Cart Before Horse – Lois Waisbrooker, 11/22/1906

Republished from our predecessor publication Lucifer the Light Bearer

Helen Wilmans says: “If the meddlesome brain had stayed in the one room where it belongs and left the
kitchen department alone—that department in which the action is involuntary, the stomach, lungs, bowels,
and kidneys—there never would have been any sickness. The involuntary system thinks more perfectly
than the brain can think for it.” That the involuntary system can do its work better without the help (or
hindrance) of the brain is quite true, but that such interference was the first cause of the sickness which
prevails is not true. It is simply a wrong-end-to statement. The brain never troubled itself about the
stomach till after that organ complained. You will have to look further, Helen, for the origin of disease.
That there is a close connection between the stomach and the sex organs is conceded by physicians,
and the ignorant, excessive—because unsatisfied—creative life threw the involuntary system out of
order, and then the brain began to inquire into the matter. But Helen, in order to substantiate her theory,
after accusing the brain of being the cause of the trouble, after saying that the involuntary organs can
think for themselves better than the brain can think for them, actually commissions the brain to arouse
the stomach to an unrecognized power by which said stomach can overcome the trouble caused by
said brain. What nonsense! Helen, you are pretty smart, but until you recognize the fact that “sex
contains all,” a fact stated by Whitman years before you assumed the position of leader, and until you
further recognize that the sex fountain must be pure before its life streams can be healthy—and also
that it never can be pure until woman is wholly free, sex receives our highest honor and we demand
its highest use—until you recognize all this, your attempts to account for the origin of disease will be
failures. “If there is no malaria in the atmosphere there will be no malarial disease.”

With no poisonous sex aura in the atmosphere, disease and crime will be reduced to a minimum, if not
entirely eradicated. The sex relation in which woman is not a willing partner inevitably creates a disturbed,
diseased, crime-producing aura, for such relation is of itself a crime. Mind is powerful if it acts intelligently
—that is, in harmony with nature’s law—but even Helen Wilmans cannot make two and two five, or cause
water to run uphill. All effort to do away with disease and crime, so long as the fountain of life is ignorantly,
or otherwise, abused, must fail. Only a pure life-fountain can bring the desired result, and that we cannot
have until woman is free—so free that she need not accept what she does not want, nor reject what she
does want. Then there will be only mutually desired relations, and nature counts all such relations pure,
children born of such relations legitimate. Motherhood is a natural right, and the public opinion which
condemns such motherhood is a false one. Women—some women—begin to see this and to act from
it. I have a letter from a girl-woman of twenty-four, who says: “I want to have my little baby as soon as
conditions will give me an opportunity. Please do not oppose me in anything I say. If you think me foolish,
do not tell me so. I recognize that the real genius of my being is seeking to manifest. I think as you do;
my mind runs in the same channel, yet I have been compelled by circumstances to map out my own
course. I must work in a different way and do my best with what is before me.” One year ago she was
writing to come to me, but since then she has had experiences which have developed a very strong
self-reliance, and she is planning to assume motherhood without the legal chain as soon as she can
see her way clear. A few women have done what she is planning to do. Over forty years ago a teacher
in Iowa desired a child. She decided it was her right and acted upon it. She was of Quaker descent.

She wrote to her parents, who lived in Ohio; told them she would go home if they said so; if not, that she
had money enough to pay for being cared for where she was. Her parents said, “Come home,” and they
tried in every way possible to ascertain who the father of her child was, but they failed. She said she
wanted the child; he was not to blame and he should not be troubled. She never did tell. She has passed
to the other side of life, but her son lives in Philadelphia and, I am told, is a man to be respected. Since
then others have asserted their natural right, lived it; some for a while and then, becoming tired of the
struggle, have married. Others continue even till now, utterly refusing to bear the legal chain. And what
good has it done, do you ask? What does the sunshine do in early spring? As I have talked with women
from time to time, I have often thought of early vegetation just below the sight—only a little more sunshine
and it comes to the surface. True, it will take a good many mental bombs, a large amount of mental
dynamite, to penetrate conservative prisons, but they cannot imprison thought. Oh, foolish ignorance,
that thinks to stop the rising sun of thought by shutting up the thinker! For thought, when shut from
speech, flies o’er the walls like cannon balls when touched by powder’s flame.