At whatever cost, we see, who have ascertained the facts, that we must
be eugenic.
This argument was set forth in full in the predecessors of this book,
which in its turn is devoted to the interests of women as individuals.
But before we proceed, it is plainly necessary to answer the critic who
might urge that the separate questions of the individual and the race
cannot be discussed in this mixed fashion. The argument may be that if
we are to discuss the character and development and rights of women as
individuals, we must stick to our last. Any woman may question the
eugenic criterion or say that it has nothing to do with her case. She
claims certain rights and has certain needs; she is not so sure,
perhaps, about the facts of heredity, and in any case she is sure that
individuals--such as herself, for instance--are ends in themselves. She
neither desires to be sacrificed to the race, nor does she admit that
any individual should be so sacrificed. She is tired of hearing that
women must make sacrifices for the sake of the community and its
future; and the statement of this proposition in its new eugenic form,
which asserts that, at all costs, the finest women must be mothers, and
the mothers must be the finest women, is no more satisfactory to her
than the crude creed of the Kaiser that children, cooking and church are
the proper concerns of women. She claims to be an individual, as much as
any man is, as much as any individual of either sex whom we hope to
produce in the future by our eugenics, and she has the same personal
claim to be an end in and for herself as they will have whom we seek to
create.
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