Imperialism and Motherhood

Anna Davin

Darwinist notions of the struggle for existence as an essential part of the survival of the race. [I] In the last decades of the century it was used both by the radical neoMalthusians, who recommended contraception as an artificial check on population and therefore a preventive of poverty (which they attributed to over-population, arguing for instance that wages were kept down by the competition for employment); and also by the advocates of what was coming to be known as eugenics, who wanted a selective limitation of population growth, to prevent the 'deterioration of the race' and decline as an imperial nation through the proliferation of those they regarded as 'unfit' (to breed). [21 There was however another view, early expressed by Charles Kingsley (in 1858), that over-population was impossible 'in a country that has the greatest colonial empire that the world has ever seen'. He believed that 'since about four-fifths of the globe cannot be said to be as yet in any wise inhabited or cultivated', 'it was a duty, one of the noblest of duties, to help the increase of the English race as much as possible', and he urged the members of the Ladies' Sanitary Association, whom he was addressing, to fight against infant mortality. [3]

Later enthusiasts for empire also tended to see population as crucial, especially after the publication of an influential work by J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, in 1883, and they were disturbed by the falling birth rate which each census after 1881 confirmed. The maintenance of empire, argued the prominent conservative journalist J.L. Garvin in 1905,

would be best based upon the power of a white population, proportionate in numbers, vigour and cohesion to the vast territories which the British dernocracies in the Mother Country and the Colonies control.

If the British population did not increase fast enough to fill the empty spaces of the empire, others would. The threat was not from the indigenous populations, whom he does not mention, but from rival master-races. The respective white populations of the United States, Germany and the British Isles, he said, were 73m, 61m, and 54m, and Britain's rate of increase was the slowest, as well as starting from the lowest base. And others protected their industry by tariffs, so that they could make the most of their larger labour forces:

Germany and America absorb into their industrial system year by year a number of new workers twice and three times as large as we can find employment for. These states, therefore, gain upon us in man-power and money-power alike; in fighting-power and budget-power; and in strict consequence sea-power itself must ultimately be shared between them.

The birth rate then was a matter of national importance: population was power. Children, it was said, belonged 'not merely to the parents but to the community as a whole'; they were 'a national asset', 'the capital of a country'; on them depended 'the future of the country and the Empire'; they were 'the citizens of tomorrow'. 15] This appreciation of their value was certainly strengthened by concern as to their supply. From the mid-seventies the birth rate had been declining, and this trend once recognized caused much anxiety, especially when it was realized that a substantial proportion of those born did not survive. The infant mortality rate for England and Wales in 1899 was 163 - that is, out of every 1,000 children born, 163 died before reaching their first birthday. This was higher than the average for the decade (154),

which in turn was higher than the average for the 1880s (142). Rates were highest in the poorest, most populous districts. [6] And as Alexander Blyth, Medical Officer of Health for Marylebone, pointed out in 1907:

over-production lessens, under-production enhances the value of commodities. Considering the life of an infant as a commodity its money value must be greater than 35 years ago. It is of concern to the nation that a sufficient number of children should annually be produced to more than make good the losses by death; hence the importance of preserving infant life is even greater now than it was before the decline of the birth rate.[7]

The influential author of the first comprehensive and authoritative treatise on infant

mortality (Infant Mortality: a Social Problem, 1906), George Newman, who at this point was also a London Medical Officer of Health (for Finsbury), expressed similar concern in its preface:

there is an annual loss to England and Wales of 120,000 lives by the death of infants. In past years, there has been a similar drain upon the national resources of life. But it should not be forgotten that this loss of life is now operating in conjunction with a diminished income.[8]

Similar statements (and metaphors) abounded at that time.

Infant mortality was not of course a new problem: Sir John Simon in his reports as medical officer to the Privy Council had already in mid-century identified it as an index of the general sanitary condition; and in the 1890s, when unlike other indices of health it seemed to be getting worse (although the new theories of bacteriology

offered fresh hope of solution), Medical Officers of Health were anxiously observing and analyzing it: as the new local monitors of public health they were in

the best position to collate statistical information and to compare different factors and attempts at prevention.[91 Some municipalities were already in the 1890s distributing leaflets on infant care, and providing instruction to mothers through visits to their homes. Such efforts were given new impetus not only by the epidemics of infant diarrhoea during the hot summers of 1898-1900, but also by the climate of opinion in the 1900s, when in the wake of the disastrous Boer War fears for national standards of physique reached a peak. [10] Concern for the health of older children (which again had begun to preoccupy some doctors and teachers in the 1880s and 1890s) also greatly intensified, and the official investigations which resulted brought no reassurance. [III Various measures followed, both at national and local level.

