THE MOTHER
"Strength and dignity are her clothing;
She openeth her mouth with wisdom;
And the law of kindness is on her tongue.
She looketh well to the ways of her household,
And eateth not the bread of idleness.
The heart of her husband trusteth in her;
Her children rise up and call her blessed;
Give her of the fruit of her hands;
And let her works praise her in the gates."
--PROVERBS.
"A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect woman, nobly plann'd,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel light."
--WORDSWORTH.
"Yet in herself she dwelleth not,
Although no home were half so fair;
No simplest duty is forgot;
Life hath no dim and lowly spot
That doth not in her sunshine share."
--LOWELL.
"I loved the woman; there was one through whom I loved her, one
Not learned, save in gracious household ways,
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
No angel, but a dearer being, interpreter between the gods and men.
"Happy he with such a mother! Faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall,
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
--TENNYSON.
=Antiquity of the Mother-instinct.=--The mother-instinct of protection
of offspring, of care of weakness and of sacrifice for the young, came
to high power before the human was reached in the scale of beings. It
must never be forgotten that humbler sisters set the fashion of
motherhood's devotion too long ago to reckon the time and in types of
organism too remote to be always recognized as kin to the human beings
we know to-day. This is the greatest and most racially useful of all
the biological assets stored up for us in the prehuman struggle toward
what we now call civilization. Nor should we fail to give full value
to the testimony of primitive human life that the mother and child
formed the first social group within the loose association of the
herd. It was the first group to develop, by virtue of its conscious
relationship, the sense of trust and the habit of service of the
stronger to the weaker, thus leading toward mutual aid within an area
of affection and good-will. These facts give basic assurance that
mother-love will last, no matter what changes in form of its
expression may be called for by changes in social order.
The reason why the relationship of mother and child was able thus to
lead the way toward social organization for the common good is
obvious. The intimate physical tie, the easily understood claim of the
child upon its mother, the prolongation of human infancy instituting a
habit of continuous service of the young and hence a tendency toward a
settled home and peaceful industries, all made it easy for woman to
become care-taker of children. These also made it easy for the early
social order to hold mothers to the task and, in growing measure,
protect them in it. What have been the recognized essentials in that
care-taking of motherhood? What are the permanent elements in the
mother's devotion to offspring which persist under all changes in
social conditions?
=The Recognized Essentials in Child-care.=--The more important items
in a program of child-care may be summed up as follows:
First--Protection of infancy and childhood from threatening
dangers.
Second--Providing food, clothing, and shelter for the young.
Third--Drilling children in physical habits and manner of
personal behavior demanded by the family rule of time and
place of birth.
Fourth--Teaching the child to talk, to walk, to obey, to
imitate.
Fifth--Interpreting to each newcomer the group morals which
govern the family and the educational process in the
period and locality into which he is born.
Sixth--For ages untold, the more formal education of all girls
and of all little boys in the folk-lore, the vocational
skill, the ways of living together and the methods of
social arrangement both within and without the tribe or
state or nation into which they were born.
Are any of these essential elements of motherhood's ancient devotion
to child-life lifted wholly from her obligation? Careful study of the
family needs and conditions, and the effect upon them of modern social
control and social organization, indicates that not one of these
ancient obligations is taken bodily from the modern mother's service.
=The Protective Function.=--The protective function has indeed been
considered for many centuries peculiarly the father's duty. Ever since
man was bound to family obligations he has been charged with repelling
enemy attacks upon the group of which his own family was a part and
with the task of standing guard over wife and child as against all
physical dangers. Man has developed under this social pressure a sense
of chivalry and a tendency to "save women and children first" which
give noble examples of courage and self-sacrifice to fire the
imagination of each new generation. Has the father-office developed
such many-sided and adequate protective service to childhood that
mothers have been able to "lay down their arms" and rest content in
the knowledge that their children are shielded from every danger? It
seems not. In the days when women were ignorant of all outside their
homes they may have felt so secure because not understanding the cause
of many family tragedies. In the days when they had no power to change
conditions affecting the home from without they may have felt excused
from the protective function of early motherhood, since men had taken
over physical defense and economic support and the relationship of the
family group to the social whole. No open-eyed woman in a country
giving women social, economic, and political power can so think
to-day.
