I always groan in spirit when any advocate of woman suffrage, carried away
by zeal, says anything disrespectful about the nursery. It is contrary to
the general tone of feeling among reformers, I am sure, to speak of this
priceless institution as a trivial or degrading sphere, unworthy the
emancipated woman. It is rarely that anybody speaks in this way; but a
single such utterance hinders progress more than any arguments of the
enemy. For every thoughtful person sees that the cares of motherhood,
though not the whole duty of woman, are an essential part of that duty,
wherever they occur; and that no theory of womanly life is good for
anything which undertakes to leave out the cradle. Even her school
education is based on this fact, were it only on Stendhal's theory that the
sons of a woman who reads Gibbon and Schiller will be more likely to show
talent than those of one who only tells her beads and reads Mme. de Genlis.
And so clearly is this understood among us, that, when we ask for suffrage
for woman, it is almost always claimed that she needs it for the sake of
her children. To secure her in her right to them; to give her a voice in
their education; to give her a vote in the government beneath which they
are to live,--these points are seldom omitted in our statement of her
claims. Anything else would be an error.
But there is an error at the other extreme, which is still greater. A woman
should no more merge herself in her child than in her husband. Yet we often
hear that she should do just this. What is all the public sphere of woman,
it is said,--what good can she do by all her speaking and writing and
action,--compared with that she does by properly training the soul of one
child? It is not easy to see the logic of this claim.
For what service is that child to render in the universe, except that he,
too, may write and speak and act for that which is good and true? And if
the mother foregoes all this that the child, in growing up, may simply do
what the mother has left undone, the world gains nothing. In sacrificing
her own work to her child's, moreover, she exchanges a present good for a
prospective and merely possible one. If she does this through overwhelming
love, we can hardly blame her; but she cannot justify it before reason and
truth. Her child may die, and the service to mankind be done by neither.
Her child may grow up with talents unlike hers, or with none at all; as the
son of Howard was selfish, the son of Chesterfield a boor, and the son of
Wordsworth in the last degree prosaic.
Or the special occasion when she might have done great good may have passed
before her boy or girl grows up to do it. If Mrs. Child had refused to
write "An Appeal for that Class of Americans called Africans," or Mrs.
Stowe had laid aside "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or Florence Nightingale had
declined to go to the Crimea, on the ground that a woman's true work was
through the nursery, and they must all wait for that, the consequence would
be that these things would have remained undone. The brave acts of the
world must be performed _when occasion offers, by the first brave soul_ who
feels moved to do them, man or woman.
If all the children in all the nurseries are thereby helped to do other
brave deeds when their turn comes, so much the better. But when a great
opportunity offers for direct aid to the world, we have no right to
transfer that work to other hands--not even to the hands of our own
children. We must do the work, and train the children besides.
I am willing to admit, therefore, that the work of education, in any form,
is as great as any other work; but I fail to see why it should be greater.
Usefulness is usefulness: there is no reason why it should be postponed
from generation to generation, or why it is better to rear a serviceable
human being than to be one in person. Carry the theory consistently out: if
each mother must simply rear her daughter that she in turn may rear
somebody else, then from each generation the work will devolve upon a
succeeding generation, so that it will be only the last woman who will
personally do any service, except that of motherhood; and when her time
comes it will be too late for any service at all.
If it be said, "But some of these children will be men, who are necessarily
of more use than women," I deny the necessity. If it be said, "The children
may be many, and the mother, who is but one, may well be sacrificed," it
might be replied that, as one great act may be worth many smaller ones, so
all the numerous children and grandchildren of a woman like Lucretia Mott
may not collectively equal the usefulness of herself alone. If she, like
many women, had held it her duty to renounce all other duties and interests
from the time her motherhood began, I think that the world, and even her
children, would have lost more than could ever have been gained by her more
complete absorption in the nursery.
The true theory seems a very simple one. The very fact that during one half
the years of a woman's average life she is made incapable of child-bearing
shows that there are, even for the most prolific and devoted mothers,
duties other than the maternal. Even during the most absorbing years of
motherhood, the wisest women still try to keep up their interest in
society, in literature, in the world's affairs--were it only for their
children's sake. Multitudes of women will never be mothers; and those more
fortunate may find even the usefulness of their motherhood surpassed by
what they do in other ways. If maternal duties interfere in some degree
with all other functions, the same is true, though in a far less degree,
of those of a father. But there are those who combine both spheres. The
German poet Wieland claimed to be the parent of fourteen children and
forty books; and who knows by which parentage he served the world the
best?