Laws designed to improve the conditions of infancy and childbirth were passed: midwives were required to have training (1902 -though with delayed execution),

local authorities were empowered to provide meals for needy children (1906), and obliged to organize medical inspection (though not treatment) in schools (1907),

births had to be notified within six weeks so that health visitors could be sent round 0 907), while the Children Act of 1908 made detailed provision across the spectrum of child welfare. Municipal authorities experimented with schemes to supply hYgienic milk cheaply for weaned infants (at risk from the contaminated and adulterated milk normally on sale in working-class districts), and with prizes for healthy babies or for babies which survived their first year; they distributed endless leaflets and sent out battalions of health visitors. The Local Government Board organized two conferences on infant mortality, in 1906 and 1908, and conducted enquiries (through its medical department under Arthur Newsholme) into different aspects of infant mortality.[121

Besides all this official activity, voluntary societies for the promotion of public health and domestic hygiene mushroomed in these years: the Institute of Hygiene (1903), the Infants' Health Society (1904), the National League for Physical Education and Improvement (1905), the Food Education Society (1908), the National League for Health, Maternity and Child Welfare (1905), the Eugenics Education Society (1908), the Women's League of Service for Motherhood (1910), and so on.[13] The officers and members of such societies were overwhelmingly ladies and gentlemen, sometimes of some prominence, who gave financial supportV their names, and often their time and energy. Local branches would unite the socially conscious gentry of a neighbourhood - doctors, clergymen, social workers, medical officers of health, councillors, teachers, nurses and health visitors, but most of all ladies whose work was voluntary and who would have no other job. Membership of such societies often overlapped with local authorities, and they would be called on to give evidence to official enquiries and also advice in the formation and execution of social policy. Their influence, in spite of their voluntary status, should not be underestimated. These new organizations, along with the older established societies of medical, social, statistical, and sanitary bent, were all in the 1900s eagerly taking up the issues of child welfare and domestic hygiene.

Their debates (reported in the national press, the medical press, and the journals of the societies) present immediate clues to all the interest and activity, in their constant references to national and imperial interest. The crucial factors seem to be that competition (both economic and political) from recently industrialized Germany and the United States appeared more and more threatening, and Japan too loomed as an impending rival. A poor military performance in the Boer War had dramatized fears of national inadequacy and "posed the poor health of the working class in Britain, from which were drawn both soldiers and sailors to defend the empire, and workers to produce goods with which to dominate the world economically. At the same time the findings of the 1901 census confirmed that the birth rate was still falling, and medical statistics suggested that infant mortality was actually rising. The result was a surge of concern about the bearing and rearing of children the next generation of soldiers and workers, the Imperial race.

MOTHERHOOD

Middle-class convention of the time took for granted that the proper context of childhood was the family, and the person most responsible the mother. So if the survival of infants and the health of children was in question, it must be the fault of the mothers, and if the nation needed healthy future citizens (and soldiers and workers) then mothers must improve. This emphasis was reinforced by the influential ideas of eugenists: good motherhood was an essential component in their ideology of racial health and purity. Thus the solution to a national 'problem of public health and of politics was looked for in terms of individuals, of a particular role - the mother, and a social institution - the family. This obscured to an extent which now seems astonishing the effects on child health of poverty and environment. It also contributed substantially to a shift in the dominant ideology. The family remained the basic institution of society, and woman's domestic role

remained supreme, but gradually it was her function as mother that was being most stressed, rather than her function as wife. (Even the recommended reasons for marriage changed: in a manual of the 1860s the young woman was advised to seek. as, partner for life someone able to support her, willing to protect her, ready to help:' her, and qualified to guide and direct her - no mention of children - while a 1914 book on young women and marriage gave as the three main objects for marriage the reproduction of the race, the maintenance of social purity, and the mutual comfort and assistance of each married couple.)[14]

Moreover the relationship between family and state was subtly changing. Since parents were bringing up the next generation of citizens the state had an interest in how they did it.[15] Child-rearing was becoming a national duty not just a moral one: if it was done badly the state could intervene, if parental intentions were good but there were difficulties the state should give help, and if it was done well parents should be rewarded at least by approval for their patriotic contribution. Arguments of this kind were gaining weight, over-riding the old individualist protests about parental rights (already undermined by compulsory education) and the danger of 'demoralizing' people by helping them. They were used to justify not only contemporary measures such as the power given to Poor Law Guardians to remove children from unsuitable parents (Poor Law Act 1899) or the provision of school meals, but also the campaigns for maternity insurance (benefit to help with the expenses of childbirth, which was included in Lloyd George's 1911 Health Insurance Act) and for 'the endowment of motherhood', the forerunner of family allowances. State responsibility was however a generalized supervision, very much in the background as a safety net. The real everyday responsibilities belonged to the mother.

