Chapter 16

"The children came rapidly, one after another, and there happened
what happens in our society with children and doctors. Yes, children,
maternal love, it is a painful thing. Children, to a woman of our
society, are not a joy, a pride, nor a fulfilment of her vocation, but
a cause of fear, anxiety, and interminable suffering, torture. Women say
it, they think it, and they feel it too. Children to them are really a
torture, not because they do not wish to give birth to them, nurse them,
and care for them (women with a strong maternal instinct--and such was
my wife--are ready to do that), but because the children may fall sick
and die. They do not wish to give birth to them, and then not love them;
and when they love, they do not wish to feel fear for the child's health
and life. That is why they do not wish to nurse them. 'If I nurse it,'
they say, 'I shall become too fond of it.' One would think that they
preferred india-rubber children, which could neither be sick nor die,
and could always be repaired. What an entanglement in the brains of
these poor women! Why such abominations to avoid pregnancy, and to avoid
the love of the little ones?

"Love, the most joyous condition of the soul, is represented as a
danger. And why? Because, when a man does not live as a man, he is
worse than a beast. A woman cannot look upon a child otherwise than as
a pleasure. It is true that it is painful to give birth to it, but what
little hands! . . . Oh, the little hands! Oh, the little feet! Oh, its
smile! Oh, its little body! Oh, its prattle! Oh, its hiccough! In a
word, it is a feeling of animal, sensual maternity. But as for any idea
as to the mysterious significance of the appearance of a new human being
to replace us, there is scarcely a sign of it.

"Nothing of it appears in all that is said and done. No one has any
faith now in a baptism of the child, and yet that was nothing but a
reminder of the human significance of the newborn babe.

"They have rejected all that, but they have not replaced it, and there
remain only the dresses, the laces, the little hands, the little
feet, and whatever exists in the animal. But the animal has neither
imagination, nor foresight, nor reason, nor a doctor.

"No! not even a doctor! The chicken droops its head, overwhelmed, or the
calf dies; the hen clucks and the cow lows for a time, and then these
beasts continue to live, forgetting what has happened.

"With us, if the child falls sick, what is to be done, how to care for
it, what doctor to call, where to go? If it dies, there will be no more
little hands or little feet, and then what is the use of the sufferings
endured? The cow does not ask all that, and this is why children are a