Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/26

 14 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

feminine point of view ; and if we wish to produce a well-developed race, we must treat our womankind a little better than we do at present. We must give them something more like the natural position which they should hold in society. Women's specialized powers must be utilized for the intellectual advancement of the race.

BY 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 toward service and self-sacrifice. They need to realize 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 stand- ards 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 realizes 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 of 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 civilized 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 and intelligent fulfilment by, all women. There are kinds of natural and instinctive knowledge of the highest value which the artificial social conditions of civilization 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 organized 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 specialized 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 brought forward. It is obvious that these reasons cannot be properly dealt with indeed, can but barely b indicated in these few words. They involve a reference to all the facts which anthropology, archaeology, history, psychology, and physiology, as well as philology, have so far 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