It is a far cry from the savage mother, beating back some beast of the
jungle or the plain, to the modern mother whose physical protection
and that of her children is amply provided not alone by the husband
and father concerned but by organized society with its police power,
its courts and laws. The dangers that threaten child-life to-day in
the more civilized communities are not the same that threatened the
young of the herd-pack or the early lives of primitive men and women.
Then the mother had sometimes to defend her child against its own
father, especially her girl-babies against the social fiat of death
executed by the father's will. Ancient folk-lore and myth show us many
a struggle, intense and cruel, between mother-love and this
group-sentence of death upon some of its young. In case of war also
the ancient mother had to protect her virgin daughters against outrage
and capture, albeit so feebly and to so disastrous an end. And war,
since it is always and by its nature must be a return to savage
conditions, now leads to the sacrifice of women and children in much
the ancient manner; and faced by its horrors at close touch, the
mother-instinct essays the old task to the same bitter defeat.
In peaceful periods, however, in the long ages when the father-rule
was a despotism tempered only by natural affection and the skill of
women in securing advantages while simulating submission, mothers had
large use of their protective function in easing family discipline and
in gaining relief from harsh conditions affecting childhood. Theirs
was then no open fight for the well-being of their offspring, and
often not a wise effort to that end, but ancient song and story all
show that childhood and youth depended upon the mother-love in crises
of family experience and that without such refuge many young lives
would have been utterly sacrificed.
=Social Elements in Modern Protection of Children.=--To-day the
dangers to which babies and children are exposed are more subtle in
form and more complex in action. They are less within than without the
average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants,
the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness
of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many
human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal
and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of
"normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but
rather that we are newly aware of them. Not that savage or early
civilized life had conditions more favorable to health and normality
but that the easier modern conditions save alive many who in harsher
times would have died in babyhood. Moreover, we are beginning at last
to set a standard, in ever-clearer outline, of what is health and of
what is normality in physical, mental, and moral human life. Moreover,
we are seeing as never before that the dangers that beset the child
to-day are not those from which the mother alone, or the individual
father and mother working together, can adequately protect. They are
dangers that only society can prevent and that society alone can
abolish.
=Women's Leadership in Social Protection.=--Why, then, do we say that
the protective function of individual motherhood is still demanded and
still a large part of the modern mother's obligation? Because she is
to-day the one most clearly required, in our own country at least, to
summon the social forces to lessen or abolish those dangers to which
children are exposed. The action of the solitary, primitive mother
fighting off the despoiler of her child does not much resemble the
banding together of modern women by the hundreds and by the thousands
to abolish typhoid fever in some city in which it has become endemic
through the greed of manufacturers who pollute the water supply. It
is, however, the same spirit in both; and in the modern instance it
wakes, first, the fathers to their protective duty, and then the
guardians of the public health, and then educates the public mind, and
at last accomplishes the desired result through appropriate laws,
well enforced. It is a long step from the indirect "influence," the
often deceitful cunning, the appeal to sex-attraction and the pleading
of weakness by which for ages women sought to protect their children
against harsh punishments, their daughters against marriage to those
whom they loathed, and their sons to apprenticeship to work they could
not choose, to the openly exercised power of the modern mother. In the
days when wives and mothers had no legal rights which society was
bound to respect, appeal was woman's only weapon; now the modern
mother has command of her protective function and exercises it
fearlessly. The same spirit is in all the long process of change,
however, and women to-day banding openly together and joining also
with men on equal terms, to secure laws protecting children from
cruelty even against their own parents; to raise the "age of consent"
in order to prevent the unwitting moral suicide of little girls; to
sweep the streets free from vicious allurements that young boys may be
preserved from debauchery and disease; to place trustees of society's
power of public protection as chaperones in every place of moral
danger; these modern women are near of kin to all motherhood of any
past. So also are those of the same spirit as the ancient mother who
band themselves together, again with men on equal terms, but oftenest,
perhaps, with men whom their own social interest has summoned to the
task, for the establishment of "Health Centres", of adequate and
efficient clinics and dispensaries; for securing necessary education
and care of mothers before the birth of their children, and for
mothers and babies alike needing good, fresh air, rest and comfort
after birth; for the raising of standards of physical well-being all
along the line of life from youth to age. The ancient mother was too
ignorant and had too little power to save her children and family from
physical ills, but she did her best. The modern mother is able to
learn about requirements and to act with power for the better health
and better training of every child. Is she always ready for and equal
to the task?