Because of the declining birth rate motherhood had to be made to seem desirable; because high infant mortality was explained by maternal inadequacy the standards of mothers must be improved. A powerful ideology of motherhood emerged in relation to these problems of the early 20^th century, though it was firmly rooted of course in nineteenth-century assumptions about women, domesticity and individualism. Motherhood was to be given new dignity: it was the duty and destiny of women to be the,'mothers of the race', but also their great reward. But just as it was the individual mother's duty and reward to rear healthy members of an imperial race, so it was her individual ignorance and neglect which must account for infant deaths or sick children. Thus moral blackmail, exploiting the real difficulties and insecurities of many mothers, underpinned their new lofty status. Nor did their elevation mean an end to subordination. To be good mothers they now needed instruction, organized through the various agencies of voluntary societies and local government, in the skills of what came to be known as mothercraft, as they were being defined by the medical profession. Doctors, district nurses, health visitors, were all asserting their superior knowledge and authority, establishing moral sanctions on grounds of health and the national interest, and denigrating traditional methods of child care - in particular care by anyone except the mother: neighbours, grandmothers, and older children looking after babies were automatically assumed to be dirty, incompetent and irresponsible. The authority of state over individual, of Professional over amateur, of science over tradition, of male over female, of ruling class over working class, were all involved in the redefining of motherhood in this period, and in ensuring that the mothers of the race would be carefully guided, not carried away by self-importance.

The ideology of motherhood transcended class, even though its components had different class origins. Emphasis on the importance of women not 'shirking' motherhood related to the belief that middle and upper class women were pursuing new opportunities in education and employment rather than marrying, or were marrying but restricting the number of their children, either tendency boding ill for the race. Emphasis on maternal ignorance related more to working-class women, who must by definition be ignorant, or at the very least irresponsible, since it was taken for granted that if you knew what you should be doing you would do it, and if in spite of that knowledge you didn't, it must be from fecklessness. It is perhaps significant that doctors were such prominent exponents of the ideology. On the one hand their experience of normal working-class life was usually minimal, since doctors' fees were beyond the working-class budget except in case of emergency. On the other, as guardians of health they appeared to have some responsibility for such problems as the preservation of infant life, and mothers made useful scapegoats, relieving them of blame. Failure to breastfeed, taking an infant to the minder in the cold early morning before clocking in at the mill, going out to work at all, were all signs of maternal irresponsibility, and infant sickness and death could always be explained in such terms. Even as careful a statistician as Arthur Newsholme, in his report on infant mortality for the medical department of the Local Government Board in 1910, ended up ignoring the evidence of his own tables as to regional variation and the excessive incidence of infant mortality wherever particular features of working-class urban life were concentrated (most of all overcrowding and the failure of local authorities to introduce a waterborne sewage system in place of middens and ash privies), and sounding off interminably about the 'ignorance and fecklessness of mothers'.[161

This article, then, is an attempt to explore the context in which a new definition of woman's role developed in Britain in the early years of this century, and to suggest some of the pressures which contributed to the formation of an ideology of motherhood whose influence still touches us today. The ramifications are many and complex, and to follow them all is impossible in this space, but in the final section I do try to draw some of them together - I hope readers will take this as a starting point for further debate, rather than any sort of final word.

A MATTER OF IMPERIAL IMPORTANCE

For many doctors and medical officers in the 1900s the saving of infant life seems to have become 'a matter of Imperial importance'. [171 At the very least, this became the normal rationalization for any discussion or concern in the area of infant mortality. Perhaps some went along with the rhetoric because it was catching, or thought their ideas would get more support if they could say the national interest was at stake. Some probably opposed it without getting much of a hearing, or kept quiet on any but strictly medical questions. But some were ardent propagandists for 'the future of the race'; and some really shared the fears of Garvin, quoted above, as to depopulation both at home and in the Dominions, which 'if not... occupied by people of British stock would sooner or later be occupied by other people'. Such

apprehensions, according to G.F. McCleary, in a book he wrote in the 1930s, were an important consideration with 'those of us who over 36 years ago began to work for the preservation of infant life'. [IS] His testimony -on what appears to have been a life-long obsession - might not carry much weight on its own, but it is continually confirmed by reading medical journals and discussion of the 1900s.

Short supply of the commodity was not the only problem: there was the question of quality as well as quantity. It was argued that the quality of survivors of infant disease was likely to be impaired: that 'the conditions to which one in five or six of the children born are sacrificed, have a maiming effect upon the other four or five', [19] and that this too should be of national concern. The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 was the occasion for a wave of jingoistic propaganda and enthusiasm, which brought a great many young men to offer themselves as recruits. (Two further

factors, then as now, affected their choice: namely unemployment and the hope of travel and adventure - 'a man's life'.) Their eagerness was not however enough to qualify them: a great many of them were found to be physically unfit for service too small for instance, or too slight, or with heart troubles, weak lungs, rheumatic tendencies, flat feet, or bad teeth. In 1899, out of every 1000, 330 were rejected on such grounds; in 1900, 280. (The apparent improvement is probably because the standard was lowered as the war went on.)[201 But it was later estimated, in an influential article by Major General Sir Frederick Maurice KCBJ2l] that if initial rejections and also subsequent losses through failure of health were both counted, only two out of every five volunteers remained as effective soldiers. Considering this 'disproportion between the willing and the physically competent' appalling and

disastrous, he argued that the crucial question was not how to improve the recruiting system (a subject much under debate just then), for:

Whatever steps are taken ... to raise the standard of the Army either in numbers

or physique seem to me to be only like more careful methods of extracting cream from milk. The more carefully you skim the milk the poorer is the residue of skimmed milk. I think it is safe to say that no nation was ever yet for any long time great and free when the army it put into the field no longer represented its own virility and manhood.

