The difference between good and bad mothers is so vast and so
far-reaching that it is no exaggeration to say that the good mothers
of this generation are building the homes of the next generation, and
that the bad mothers are building the prisons. For out of families
nations are made; and if the father be the head and the hands of a
family, the mother is the heart. No office in the world is so
honorable as hers, no priesthood so holy, no influence so sweet and
strong and lasting.
For this tremendous responsibility mother-love has always been
sufficient. The most ignorant women have trusted to it; and the most
learned have found it potential when all their theories failed. And
neither sage men nor wise women will ever devise anything to take
the place of mother-love in the rearing of children. If there be
other good things present, it glorifies them; if there be no other
good thing--it is sufficient. For mother-love is the spirit of
self-sacrifice even unto death, and self-sacrifice is the meat and
drink of all true and pure affection.
Still, this momentous condition supposes some central influence, some
obligation on the child's part which will reciprocate it; and this
central influence is found to be in _obedience_. There was once a
child in Jewry who was called "wonderful," and yet the most
significant fact recorded of his boyhood is that he "was subject unto
his parents." Indeed nothing else is told of the child, and we are
left to conclude that in the pregnant fact of his boyish obedience lay
the secret of his future perfect manhood. Unselfish love in the
mother! cheerful obedience in the children! in whatever home these
forces are constantly operative, that home cannot be a failure. And
mother-love is not of the right kind, nor of the highest trend, unless
it compels this obedience.
The assertion that affectionate firmness and even wholesome
chastisement is unnecessary with our advanced civilization is a
specious and dangerous one. The children of to-day have as many
rudimentary vices as they had in the days of the patriarchs; as a
general thing they are self-willed and inclined to evil from their
cradles; greedy without a blush, and ready to lie as soon as they
discover the use of language. A good mother does not shut her eyes to
these facts; she accepts her child as imperfect, and trains it with
never-ceasing love and care for its highest duties. She does not call
impudence "smartness," nor insubordination "high spirit," nor
selfishness "knowing how to take care of itself," nor lying and
dishonesty "sharpness." She knows, if the child is to be father to the
man, what kind of a man such a child will make.
How to manage young children; how to strengthen them physically; how
best to awaken their intellects, engage their affections, and win
their confidence; how to make home the sweetest spot on earth, a place
of love, order, and repose, a temple of purity where innocence is
respected, and where no one is permitted to talk of indecent subjects
or to read indecent books,--these are the duties of a good mother; and
her position, if so filled, is one of dignity and grave importance.
For it is on the hearthstone she gives the fine healthy initial touch
to her sons and daughters that is not effaced through life, and that
makes them blessed in their generation.
There is another duty, a very sacred one, which some mothers, however
good in all other respects, either thoughtlessly or with mistaken
ideas, delegate to others, the religious training of their children.
No Sunday-school and no church can do it for them. The child that
learns "Our Father" at its mother's knee, that hears from mother's
lips the heroic and tender stories of the Bible, has a wellspring of
religious faith in his soul that no after life, however hard and fast
and destructive, can dry up. It is inconceivable, then, how a mother
can permit any other woman to deprive her of an influence over her
children nothing can destroy; of a memory in their lives so sweet that
when every other memory is withered and approaching decay, it will
still be fresh and green,--yes, even to the grave's mouth. Family!
Country! Humanity! these three, but the greatest of the three is
Family; and the heart of the family is the good mother. Happy the
children who have one! With them
"faith in womankind
Beats with their blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to them."
But if the grand essential to a good mother be self-denying,
self-effacing love, this is a bad era for its development. Selfishness
and self-seeking is the spirit of the time, and its chilling poison
has infected womanhood, and touched even the sacred principle of
maternity. In some women it assumes the form of a duty. They feel
their own mental culture to be of supreme importance; they wish to
attend lectures, and take lessons, and give themselves to some special
study. Or the enslaved condition of their own sex troubles them;
they bear on their minds the oppressed shop-girls of America, or
the secluded odalisques in some Eastern seraglio, or they have
ecclesiastic proclivities and take the chair at church meetings,
or political ones, and deliver lectures before their special club on
women's disabilities. In these and many other ways they put the
natural mission of womanhood aside as an animal instinct, not
conducive to their mental development.
Now, no one will object to women's devoting themselves to works of
religion and charity; but this devotion should come before marriage.
If they have assumed the position of wifehood, it is a monstrous thing
to hold themselves degraded by its consequences, or to consider the
care of children a waste of their own life. The world can do without
learned women, but it cannot do without good wives and mothers; and
when married women prefer to be social ornaments and intellectual
amateurs, they may be called philanthropists and scholars, but they
are nevertheless moral failures, and bad mothers.
Society has put maternity out of fashion also, and considering the
average society woman, it is perhaps just as well. No children are
more forlorn and more to be pitied than the waifs of the woman whose
life is given up to what she calls "pleasure." Humbler-born babies
are nursed at their mother's breast and cradled in her loving arms.
She teaches them to walk and to read. In all their pain she soothes
them; in all their joys she has a part; in all their wrongs "mother"
is an ever-present help and comforter. The child of the fashionable
woman is too often committed at once to the care of some stranger, who
for a few dollars a month is expected to perform the mother's duty for
her. If it does not suck the vitiated, probably diseased, milk of some
peasant, it has the bottle and india-rubber mouthpiece, when the woman
in charge chooses to give it. But she is often in a temper, or sleepy,
or the milk is not prepared, or she is in the midst of a comfortable
gossip, or she is dressing or feeding herself, and it is not to be
expected she will put any sixteen-dollar-a month baby before her own
comfort or pleasure.
The child cannot complain of hunger, it can only cry, and very likely
may be struck for crying. What these neglected little ones suffer from
thirst is a matter painful to inquire into. The nurse, accustomed to
drink her tea and her beer at all hours, does not, herself patronize
cold water, and she never imagines the child needs it. Many a baby,
after being tortured for hours with a feverish, consuming thirst,
passes into the doctor's hands before the trouble is recognized. But
if the child's own mother had been nursing it she would not have been
long in finding out the cause of its impatient, urgent fretfulness.
Let any tender-hearted woman go into the parks and watch one of these
unhappy children in the care of its nurse. The hot sun beats down on
the small upturned face, and the ignorant creature in charge goes on
with her flirtation, or her gossip, or her novel. The child may be at
shrieking point from lying long in one position, but there is no one
to comprehend its necessity. During those awful hours in which its
teeth force their way through hot and swollen gums--hours which would
bring from adults unwritable exclamations--the forsaken little
sufferer is at the mercy of some sleepy, self-indulgent woman, who has
no love for it. Why, indeed, should she? If it were a matter of
catechism, how many educated women would be capable of nursing
good-naturedly for weeks a fretful, sick child not their own?
As for these neglected babies of pleasure-seeking women, they suffer
terribly, but then their mothers are having what they consider a
perfectly lovely time, posing at the opera or gyrating in some
ballroom, exquisitely dressed, and laughing as lightly as if there
were no painful echoes from their neglected nurseries. For no nurse is
apt to complain of her baby, she knows her business and her interest
too well for that; she prefers to speak comfortable words, and vows
the "little darling grows better and better every hour, God bless it!"
and, so assured, the mother goes airily away, telling herself that her
nurse is a perfect treasure. Whatever other nurses may do, she knows
that her nurse is reliable. The fact is that, even where there are
children in a nursery able to complain of the wrongs and cruelties
they have to endure, they very seldom dare to do so. Mamma is a dear,
beautiful lady, very far off; nurse is an ever-present power, capable
of making them suffer still more. And mamma does not like to hear
tales, she always appears annoyed at anything against nurse. They look
into their mother's face with eyes full of their sad story, if she
only had the heart to understand; but they dare not speak, and very
soon they are remanded back to their cruel keeper with a kiss, and an
injunction to "be good, and do as nurse tells them."
Consider the women to whom this class of mothers delegate their
high office,--an office for which hardly any love or wisdom is
sufficient. It would scarcely be possible in the whole world to
find any persons more unfit for it. Taking this class as a whole,
these very mothers are never tired of expatiating upon its gross
immorality, deceitfulness, greed, and dishonesty; yet they do not
hesitate to leave the very lives of their children in the charge of
these women, whose first lessons to them are lying and deceit. It
is a hideous system, and how hideous must that life called "pleasure"
be that can thus put aside love, reason, conscience, and break to
pieces a natural law so strong that in its purity it frequently
proves more powerful than the law of self-preservation. Writing on
this subject, Frederick James Grant, F. R. C. S., in his bold and
original book, "From Our Dead Selves," tells of a fashionable mother
who put her first child out to nurse, and who, when her second died
at birth and was brought to her bedside in its coffin, was entirely
interested--not in the child--but in the pretty lining and covering
of the coffin. For it is one of the startling facts of this condition
of motherhood that the poor infant left to some dreadful shrew, body
and soul, has the very best care taken of its frills and coats and of
the wraps in its baby carriage. For these things will be seen by other
people's servants and commented on, and are therefore worthy of
attention.
It is a strange state of society which tolerates this awful transfer
of duty, and society will have the bill to pay as well as the cruel
mother. These neglected children, whatever their birth, come really
from the dangerous classes, and have a likelihood to drift there. For
the first moral training of a child is the most important of all, and
in these cases it is given by women gross both through ignorance and
vice; whose relatives are very likely at the same time living in
suspicious localities, or in prison wards. And, naturally enough,
their first lessons to the children under them are to lie, to deceive,
to commit small pilferings, and not be found out. They are ordered not
to carry tales out of the nursery, or let mamma know what nurse does
not want known. Bad language, bad habits, hatred, petty conciliations,
meanness of every kind, are in the curriculum of any nursery left in
the care of the women usually found in them.