At least we can claim this for the mother devotion in modern times,
that it shows, and in exact proportion of its increasing social power,
an alertness and a moral earnestness in all that concerns the welfare
of children that have perpetuated and extended the protective
functions of society as no other agency has done. Much of the modern
legislation and social work directed toward the physical and moral
safeguarding of the young has been instituted and is carried out in
detail largely by women. The passage of the so-called Maternity Bill
by our National Congress, at the recognized instigation of women of
the United States, and the call it makes for a large staff of women
workers to carry out its provisions, is a case in point. This
protective work for mothers and babies is not always done by women who
are themselves mothers. Perhaps too often its details are in charge of
those lacking deep experience of life, and hence not able to interpret
new laws of social control to parents of ancient ideals and backward
social culture. But women in any case are called for in large numbers
to translate the ancient personal duty of protective care of the young
in terms of social obligations.
=The Provision of Food, Clothing, and Shelter.=--The second recognized
ancient duty of mothers is in respect to the provision of food,
clothing, and shelter for the young. This duty has undergone great
changes of method during the last century, and in the large centres of
population has altered almost past recognition. These changes seem to
many to minimize the individual mother's responsibility in these
matters to the vanishing point.
It is indeed an almost immeasurable distance from the primitive mother
scratching the soil with her sharpened stick, her baby bound to her
bended back, in order to plant a few seeds for a tiny harvest to save
the life of her child when the hunt should be poor, to the modern
mother whose food supply for her family comes to the table from all
parts of the earth at the call of her telephone. Is the modern mother,
then, released from all obligations as to that food supply? It is a
long step also from the primitive mother making slowly with her thorn
needle the only garment her child may wear, and even a long step from
the home spinning, weaving and dyeing of later handicraft, to the
modern use of the "ready-made" shop and the division of all
garment-making into innumerable specialties of labor. Is the modern
mother thereby released from care concerning the family clothing?
For the modern housing of families do we not all have to depend upon
the architect, the builder, the real estate broker, the speculator in
land, the laws concerning boundaries, taxes and title deeds, rent and
landlords' powers, and press all one upon another for a chance for a
home when we elect to live where many other people want also to live?
Is, then, the shelter of the family no longer the mother's care?
=The Woman in Rural Life.=--The country-woman, dealing at first hand
with rural conditions, has many of the same problems of personal
devotion in the provision of food, clothing, and shelter with which
her ancient ancestor struggled. She has, it is true, "scientific
farming" of men to raise the harvests that ancestor's heroic but
feeble efforts could not secure. She has mechanical and commercial
aids as housemother such as the primitive woman never imagined. She
has been released from much of the drudgery which burdened her
grandmother in the domestic stage of industry. She is under social
protection such as no previous woman enjoyed in the solitary household
of the past. And in the United States the Federal Government is
offering her aids.[3] It is, however, true that the housemother in
rural communities still feels many of the obligations of the ancient
woman. The three-meal-a-day routine, the actual preparation of raw
material of food for the table, the personal offices of housework,
washing, ironing, mending, making, sweeping, dusting, cleaning, in all
their varied details, keep her in active sympathy with the past. This
fact furnishes the main reason why "Women's Columns" and "Magazines
for Women" reach such large circulation in rural districts, where they
help toward lessening the domestic burden by showing how to carry it
more easily.
The farm woman, however, is moving, many thousand strong, with men as
many, to mitigate the isolation of the solitary household, to bring
the home nearer to the neighbors, the school, the church and the
store, by massing rural homes in villages and forming the habits of
the men-folk to go further afield for their own work. This movement,
which is of all social reforms most needed because affecting larger
classes than any other and also because affecting the basic industry
of all countries, that of agriculture, is working toward making
farm-life once more attractive to young men and capable of winning
young women to the life of the farmer's wife.
