by H. G. Wells
that winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was
shown in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an
ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and
sympathetic. When at last we got within sight of the House the
square was a seething seat of excited people, and the array of
police on horse and on foot might have been assembled for a
revolutionary outbreak. There were dense masses of people up
Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The scuffle that
ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such
stupendous preparations…
3
Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night,
and all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the
piers of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch,
stood women pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we
went to and fro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course,
the independent worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed
old ladies standing there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-
looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness
of battered women showing in their eyes; north-country factory
girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim, comfortable mothers of
families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank,
hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very
dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast,
with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those women looked
defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of
adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never
ceased. I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or
cease. I found that continual siege of the legislature
extraordinarily impressive-infinitely more impressive than the
feeble-forcible "ragging" of the more militant section. I thought
of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the
women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to
Westminster.
I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should
ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past
with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards
the end the House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
4
There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat
the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue,
irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political
life. We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it
thrust out before us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it
insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to
the essential things…"
We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient
children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That
conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its
essentials the habitual daily life is all against a profounder
treatment of political issues. The politician, almost as absurdly
as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnificent
preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality
he has so stupendously summoned-he bolts back to littleness. The
world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but without, he
adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning cup of
tea…
The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one.
It reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And
at any particular time only a small minority have a personal
interest in changing the established state of affairs. Habit and
interest are in a constantly recruited majority against conscious
change and adjustment in these matters. Drift rules us. The great
mass of people, and an overwhelming proportion of influential
people, are people who have banished their dreams and made their
compromise. Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no longer to
be thought about. They have given up any aspirations for intense
love, their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a
cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of righteousness as
their compensation. It's a settled affair with them, a settled,
dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest
reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to the
Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal
marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "Iam for leaving
all these things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice,
"Leave them alone! Leave them all alone!"
That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed
passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and
went out.
For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone.
I developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music,
for the human figure in art-turning my heart to landscape. I
wanted to sneer at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable
until I found the effective sneer. In matters of private morals
these were my most uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of
these things any more for ever. I hated the people whose talk or
practice showed they were not of my opinion. I wanted to believe
that their views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible,
because I had decided to treat them as at that level. I was, in
fact, falling into the attitude of the normal decent man.
And yet one cannot helpthinking! The sensible moralised man finds
it hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still
dreams beyond these commonplace acquiescences,-the appeal of beauty
suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer
nights, the sweetness of distant music…
It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the
present time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and
so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to
unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married
for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling
has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't
understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children
or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the
supreme claim of good births and selective births above all other
affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most
fundamental aspect of existence…
5
It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of
the position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about
all these intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was
bringing about, that led me to the heretical views I have in the
last five years dragged from the region of academic and timid
discussion into the field of practical politics. Those influences,
no doubt,
have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful
emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of
things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment
of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism. Now
that Iam exiled from the political world, it is possible to
estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.
I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a
universal education grew to paramount importance in my political
scheme. It is but a short step from this to the question of the
quantity and quality of births in the community, and from that again
to these forbidden and fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and
the family organisation. A sporadic discussion of these aspects had
been going on for years, a Eugenic society existed, and articles on
the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit
were staples of the monthly magazines. But beyond an intermittent
scolding of prosperous childless people in general-one never
addressed them in particular-nothing was done towards arresting
those adverse processes. Almost against my natural inclination, I
found myself forced to go into these things. I came to the
conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,
based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work.
It wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and
well trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised
state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its
intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some
very extensive and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old
haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly
discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or
good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire.
Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a
puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle.
No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present
question for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and
sits at every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional
except the improvement of the race, and it became more and more
doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all! Splendid and
beautiful and courageous people must come together and have
children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be
freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to
be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom
need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances
have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to
whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the
family, to threaten its existence. It is as if a party of pigmies
in a not too capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant-
and decided to go on living happily by cutting him dead…
The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it
can get the best possible increase under the best possible
conditions. I became more and more convinced that the independent
family unit of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and
owner of the children, in which all are dependent upon him,
subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up
or down, does not supply anything like the best conceivable
conditions. We want to modernise the family footing altogether. An
enormous premium both in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put
upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held out
to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences to
social and material considerations.
The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition
of the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is
changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy
everything is changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls
and falls most among just the most efficient and active and best
adapted classes in the community. The species is recruited from
among its failures and from among less civilised aliens.
Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning the best of their
possible babies in the furnaces that run the machinery. In the
United States the native Anglo-American strain has scarcely
increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries
the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic elements
in the community. The women of these classes still remain legally
and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural
excuse for their dependence gone…
The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory
groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless
effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a
solitary child grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes
that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a great
social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married
women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and
asylums for the heedlessly begotten. It is just the disorderly
proliferation of Bromstead over again, in lives instead of in
houses.
What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying
boundaries, pushing research and discovery, building cities,
improving all the facilities of life, making great fleets, waging
wars, while this aimless decadence remains the quality of the
biological outlook?…
It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion
until I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had
it clear in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than
participate in all the surrenders of mind and body that are implied
in Dayton's snarl of "Leave it alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage
and the begetting and care of children, is the very ground substance
in the life of the community. In a world in which everything
changes, in which fresh methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas
perpetually renew the circumstances of life, it is preposterous that
we should not even examine into these matters, should rest content
to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a barbaric age.
Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the
solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together,
are right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out
from our IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to
say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of
individual passions but a service rendered to the State. Women must
become less and less subordinated to individual men, since this
works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and
sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become
more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to
the collective purpose. Or,
to express the thing by a familiar
phrase, the highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it
is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled
family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and
freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.
After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows
clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and
mothering is their special function in the State, and that a
personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power
of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No
contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to
recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her
freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of her choice
and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession.
This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.
Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a
pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.
Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood
struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears…
I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the
matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I
want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full
participation in the collective purpose of mankind. Women, Iam
convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are
capable of far greater devotion than men. I want to see them
citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for
their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's
satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good children
in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service,
choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way
enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social
consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched
mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to
change the respective values of the family group altogether, and
make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner
