MOTHERHOOD AND ITS ENEMIES. By Charlotte Haldane. (Chatto and Windus.
6s.)—It is perhaps unfair to charge a book intended as a general survey with an eclecti- cism of method, but a work from Mrs. Haldane's pen is of scientific importance and must be considered from a scientific viewpoint. There is frequently a doubt as to what aspect of maternity Mrs. Haldane is discussing, whether the psycho- logical, the economic, the eugenic, the ethical, or the purely physiological. Also, her anxiety to avoid anything that might be called sentimentality causes a simplification disproportionate to the extraordinary complexity of sexual relations ; it leads her also to adopt highly controversial psychological hypotheses, such as her Freudian explanation of Madonna-worship, which she seems to have accepted without question. The first half of the book is devoted to a sketch of the position of women under different phases of civilization. Mrs. Haldane has some- thing to say about the opinions of the Greek philosophers concerning the status of the wife-mother, but omits to make any mention of the eugenic and other proposals advocated in The Republic. She may, of course, have decided that the Socratic balance was in this instance destroyed by his domestic trials. Yet the ideas propounded in the great dialogue are of importance in the history of eugenics. Mrs. Haldane's ;historical survey is ably written, though to make the Aspasia of Pericles representative of the Greek hetaerae is analogous to the selection of the Wife of Bath as the typical middle-class Englishwoman of Chaucerian England. The second half of the book is controversial. A discussion of the physiological- psychological basis of motherhood precedes the treatment of contemporary problems. Birth control, the employment of women after marriage, eugenics, Mormonism, are all discussed. We cannot go into these difficult questions here, but we are in complete agreement with Mrs. Haldane's general plea for the wider dissemination of hygienic knowledge and the raising of the ideal of motherhood.
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