Meanwhile, the higher forms of social organization possible in cities
and in closely settled towns and villages are working to lessen
house-keeping burdens to an unprecedented degree. It is noticeable
that all schemes for so specializing woman's work and so easing the
domestic burden as to make, as one writer puts it, "the home a rest
place for women as for men," have their imaginary seat in great cities
or closely built suburbs. The farm-women we know can combine and
coöperate to a greater extent than they now do and the town and city
women may take far better advantage of the agencies of household
assistance now at their doors. How far this movement to relieve the
home of household work may go we do not know.
=Modern Demand for Standardization.=--Is there any plan yet proposed,
however, which can relieve the mother of her primary and ancient
obligation to see that her family is well nourished, suitably clothed
and healthfully sheltered? Some one must attend to the needs of each
family in these vital particulars which underlie all problems of
public and private health. Shall the state do it? So far the
experience of state institutions and even of private "homes" do not
encourage hope along that line. So far the physical and affectional
needs of children and youth, and of husbands and wives, and of fathers
and mothers have not been met by any substitute for the private home.
And in the private home, under any plan, there must go on certain
processes which have to cost some one member of the family a great
deal of thought, much personal effort and constant attention. For most
families in average condition that person is naturally the
housemother. If the husband and father is the chief or only
wage-earner in "gainful occupations," then his health and strength are
of primary concern to all the family and must be secured by adequate
and healthful provision of food and clothing, and the home must give
him what he vitally needs for maintaining power of economic service to
his family. If the mother, also, is a wage-or salary-earner we have
the dictum of economists that her inherited and usual place in the
family machinery must be filled, if at all successfully, by trained
and congenial helpers at a cost in present conditions prohibitive for
the average family income. The estimate of Mr. Taber, in his excellent
book, _The Business of the Household_, is that unless for causes of
illness or special emergency "no family having an income of less than
three thousand dollars has any right to maintain a maid." This
estimate seems not only economically correct but shows why so few
families have incomes that can release the housemother from housework.
It also shows why only the exceptionally trained and competent
vocational worker, if a married woman and mother of young children,
can earn enough to release herself from the miscellaneous tasks of the
private household without loss to the family treasury. The easing of
the burden of housework, almost unbearable as it has been and
responsible, as we have good reason to believe, for much ill-health of
women and much unhappiness in marriage, is coming fast and from quite
other directions than is often perceived. The commercial aids of
wholesale preparation of food and clothing, and the new fashions in
house-building and household management are alike working toward such
a reduction of private household service as may enable the average
woman to meet the family needs, even where there are several young
children, if she is strong in body and trained in efficient ways of
working, and yet have considerable time left for other activities.
The apartment house has set the fashion of simplification and
reduction of necessary personal service in the home. The apartment
house, with its continuous hot water, its ready heat and its relief
from care of sidewalks, halls and stairs, and with its hour-service at
command is obviously becoming a favorite place to live in. Especially
do women like it. The multiple house, however, does not seem the best
place for children after the earliest months of infancy, and in many
such houses they are openly "not wanted." The multiple house has also
many disadvantages from the social side in the lack of home
associations which support family affection. They are also for the
most part in localities where people are brought together without plan
or friendship and hence can not cultivate that neighborliness which,
so far in the history of the race, has been a nursery of the community
spirit.
=The Apartment House and the Family.=--The apartment house seems to be
the best place for those families in which all the adult members are
busy at some vocation, and in which the children are of age to profit
by educational opportunities usually found only in cities. In such
families the burdens of the person who is in command of the family
comfort as to food and raiment and house-keeping are reduced to the
lowest terms. If to the usual apartment house provisions for aids to
the housemother are added, what is now offered in some places, namely,
the "Auto-Service for Meals," whereby the principal meal, at least,
the dinner, is brought to the door ready to place on the table and all
cooking dishes hard to wash are returned to the centre of supply to be
prepared for another service, then, indeed, can all the members take
turns in rendering the small offices for family comfort still required
and each go about his or her special vocation at will. This seems to
be the goal of many progressive minds, although personal taste is
seldom satisfied by "coöperative" cooking.