No one need imagine that the evil thus wrought can be eradicated in
future years by a higher class of teachers. The vicious seed is sown;
it is next to impossible to go through the field of a child's mind and
gather it up again. It has taken root, and unless it can be crowded
out by a nobler growth, the harvest is certain. The mother, then, who
prefers pleasure and society to her children, whom she hands over to
wicked and cruel nurses, is herself wicked and cruel. She may stand
before the world as the personification of refinement and delicacy
and elegance, but she is really no better than her substitute; and she
has no right to expect that her children will be better. In some
favorable cases there may come a redeeming power in future years, but
in the main they will drift downward to their first moral impressions;
and when they have become bad and unhappy men and women, they will not
scruple to say, "From our mother cometh our misery." These are hard
truths, yet one-half has not been told. For if it were not for the
abounding number of good mothers, both rich and poor, this class of
women would undermine all virtue, and everything lovely and of good
report.
There was once an idea that mothers were the antiseptic quality in
society, that they preserved its moral tone, by insisting that the
language used and the subjects discussed before them should be such as
were suitable for virtuous women. But there is one kind of bad mother
to whom questionable subjects seem highly suitable. She discusses them
without reserve in the presence of her daughters, and she makes her
drawing-room the forum for women with queer domestic views, for
"Physical Culture" women, and such-like characters. The things our
grandmothers went down to their graves without knowing she talks about
in unmistakable terms before unmarried girls. A certain mother who
boldly defended her opinion that "girls should not be kept ignorant as
a means for keeping them innocent," permitted her own daughter to be
present during all the unsavory scandal of Vanity Fair. The child
learned to watch with interest the doings of women of many seasons,
and to listen with composure to very questionable stories. Before she
was twelve years old she had become suspicious of the conduct of every
woman, and when her teacher one day asked her, "Who was Moses?" she
answered promptly, "The son of Pharoah's daughter." "Not the son,"
corrected the teacher, "the adopted son. Pharoah's daughter found him
in the river Nile." "_So_ she said," replied this premature
woman,--suspicions of women's actions and a ready assumption of the
very worst motives for them, being the lessons she had deduced from
knowledge imparted before mind and experience were capable of
receiving it.
It is often said that "ignorance is not innocence." True, but neither
is knowledge innocence; it is most frequently the first step of
guiltiness. What good can come of little children knowing the things
which belong to maturity? Is any girl sweeter or even safer for
knowing about the under-current of filth below the glittering crust of
gilded society? The Chinese quarter is a fact, yet is there a mother
who would like her daughter to visit it? But if it is not fit to
visit, it is not fit to talk about. No one is ever the better for
knowing of evil, unless they can do something to remedy it.
A good mother will shield her children from the consequences of their
own ignorance, physical and moral, and she will just as carefully
shield them from knowledge which is hurtful because premature,--just
as fruit green and unripe is hurtful. And no guardianship is too close
for this end. Mothers will generally admit this fact as regards the
children of other people, but as to their own brood they cradle
themselves in a generous belief of its incorruptibility. Their girls
would never do as other girls do; and their girls are consequently
permitted a license which they would think dangerous for any but their
own daughters. Then some day there is a paragraph in one of the
papers, and the men blame the man, and the women blame the girl, and
all the time the mother is probably the guiltiest of the parties. She
has stimulated her daughter's imagination in childhood, she has left
her to the choice of her companions in youth, she has trusted her
sacred duty to circumstances, she has indulged a vague hope concerning
the honor and virtue of humanity, and thus satisfied her indolent
neglect. But what right had she to expect that men would revere the
treasure she herself left unguarded?
For there has been no special race made for this era; what Adam,
Jacob, Samson, and David were, what Eve, Sarah, Rachel, Jael, and
Bathsheba were, the men and women of to-day are, in all their
essentials. Circumstances only have made them to differ; and nature
laughs at circumstances, and goes back at any crisis to her first
principles. Indeed, the good mother of to-day, instead of relaxing,
must increase her care over her children. For never since the world
began has youth been so catered to, never has it been surrounded by so
many open temptations, never so much flattered, and yet at the same
time never have the reins of discipline been so far relaxed. Now the
spirit we evoke we must control, or else we must become its slave.
If we are no longer to reverence the gray hairs of age; if young men
are to drive the chariot of the sun, and young women are to be
allowed to strip the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, then it is
high time some system of education was invented which will put old
heads upon young shoulders. Alas, this can never be, for education
is a long and composite process, made up of home influences,
surrounding circumstances, and early associations. When books and
schools and teachers shall have done all they possibly can, high
above every Gamaliel will sit the good mother,--the first influence,
the first teacher, the first friend, and the last.