And where do all these lunatics and criminals come from? From educated mothers? from mothers who are in even a small and limited sense allowed to own themselves, to think for themselves, control their own lives? Not at all. They are the mothers whose lives belong to their men, as this learned doctor, who objects to the higher education of women, argues that all wives should.
Maternity is an awful power, and I repeat that it strikes back at the race, with a blind, fierce, far-reaching force, in revenge for its subject status. Dr. Arthur MacDonald, in his "Criminology," says: "The intellectual physiognomy shows an inferiority in criminals, and when in an exceptional way there is a superiority, it is rather in the nature of cunning and shrewdness.... Poverty, misery and organic debility are not infrequently the cause of crime."
Who is likely to transmit "organic debility?" The mother of many children or of few? Who is likely to stamp a child with low intellectual physiognomy? The mother who is educated or she who is the willing or unwilling subordinate in life's benefits?
Again he says: "Every asymmetry is not necessarily a defect of cerebral development, for, as suggested above, under the influence of education defects of function can be corrected, covered up or eradicated." Can this be true of criminals and not of normal women?
Again he says: "When we consider the early surroundings, unhygienic conditions, alcoholic parents, etc., of the criminal, where he may begin vice as soon as consciousness awakes, malformation, due to neglect and rough treatment, are not surprising. Yet the criminal malformations may be frequently due to osteological conditions. But here still hereditary influence and surrounding conditions in early life exert their power." Benedikt says: "To suppose that an atypically constructed brain can function normally is out of the question."
So long as motherhood is kept ignorant, dependent and subject in status just that long will heredity avenge the outrage upon her womanhood, upon her personality, upon her individual right to a dignified, personal, equal human status, by striking telling blows on the race.
But let me return to the arguments of the author of "Higher Education and Woman's Sphere," since he represents all the reactionary thought on this topic and because he ignores utterly, as do all of his fellows, woman's duty to herself and her awful power for good or evil upon the race, according as she makes herself a dignified, developed, educated and independent individuality first and a function of maternity second. It seems to me that in discussing no other question in life is there so little logical reasoning and so much arbitrary dogmatism as in the ones which are usually embraced under "woman's sphere." In the first place, it is assumed that because women are mothers they are nothing else; that because this is her sphere she can have, should have, no other.