If, as it seemed, these puny young men were typical of their class ('the class which necessarily supplies the ranks of our army'), the problem was to discover why, and

to change things. Proceeding to speculate on possible explanations, he accounted for the prevalence of bad teeth among recruits by unsuitable food in childhood ('the universal testimony that I have heard is that the parents give the children even in infancy the food from off their own plates'), and decided at once that 'the great original cause' (of bad teeth at this point, but subsequently, and with as little evidence, of all the ill-health) was 'ignorance on the part of the mothers of the necessary conditions for the bringing up of healthy children'. He referred rather doubtfully to Rowntree's recent enquiry into poverty in York, but shied away from

accepting general validity for its conclusions (though he quoted them), 'that the wages paid for unskilled labour in York are insufficient to provide food, shelter and clothing adequate to maintain a family of moderate size in a state of bare physical

efficiency', and that 'in this land of abounding wealth, during a time of perhaps unexampled"prosperity, probably more than one-fourth of the population are living in poverty'. York, he felt, must be exceptional: if this be true for the whole country, then the impediment to the rearing of healthy children is not the ignorance of the mothers so much as ... that the conditions of modern life do not enable them to supply their children with sufficient sustenance.

This conclusion was unacceptable; and he preferred to plump for 'at least attackable causes such as the early marriages and the want of knowledge of the mothers'. I quote his conclusions at length, and in spite of his repetition, because these themes recurred throughout the 1900s in the continuing and ramifying debate on 'physical deterioration' set off by the unfit recruits.

Whatever the primary cause ... we are always brought back to the fact that the young man of 16 to 18 years of age is what he is because of the training through which he has passed during his infancy and childhood. 'Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined'. Therefore it is to the condition, mental, moral, and physical, of the women and children that we must look if we have regard to the future of our land.... Mr. Barnett in Whitechapel ... found that the health and long life of the Jews, whose women did not go out to work, compared most favourably with that of the Christian population, the women of which worked without adequate regard to their function as mothers. It does not follow that a stereotyped copying of the habits of the Jews would be desirable, but it may explain and justify the view of the Emperor of Germany that for the raising of a virile race, either of soldiers or of citizens, it is essential that the attention of the mothers of a land should be mainly devoted to the three Ks -Kinder, Kfiche, Kirche. [Children, Kitchen and Church.]

The General's call to arms found a ready audience. Alarmist cries of urban degeneration had been heard already, and invoked to explain city poverty, though as Gareth Stedman Jones points out they are better seen as 'a mental landscape within which the middle class could recognize and articulate their own anxieties about urban existence'. [22] And appeals for working-class girls to be taught the theory and practice of housekeeping were not new either: indeed by the turn of the century such lessons were becoming more and more general. [231 'Physical Degeneration' ~or 'Race Degeneration' or Deterioration) now became the order of the day, stimulating much debate, some research, and a parliamentary enquiry or two, most importantly the Physical Deterioration Committee, which reported in 1904. The problem was constantly linked with the question of child bearing and rearing, and with the 'ignorance' of working-class mothers; and it was invoked to justify a wide variety of campaigns and reforms: on physical education, feeding of schoolchildren, pure food, clean milk, hygiene and cookery classes for schoolgirls, workgirls, and mothers, temperance, education for parenthood, refusal of marriage licences to the 4unfit' or 'degenerate' or even their sterilization. (These included alcoholics, the tubercular, vagrants and the chronically unemployed-and more or less anyone who counted as mentally sick or physically abnormal.)

In many cases the terms in which reforms were proposed also involved reference to the nation, the empire, or the race, and in this way measures might be rendered acceptable which otherwise would have smacked of socialism. So T.J. Macnarnara (ex-schoolmaster and Liberal MP for North Camberwell, in London) writing in the Contemporary Review in 1905, after making a whole series of proposals, culminating

in school canteens and free transport and baths for school children, concluded confidently:

All this sounds terribly like rank Socialism. I'm afraid it is; but I am not in the least dismayed. Because I know it also to be first rate Imperialism. Because I know Empire cannot be built on rickety and flat-chested citizens. And because I know that it is 'not out of the knitted gun or the smoothed rifle, but out of the mouths of babes and sucklings that the strength is ordained which shall still the Enemy and the Avenger'. [24]

Comparisons could also be made with imperial rivals, who without accusations of socialism had successfully turned the attention of the state to national and particularly children's health. Japan (a very recent newcomer to the club of imperialist powers) was often quoted in this context, as at the annual congress of the Sanitary Institute in 1904, where members were told (apropos of the medical

inspection of schoolchildren) that in Japan every schoolchild was under medical supervision, and that first aid and hygiene were taught in school. Japan also was 'in no danger of race-suicide', mothers there were not 'shrinking from maternity as in other lands'. [251 Germany was still more often compared, very directly in The Improvement of the Dwellings and Surroundings of the People. the Example of

