provide a remedy for them. One scheme, propounded by Mr. H. G. Wells, and with a few ardent supporters, is the State endowment of motherhood. If this were adopted, the individual man would be relieved of the necessity of providing for his child, and the individual woman would be relieved of her economic[83] dependence on her husband. There has been markedly little support for this proposal as yet among women in England, although Ellen Key in Sweden is a warm advocate, seeing in it the opportunity of women to do their life-work well. So far as the scheme applies to women who have lost their husbands, there is a considerable measure of approval; it has sometimes been described as &ld............