MAN’S WORLD (6)
By:
August 21, 2024
HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize Charlotte Haldane’s 1926 proto-sf novel Man’s World for HILOBROW’s readers. Written by an author married to one of the world’s most prominent eugenics advocates, this ambivalent adventure anticipates both Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale. When a young woman rebels against her conditioning, can she break free? Reissued in 2024 (with a new introduction by Philippa Levine) by the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: INTRO | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
(cont.)
II
The atmosphere of the entire settlement was one of gay calm. It was not designed for the pregnant women; no births took place there. For these other nurseries were reserved, where each mother resided during sixteen months; seven previous to and nine subsequent to the birth of her child. Here came, for another three months at the most, only those whose services were required by the commonwealth in order that their successors, the mothers of the future, might be apprenticed to learn the elements of their craft.
The mother settlements lay in the most exquisite spots on the North American, Australasian, and European continents. Wherever nature, encouraged and directed by the hand of man, could create a setting of unsurpassable beauty, wherever the climate was gentle and clement, they nestled among sloping hills, decked with blue lakes and painted with flower gardens.
These settlements, covering thousands of acres, were the breeding grounds, the nurseries, in the true horticultural sense, of the white race. Here women congregated to bear, not in agony nor in anguish, not in pain, distress, misery, filth, nor poverty, no longer anticipating in dread the hour of their delivery, but gladly, proudly, majestically. Here they came, conscious of their chosen vocation, submitting willingly to the stringent discipline of hygiene, striving to attain physical and mental perfection, poise, and balance, and to transmit it to those born to the high wonder of scientifically directed living. All they had done was to exchange the haphazard, pitiful, and inadequate discipline of sorrow and suffering for the acceptance of proven laws. Each mother knew in advance what would be the sex of the child to be born to her, and could aid its shaping to its destined end by judicious application under expert direction of the necessary mental and physical exercises. Pre-natal ill-health and pangs of labour no longer existed; foolish self-indulgence would have been scorned; fear was cast out.
III
Only those mothers who possessed certain specific qualities were chosen as teachers of the young. For vocational motherhood was a career which had its grades like all others. These women were at the head of their profession, and most of them passed on, when they had produced the number of children expected of them, to administrative duties in the linking up of their own special problems with those of the world in general. They had by then mastered the theory, as well as the practice, of race-production. To meet such mothers, to exchange views with them, to enjoy their conversation and companionship, was part of the unvarying custom of those men whose province touched theirs.
But all maternal settlements played an inspiring part in the social life. It was here that informal counsel was most often taken; here that men sought inspiration; here that an intercourse almost holy in its purity took place between men and women, when the meaning of friendship in all its wealth and beauty was discovered.
The small girls had gone to their dormitories; the infants lay aligned in their guarded nurseries; all was silence in the spacious buildings which housed them. But not far away, the pleasure halls were gay with light and colour; some were given up to music and games, others to quiet, reflective talk.
While her child slept and Nicolette, her little protégée, lay dreaming, the mother Leila walked calmly through gardens and passages until she came to a small, cosy saloon. When she entered it she found only four people there — the president of the settlement, two other young women destined, like herself, for wider responsibility in the future, and a young man, who had collaborated with one of them in producing her last child.
‘Has he arrived?’ asked Leila eagerly.
‘Yes,’ answered the older mother, Mary. ‘He will be with us directly. This young man,’ she said with a smile at him, is Bruce Wayland, who has brought him to us.’
‘Oh yes,’ Leila nodded and also smiled, ‘I know your name. You are of the Gay Company
surely? ‘
‘Of the other side,’ he answered. ‘I flew across with Peter Minden and thought you might like to talk to him. He was naturally delighted to come. The mothers of Nucleus have a reputation.’
‘How are his cattle? I have not yet seen any of them, although of course we have our own.’
‘Well, naturally, his are models, as they were the originals of all. I am not an expert, as it is not my line. But last year his workers turned out seventy-eight ectogenetic calves; the aseptic cows produced in the past two years are apparently giving excellent milk.’
‘I understand his beasts really are free from all harmful bacteria,’ put in Elspeth, the younger woman. ‘But I should think it will be a long time before he can rear them in sufficient numbers.’
‘It takes time, of course,’ answered Bruce. ‘As far as he is concerned, the interest is only in the experiment of producing them.’
‘Given the land and the animals,’ said Leila reflectively, ‘I imagine you will be able to support an increasing number. But I suppose they will never compete seriously with those bred normally?’
‘Oh no. Nor would the rearing of ectogenetic children have an effect on the human birth-rate in our time. Not on a large scale. But, of course, we don’t know how fast things will change. It is a year-to-year matter.’
The man they were talking about came in. He was short and thin, an almost shrunken little man. Yet this was Peter Minden, the geneticist whose performance might one day revolutionize the breeding of all animals on whose products man still depended.
‘I am delighted to see you, mothers,’ he said in a gentle, jerky voice, while he beamed at them bird-fashion, and turned his bright glances from one to the other. ‘Our young friend did not need to persuade me to come here. Such visits are my chief pleasure. I think we have some things to discuss, yes?’