Germany, a book published by T.C. Hqrsfall in 1904. German provision of baths at school, and food and medical supervision, strongly influenced English reformers, sometimes simply as an example, sometimes as one "planation of Germany's

success as the 'country which has increased most rapidly in wealth and has become our most formidable industrial rival'.[261

Of course socialists were indeed pushing for these reforms, though in the interests of the working class and the community, rather than the Empire. In some

cases, as with school meals, they had been demanding them for 20 years already. [271 But there were many views, even among those who called themselves socialists, as to what should be done and how. Some favoured state or municipal action and collective solutions, some the one but not the other. They were not likely to work in the voluntary societies which were so active, because their tendency was too individualist. Much of their effort went into attempts to improve the conditions of children of school age, rather than infants, perhaps because local school boards (before their abolition) and local councils were the points at which they could most easily exert pressure, and were more receptive to projects which could be organized through the existing institutions of schools. Work of this kind was especially

successful in Bradford. The socialist sisters Margaret and Rachel McMillan, both there in the 1890s and in London later, were very active in campaigning for more municipal and state concern for the health of children, but interestingly according to Margaret McMillan, they did not always have the support of their comrades:

Even the Labour Party outside Bradford was cold. It was the old, old story that always brings a feeling of despair. 'Mothers and fathers', it is said, 'have a divine

instinct out of which they produce everything that is needed.' They have no such ,instinct. New help does not rise out of these dim underworlds. It comes always from another source. The infant death-rate was appalling. [281

n the south both sisters made the health and happiness of children the main focus of their activity, putting into practice new ideas about nursery education, the benefits of open-air teaching (and even sleeping, in their Deptford 'camp school'), and of school clinics. Margaret McMillan's writings on children, though suffused with a slightly cloying idealism, are notably free of reference to empire or race, or even to the next generation: children were important in themselves. and as future citizens. Her main emphasis was humanist. [291

But sometimes socialists too - or some kinds of socialists - became infected with the rhetoric and even the assumptions of the empire-builders and the eugenists. Ramsay MacDonald in his Socialism and Government (1909) tried to distinguish a socialist position on the problems, without abandoning the rhetoric. 'Eugenics ... is a matter of State concern - not the whole field of Eugenics, but part of the field.' He regarded race deterioration as a social phenomenon, the result of general ill-health, 'an organic disease undermining the systern'; but saw a real conflict for socialists between their duty 'to protect the weak because our sentiments will not allow us to sacrifice them', and the risk for society 'of their deteriorating the stock'. He rejected the proposals of 'the individualist and the reformer' for 'changed systems of Poor Law administration, segregation of the unfit, the lethal chamber and similar things as preventives' without particularly discriminating between the first (presumably dismissed as tinkering with the system instead of transforming it), and the rest. His own rather vague solution lay in 'mutual aid' and also in education 'to secure such personal tastes regarding beauty and strength as to guarantee that the race is being propagated by healthy and comely men and women'. [30)

MacDonald was one of those who resigned from the Fabian Society when it split over the question of support for imperialism, in 1900 during the Boer War. In this 'socialist' organization a poll showed that 259 supported George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb's argument for 'a lofty and public-spirited Imperialism', and only 217 voted for the anti-imperialist position. The majority Fabian line thus became support for imperialism and the congenial doctrine of national efficiency, in alliance with the Liberal-Imperialists, Rosebery, Asquith, Grey, Haldane, and so on.[31] Webb quoted Asquith approvingly in his proclamation of the new position, an article in The Nineteenth Century and Mer published in September 1901. A programme based on National Efficiency was needed:

Here Mr Asquith is on the right track. What is the use of an Empire (he asks) if it does not breed and maintain in the truest and fullest sense of the word an Imperial race? What is the use of talking about Empire if here, at its very centre, there is always to be found a mass of people, stunted in education, a prey to intemperance, huddled and congested beyond the possibility of realizing in any true sense either social or domestic life?

And he called for a raising of standards of wages, education, and sanitation, because the Empire was 'rooted in the home'. [32] The Fabian imperialists, with their demands for greater state responsibility and planning, but their emphasis also on Britain's imperial role (which tended to go with ideas about the 'imperial race' and the threat of its diminishing vitality), were easy prey to the racist ideology of eugenics.

