The Heroism of Women

There is a well-travelled urban legend about the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta that holds that women who died in childbirth were given grave honours equivalent to that of a man who died in battle. This seems to originally stem from a combination of a misunderstanding of Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus and the discovery of a single grave inscription of a Spartan woman called Agrippina, who is reported to have died in childbirth. 

Plutarch says of the semi-legendary Spartan lawgiver that he: 

“...permitted nothing to be buried with the dead; they simply covered the body with a scarlet robe and olive leaves when they laid it away. To inscribe the name of the dead upon the tomb was not allowed, unless it were that of a man who had fallen in war, or that of a woman who had died in sacred office.”

Since Agrippina had not apparently died in sacred office, and no tombstones have been discovered with any inscriptions to support Plutarch’s statement, we are forced to conclude that the veracity of this legend is indeterminate at best. I think the point of these urban legends, however, is not whether they contain historical truth. Instead, they perform a social function for the civilisation that holds them, and in dispelling such myths we do ourselves a disservice because the myths themselves speak to our own set of values. 

Indeed, we admire the idea that the Spartans honoured women who died in childbirth as the equals of men who died in battle because it is noble. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”, as Horace wrote: it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country, and, while the most obvious manifestation of this is in the duty of a man to die in the face of the enemy, I would argue it equally applies to a woman who dies in childbirth. 

As a father of three, I have seen childbirth first-hand and I have come away from the experience with the realisation that to give birth is absolutely a form of battle in which only the women of our species can engage. Once the mechanisms of birth have begun, there is not even the luxury of fleeing from the field — the woman must see the job out until the bitter end. 

Though there is doubtless a lower casualty rate for women in labour than for soldiers on a battlefield, it doesn’t change the fact that when a woman begins her contractions, she must prepare herself for what is a life-or-death confrontation. If all goes well and she prevails, the victory is magical and life-changing, but if things go wrong and she loses the baby, or she herself dies, then it is no less a loss than to be a Tommy who dies under enemy fire. Either way, those that are left behind still have to struggle with the loss of a family member. 

I want to emphasise that point about her also dying for her country. Though it might seem disconnected from the immediacy of the sacrifice of the soldier, a woman’s challenge is no less important and in many ways it is more so. 

If Edmund Burke was right that a civilisation is a compact that forms a continuum between the past, the present, and the future, those that came before and those that will come after are the product of this private battle that women have fought since the dawn of time.  Women are the generative engine of a civilisation; they produce the people who are that civilisation’s human capital. As Dave Chappelle recently put it:

“Every human being on Earth had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth.”

This makes families the most important foundations of a civilisation, and puts the soldiers who defend them a close second. Threats to the homeland are intense yet infrequent, but the great continuum must be maintained on a daily basis, in a much slower yet more enduring process that is the cumulative effort of the men and women of the entire nation. 

When segments of the civilisation decide to opt-out from their place in this great chain, the results are slow to manifest but, once moving, are like an unstoppable avalanche. What will become of the civilisation we inherited from the past if the people in the present fail to do their duty to create the people of the future? 

Since the advent of modern birth control, a materialistic mindset has gripped the West with a cold hand and demanded that we think only of ourselves, in this place, in this time, and without regards to that which we inherited. The contraceptive pill, the great liberator of women, has indeed allowed them control over what was once forced upon them by nature, but this has consequences. 

It is no surprise, and not even blameworthy, that the women of the West have decided to abdicate their heroic duty in much the same way as the men. Who, when given the option of struggle or ease, wouldn’t choose ease? 

Luckily for us, the enemies of our countries aren’t capable of the military aggression of past eras, and so each man in the village does not need to be equipped with a spear and a shield lest the hue and cry be raised and the fyrd need be gathered. But that does not hold true for the generative requirements performed by families which culminates in that final battle for life by women.

Birth control has made it possible for women to decide that they would not succumb to Mother Nature’s dictates, but nature’s will was not arbitrary, and for our civilisations to continue we must produce future generations. If women actively choose to avoid such a fate, and our culture militates against a woman’s inclination to reproduce, what will happen? We already know because the avalanche is already upon us: we are in the middle of demographic collapse and face the threat of an “empty world,” as the World Economic Forum has described it. 

Those who do not wish to accept the truth of this unsavoury conclusion may argue that we can simply resolve the problem through mass immigration, but this is no certain fix. Aside from the obvious problem that importing foreigners will not produce a continuation of the culture we inherited, and that population decline is a worldwide phenomenon, what is to prevent the foreigners from succumbing to the very same forces that caused Westerners to cease having children?  

It may be that Western countries come to be regarded as a kind of demographic black hole where bloodlines go to terminate. Parents might do everything in their power to dissuade their children from coming to the West for fear that they will never have grandchildren or insist that they return home as soon as they have, in mercenary fashion, made the money they are seeking for a comfortable life back home. 

Either way, what of Western women? What is to become of them? Are they to be cursed by limitless freedom that they fritter away after being degraded, again as Burke said, to be the mere equals of men? It used to be that women were venerated in our cultures, but if they are to give up their ancient privileges for the sake of equality, Burke’s assessment holds true: 

“On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order.”

The heroic narrative of motherhood, having been stigmatised by feminists as a form of oppression and abolished in favour of career, wine, and a lonely old age, has left many a Western woman’s biological clock ticking in earnest, unable to be fulfilled because they simply can’t find a man. Their squandered fertile years in the corporate boardroom during the day and a party life by night have prevented them from being marriageable prospects to men who themselves are not marriageable prospects either. 

This state of affairs has had a profoundly negative impact on women; the narratives that guide our entire civilisation have become turned on their heads and have put us into mortal peril because we no longer value the self-sacrifice required to keep and maintain it. Is this really the desired end goal of the Enlightenment? A dwindling population of women who are maladjusted, single, selfish, depressed, and fearful corporate workers who are busy ruling over a population of imported labourers until the last of their kind dies alone in an ancient dotage? 

If there was a heroic aspect to womanhood, it seems that the rationalisation of life has completely eradicated it and made women prisoners of the civilisation they have forsaken. Instead, perhaps there is a place for heroism in the lives of regular women, and perhaps that heroism begins at home, with a husband and children, and an eye to the future.