‘We welcome you,’ said Mary on behalf of them all. ‘I expect we have much to learn from you.’
‘I am at your disposal. But I wish to reassure you at once on the chief point. We have failed until now with the human embryo.’
‘We had not yet considered you as a possible rival,’ said Leila.
‘I am not so sure,’ warned Bruce. ‘Beware of him!’
‘Of course,’ cut in Mary with her clear quiet voice, ‘we have thought of that. But not nearly enough. There are many people, Minden, who refuse to take you seriously. What do you think of them?’
‘Ah, my dear mother, what a mistake to take anything or any one seriously! Nevertheless, I may have a problem to put to humanity later on. And as it particularly concerns your sex and your profession, I seek an opportunity whenever possible to discuss it with you. Inevitably the day will come, and we might as well consider now what it may bring.’
‘You will be a bold man,’ said Bruce mockingly, ‘if you challenge the mothers on their own ground.’
The ectogeneticist joined in the laugh, but returned to his point.
‘That will not be my affair,’ he declared. ‘It is an inevitable result of discovery. Its various implications will affect me as well as every one else; but principally these women. How do you think,’ he asked, turning to them, ‘the suggestion of human ectogenesis will be generally received?’
‘You will be the most unpopular man in the world,’ they told him.
‘I disclaim all responsibility,’ he repeated. ‘Let us look back a little. First you had birth control, then you had sex control. The two enabled you to impose your will on us in collective bargaining. Both met, in the beginning, with opposition from those of you who would not realize the advantages they brought you. But when you did, you knew an era was beginning for you such as motherhood had never known since dim antiquity.’
‘It’s curious, when one thinks of it,’ said the president, ‘how, after nearly two thousand years, women do occupy the same relative rôles they bore in Greece and Rome. There you had mothers, prostitutes, and slaves, forming the female hierarchy. The Patrician mothers had then, as now, no more to do than to produce and rear children. Slaves ran their households for them, and courtesans spared them the lust of men.’
‘We,’ added Leila, ‘have mechanical slaves, neuters to perform the more highly skilled jobs, and entertainers to deal with the other matter.’
‘But,’ interrupted Minden, pointing a warning finger at her, ‘remember the time it has taken you to get back to that pleasant situation. Remember the heyday of Christianity, when one woman per man, to speak roughly, was expected to perform the triple rôle of wife, mistress, and slave. Remember the day of the factory, when in millions of cases a fourth job was added to the burden. It was woman who built up “family life,” and it was that that threatened to destroy her when she revolted — in the nick of time.’
‘Surely,’ suggested Bruce, ‘it was not woman, but the Church who invented that myth. It was the Church that took all the asexuals into the convents, and persecuted the “fallen.” It was not until the mothers were completely under the sway of the priests that they were duped into bearing every one else’s burdens. Woman outgrew the family just as government outgrew empire and thought outgrew religion. Science had nothing to do with contraception, and its other inventions only aided and abetted the female effort to find its own level.’
‘But science soon turned that to its own advantage,’ declared Leila.
‘That, again, was not science, but male human nature,’ he answered with a grin. ‘Obviously it suited us to find you so ready to fall in with our views. A little knowledge of practical psychology enabled us to convince you that the interests of both sexes were identical. At least up to the present.’
‘Yes,’ reflected Minden. ‘I can almost foresee a day in which we shall return even further than to Greece and Rome. When we shall go even beyond Egypt, to the dawn of human society. When the goddess World-Mother shall become the supreme reality again.’
‘What!’ said Leila, and the other women half laughed, half frowned at her words. ‘A sort of human termite queen? From whom the entire race shall be bred? Luckily that will not be for a few thousand years yet!’
‘In all ages, everywhere, human beings have declared “Save us from the future!” It has been the abiding terror of all imaginative cowards. For the future alone is inexorable. Death can be cheated again and again — the future never. But those who resent it forget that they themselves will not have to endure it. Those whose present it is, learn to adapt themselves.’
Minden’s voice as he had spoken had undergone a slight change. The audacity of the vision they were creating between them had its hold on them all. For a few moments they were no longer individuals — only vehicles for the expression of the thought which gripped them collectively.
‘Imagine it,’ Bruce took up the completion of its form, ‘ectogenesis provides the means to select on the most strictly accurate lines. The numbers of mothers chosen diminish year by year. Until at last, those who supply the race are the supreme female types humanity can produce. Pyramidal.’
‘But you really do not think’ — Elspeth, the youngest of them there, turned appealingly to Minden — ‘that this thing will begin in our time?’
‘There is no need whatever to distress yourself,’ he reassured her. Once more he had become his quaint, outwardly flippant self. We are hundreds, even thousands of years away from that goal. No one, in our day, even desires it. But since all living and striving has become amenable to experiment, no possibility, however remote, can be entirely ignored. Certainly I think that my results have brought that day nearer. But it is still sufficiently far away for you to remain easy.’
‘What is the quality and quantity of the milk produced by your cows, as compared to that given by normally reared beasts?’ asked the presiding mother.
And forthwith Minden plunged into details of considerable, but merely technical interest.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
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