EUGENICS

The advocates of eugenics, whose influence in this period was pervasive, strongly believed in the importance of the family and especially the mother, because improving the racial stock was partly a question of breeding and partly of rearing, and in both her health and her role were essential. Although there was overlap between their ideas and those of other people concerned with infant mortality and child health, the priority they set on actually improving the race, and their assumptions about the importance of heredity, involved certain important differences. The more extreme of them argued that preventive medicine and injudicious state aid interfered with natural selection and would lead to 'retrogression' and the multiplication of the unfit.

of far more importance to a people than a declining infantile mortality is the preservation of the national stamina. A multitude of weaklings is less to be preferred than a handful of virile men, and a healthy people pruned of its decadents by a high mortality amongst its children is better than a degenerate race weakened by the survival of its effete progeny. [33]

They mustered their evidence through a research group at the University of London, the Galton Laboratory, set up for 'the,study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally'; they believed that:

To produce a nation healthy alike in mind and body must become a fixed idea -

one of almost religious intensity - . . . in the minds of the intellectual oligarchy,

which after all sways the masses , and their leaders.

Their command of genetic theory and the currency that their catchwords and indeed their ideas obtained, gave them a great sense of power or even mission: they were preparing for the approaching time when

we must consciously carry out that purification of the state and race which has hitherto been the work of the unconscious cosmic process. [34]

The Darwinist and utilitarian origins of their arguments (and later their claims of statistical proofs) gave them an appearance of scientific and pragmatic authority. This no doubt strengthened their influence among those involved in theoretical or practical 'social engineering' - Fabians of course, social scientists (they founded the Sociological Association), administrators and social workers, and also doctors and Medical Officers of Health. Such influence was reinforced through their elitist and managerial attitude to politics.. In their journal, The Eugenics Review, in the Sociological Society and its journal, through the meetings and publications of the Eugenics Society, and wherever else they could get a hearing, they zealously defended the cause of 'nature against nurture': the influence of environment, they claimed, was 'not one fifth that of heredity, and quite possibly not one tenth of it'. [35] increasing anxiety about the spread of syphilis and other venereal diseases this demand would no doubt have had its attraction for doctors and medical workers, though they held heredity responsible also for a wide range of other ills. in an exposition of eugenics. published in 1904 the eugenic marriage is explained as follows:

When a young man and a young woman, offering themselves for marriage, can produce certified records of their ancestry back for three or four generations, showing that their progenitors have been entirely, or largely, free from nervous prostration, sick headaches, neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, St Vitus' dance, epilepsy, syphilis, alcoholism, pauperism, criminality, prostitution and' insanity - when they can further show that their ancestors have been free from all other inheritable forms of nervous disorders, including certain forms of deafness, colour blindness and other indications of defectiveness and degeneracy, then it may truly be said that such a union may be correctly styled a EUGENIC MARRIAGE. [36]

If alcoholism, pauperism and criminality, which traditionally were blamed for poverty and the miseries of working-class life, could be attributed to heredity, by implication they could be ended if marriage and procreation by the poor were controlled. Conversely, failure to limit their multiplication would carry the risk of disaster: 'the urban proletariat may cripple our civilization, as it destroyed that of ancient Rome'. [371

For those of 'superior stock', whose marriages were not doom-laden, there lay a' great future. Motherhood was to be made in every way desirable: its status raised, its supremacy acknowledged, its economic security assured, for 'the elevation of motherhood' was 'the one fundamental method by which infantile mortality may be checked'. [38] 'Let us glorify, dignify and purify motherhood by every means in our power', demanded John Burns (once a militant socialist engineer, and by this time Liberal MP and President of the Local Government Board), in his presidential address at the Infant Mortality Conference in 1906,[39] and his words were often quoted by eugenists and other 'maternalists'. But it had to be informed and dedicated motherhood, and it was threatened by recent developments opening education and sports to middle-class girls. Karl Pearson, one of the eugenist founding fathers, was among those who believed with Herbert Spencer that individual intellectual development (especially in women) might impair the reproductive powers: in 1885 he wrote that 'if child-bearing women must be intellectually handicapped, then the penalty to be paid for race predominance is the subjection of women', and such ideas continued to be held and voiced in the 1900s.[401

The 'new women' of the 20^th century, in spite of their 'larger outlook on life' , wrote a doctor in the Eugenics Review in 1911, were less fit than their predecessors to become the mothers of a stronger and more virile race, able to keep Britain in its present proud position among the nations of the world'.

There is no doubt that the new woman is a more interesting companion than her predecessors, and that she has made great progress in the arts and sciences, in trades and professions, but the question of questions is - is she a better mother of the race? Does, for instance, her knowledge of mathematics, or even her efficiency in athletics, make her intrinsically a better mother than the natural, bright, -intelligent girl interested in frills, dances and flirtations?...

Womanliness is disassociated in men's and also in most women's minds with

either intellectual power or physical development, but is ... rightly or wrongly associated with certain passive qualities, such as sympathy and tenderness ... which best find their expression in the domestic sphere and more particularly in the roles of wife and mother ... may it not be that the manliness of men and the womanliness of women are ... but the modern expression of Natural Selection? [411

Others maintained that a woman's health and child-bearing capacity would be damaged by excessive activity (physical or intellectual) in adolescence, and advised against any but the most desultory occupations. [42] Mary Scharlieb, an influential eugenist doctor, would not go so far (perhaps because her professional status made her something of a 'new woman' herself). She feared that excessive athletics and

gymnastics would be harmful both to the individual and to the race, tending to produce what she called 'the "neuter" type of girl', whose boyish asexual figure was

matched by disinclination for maternity. But she recommended general 'physical culture' (especially dancing) for its moral and physical effects, and because:

Ours is a people which has been commissioned to carry the lamp of light and learning to the uttermost ends of the earth, and it will neither fail as long as it is worthy, nor cease while aught remains to be done. That we may be worthy, it behoves us to perfect the spirit, mind and body of every man and every woman by our imperial race. [43]

Of course the discussion of the value of exercise for adolescent girls was concerned only with the daughters of the well-to-do. Working-class girls at puberty worked in

factories and laundries and in service with no reduction of the demands made on their strength. [44]

Woman must be taught how 'to exercise her great natural function of choosing the fathers of the future', and to understand 'the age at which she should marry, and the compatibility between the discharge of her incomparable functions of motherhood and the lesser functions which some women now assume'. [45) Motherhood though a destined and natural function nevertheless needed to be taught; there were skills to be learnt so that the eugenically conceived baby would also be reared to its best advantage. The respoTisible mother would study expert opinion and put herself and her family under the supervision of a doctor, preferably a specialist, whose instructions she would then execute. Teaching was desirable in 'the subjects of food an dietetics, the physiology of nutrition, and the effects of proper sanitation', for in this way:

by instruction leading to the improvement of the individual we shall aid in preserving women for their supreme purpose, the procreation and preservation of the race, and at the same time promote that race to a better standard, mentally and physically. [461

But this emphasis on the functions of motherhood was not to be thought belittling

or confining: the thoughtful woman would realize that 'upon womanhood largely depends the standard attained by the world's ethical code'. Entrusted with the greatest of all human assets, the child, she would respond to the need for skilful care time, and was incorporated in the 1911 health insurance provisions: this was intended simply to help with the expenses of confinement, and in fact scarcely covered them. One doctor, C.T. Ewart, suggested in the Empire Review that such a scheme combined with 'lactation premiums to those mothers who feed their own babies' would be 'of greater vital importance to the race than old age pensions'. [531

Emphasis on motherhood was by no means confined to the eugenists and their closer followers. It was the common feature in all the discussion of infant mortality and child welfare, whether the focus was on quality or quantity, on the encouragement and nurture of the fittest, or the preservation of all infant life. Eugenists talked also about education for parenthood; occasionally someone might recommend involving fathers in the upbringing of their children; [54) but overwhelmingly (and especially in the medical press) it was maternal ignorance that was blamed, not parental - I faulty maternal hygiene', or the mother's neglect, intemperance, employment, early marriage, and so on. From 'the physiological law that infant life is dependant upon the mother from nine months before birth until nine months after birth', [551 from the recognition that in pregnancy 'the mother's well-being and the child's well-being are inseparable', [56] from the discovery that mortality was lower among breast-fed babies, [57] came the argument 'in dealing with infant mortality it is the mothers we must go for not the babies', [58] and this was extended to mean far more than the mother's health. Biologically based reasoning was used to justify a social construct, motherhood. And the ideology was passed on to mothers along with practical advice in the newly proliferating manuals on child care, even those intended for the working class.

If every woman who takes upon herself the sacred relationship of motherhood could be led to realize how she is responsible for the future of the baby-life, and how the true greatness of the individual constitutes the true grandeur of nations, we should have healthier babies and happier homes, and the disintegration of family life would be a menace no more. [591

Nineteenth-century criticism of mothers had dwelt most often on the iniquity of their going out to work. [601 Working mothers of the early 20^th century did not escape similar denunciation, but as 10 years of legal restriction on the employment of mothers in the first month after childbirth had not lowered infant mortality, and as investigations showed that infant mortality rates were extremely high in some areas (Tyneside and South Wales particularly) where mothers rarely went out to work, it was increasingly recognized that other factors must be involved. Maternal ignorance provided an acceptable alternative explanation. It could include all the mother's failings, including going out to work, yet by stressing knowledge rather than necessity, it made the problems seem soluble. Mothers would want the best for the babies, therefore all that was necessary was to educate them in what they should be doing. So for example the British Medical Association in 1904, on the recommendation of its public health committee, launched a petition (for which they collected 1400 signatures in the first week) representing to the Board of Education:

that it is of urgent importance that elementary instruction in health subjects, including temperance, should be provided in all primary schools in order that the conditions which lead to deterioration of the national physique may be understood and as far as possible prevented. [61

Special attention to the care and feeding of infants was to be taught to future mothers, which it was assumed meant all girls and young women. Mrs Bosanquet, a well-known social worker and commentator on social problems, advocating what she called 'a woman's remedy', in an article entitled 'Physical Deterioration and the Poverty Line', enjoined:

Begin with the girls in school, and give them systematic and compulsory instruction i n the elementary laws of health and feeding, and care of children, and the wise spending of money. Go on with the young women in evening classes and girls' clubs; and continue with the mothers wherever you can get at them.... It has been possible to awaken an intelligent interest in window gardening in the very poorest quarters of our towns, and it ought not to be impossible to awaken a similar intelligent pride in the care of children.... What we want is a reform which will provide suitable food and care for the children from the first day of their lives, and continue to provide it throughout manhood and old age; and there is no way of securing that except through the mothers and wives.[62]

It is interesting in this passage that not only is all domestic instruction and responsibility relevant only to girls, but it is assumed that the babies are male - they are to be cared for as children and 'throughout manhood' and old age. This was in fact quite often implied in the rhetoric of these discussions, and points to the very direct connection with concern about the 'material of Empire', as Masterman put it in his denunciation of conditions At the Heart of the Empire (1901) -'the future colonizers and soldiers, not to mention the traders, who hold the Empire together'. [63] The word virile was constantly used, even when the issue was not specifically the health of recruits. 'Future citizens', in those days when women did not vote, were men of course; and the eugenist Karl Pearson defined the desirable characteristics of good English stock entirely in terms of the 'typical Englishman of the past'. ('A clean body, a sound if slow mind, a vigorous and healthy stock, a numerous progeny' were 'the essentials of imperial race', the ideal of all 'who have the welfare of the nation and our racial fitness for the world-struggle at heart'.) [64] Mothers thus, became responsible to the nation above all for the production and rearing of healthy sons; in spite of 'the elevation of motherhood' the production of healthy future mothers was much less commonly demanded.

The focus on mothers provided an easy way out. It was cheaper to blame them and to organize a few classes than to expand social and medical services, and it avoided the political problem of provoking rate- and taxpayers by requiring extensive new finance. [65] And there seemed more chance of educating individuals, future or present mothers, than of banishing poverty. So even those who recognized - or paid lip-service to - the importance of environment were liable to fall back on such measures as more domestic science in schools, and education for motherhood, and banning the employment of mothers. The parliamentary committee investigating physical deterioration in 1904, deciding that while actual deterioration remained unproven working-class health nevertheless left much to be desired,, made 53

recommendations. Many of them dealt with the environment (overcrowding, open spaces, smoke, pollution, houses in bad repair, insanitary conditions, , cooking facilities, milk supply, etc), or with other aspect's of working-class life (unemployment, the provision of creches, work conditions, over-fatigue, the employment of young persons and of women in factories, adulterated food, insurance for sickness, for unemployment, and particularly for childbirth). Others dealt with the powers and organization of local and health authorities. But overwhelmingly, in the discussion which followed publication of the report, most of that range was ignored., The recommendations which were quoted and endorsed were those concerning the instruction of girls and women in cooking, hygiene, and child care. These were more .acceptable than for instance the registration of landlords with a view to enforcing repairs and the provision of decent living conditions.

But there were in fact -considerable problems in implementing the catch-all solution of teaching future mothers. Provision for further education of girls who had left school (at 13 or 14 usually) was not widespread, was organized much more around commercial skills, and would not necessarily attract girls who had been at work all day and might well have their share of chores to do at home in the evening. (in fact it's likely that many of these 'little mothers' who already had a great deal to do with child care would have felt they had little to learn.) Girls' clubs, another of Mrs Bosanquet's suggestions, were unevenly distributed and sometimes irregularly attended; in any case they reached only a few girls. In schools the syllabus of girls was already overloaded: to their original handicap of needlework had been added (in the big cities at least) classes in cookery, laundry and housewifery, but with no very satisfactory results. It was expensive to provide the necessary equipment, and what was provided bore no relation to what they were used to, being too up-to-date and probably too large-scale. In cookery classes the dishes cooked were supposed to be paid for to cover their cost, but often the girls could not afford them and they might end up eaten by the teachers. Nor could the girls get much practice at home, even if any of the dishes they were taught. were within the family's means: few mothers felt they could risk experiment with the carefully rationed supplies. There were complaints that laundry work was taught by giving the girls their teachers' washing to do; or that they were learning skills only relevant to domestic service, not to their family needs. [66] To set up classes in infant care was even more tricky - what could they practise on? Dolls were proposed, or borrowed babies, but one was too unrealistic, and the other was difficult to organize. Nevertheless, at the Board of Education, on the instigation of its, president Walter Runciman, with the strong support of Robert Morant, its secretary, and of the Chief Medical Officer, George Newman (all gentlemen without school-teaching or presumably domestic experience), a circular was prepared by Janet Campbell urging on local education authorities and teachers 'the great importance of increasing and improving the present inadequate provision in our schools for instructing the girls in the care and management of infants'. The hope was that by teaching girls and women how to take care of infants both mortality and ill-health in infancy and childhood might be diminished. [67] All girls were to learn it, including the duller ones, who might well discover they could for once do something as well as the brighter ones, and who would learn 'with their brighter comrades' that intellectual attainment is not the only issue of true education, and that in learning the art and practice of infant care they are helping to secure for themselve, their true place in the future of the state.[68]