It must be remembered by all, that the sort of family pictured above
has in it no children of ages requiring freedom of motion and constant
attention (unless, indeed, "the boarding-school in the country" for
all over four or five years is contemplated). It has in it no aged
whose needs in diet and in physical comfort vary from the usual. It
has in it no chronic invalids and no convalescents, no blind or lame
or specially weak requiring special help. It is for the particular
benefit, at least, of families of a particular type, of which the
cities, with their more varied facilities, contain an unusual
proportion. For the family of the ordinary type, with its many
differing needs and its variety of claim upon some one person for its
central direction and service, the various aids from without which
have been indicated serve rather to relieve from excessive burdens
than to remove altogether the special obligations of the woman-head of
the family.
Moreover, the time left to the average housemother from the old
housework by the new helps in that work is, in part at least,
mortgaged in advance to social effort to make the new commercial aids
to family service actual helps and not hindrances to family health and
comfort. The food supply drawn upon must be sharply investigated lest
it contain deleterious substances or be denuded of nourishing quality.
The ready-made clothing must be bought with knowledge and constant
vigilance against cheating in material or in construction or in sins
of fashion against health and beauty. The labor-saving devices of
every sort must be put to intelligent test and require specific
training for most efficient use. The family budget must be more
carefully planned and more heroically maintained at prudent levels.
The public service of markets, transportation facilities and functions
of "middlemen" must be understood and controlled as never before.
Above all, the pressure of uniformity must be resisted if the offered
supply of the essentials of life prove inadequate to the deepest
needs, or the scale of living be too ambitiously set by the housing
facilities adjusted to the ideas and claims of landlords rather than
to the needs of family life.
Hence we may say that the old forms of effort by which mothers fed and
clothed and sheltered their children led directly to absorption of
interest, energy and conscientious labor within the house. The new
forms of effort by which these essentials of healthful and comfortable
living are secured lead directly to all manner of coöperative social
adjustments of supply to demand. The standard of demand, however, let
it never be forgotten, is made and maintained within the intimate
family circle itself, and the personal intelligence and ethical
maturity of the housemothers, who form the major purchasing class of
every civilized community, determine that standard. For that great
enterprise of high standardization the same personal devotion to the
central demands of life is required in the average modern woman which
made the ancient mother so great a leader in primitive culture. The
new aids to the housemother's task may give her a better chance than
any women ever had before to see the real social significance of the
personal offices of home life. The poets have seen it all through the
centuries and have pictured the myth goddesses bringing the cup and
the bread and the fruit and weaving the web of ceremonial or of simple
garment in household poetry. All human need for sustenance and the
nurture of our physical being has made the wife the loaf-giver and the
mother a nourisher of the young, and as such artists have portrayed
her.
We may say "our father-land," but we always say "our mother-earth." To
those who see clearly the value of the ancient family rite of the
meal alone together, to which it may well be every member of the
family has made a distinct contribution; to those to whom the private
table still appeals and who still appreciate the taste and quality of
every purchase made for each individual member of the intimate group
(things taking time and thought most often of the mother), the
individual home has meanings that are not lost but rather are growing
in spiritual importance as the drudgery of the household is lessened.
=New Uses of Electric Power.=--To-day another great contribution to
the spiritual value of the private household ministrations is offered
in the new uses of electric power. Already the "servantless house" is
widely advertised. Already the grave difficulties in household
adjustment made by the growing unwillingness of competent girls and
women to do anything in the households of strangers, and thereby
giving rise to the serious "servant-girl problem" for people of
limited means, are being mitigated by the new devices of this modern
wizard of electricity. It seems to many of us that had this magician
been discovered before the invention of steam-power-driven machinery
the whole tendency of modern industry would have been turned not so
absolutely, if at all, toward the factory. Such modifications of
domestic manufacture and handicraft as right use of electricity could
have initiated, might have prevented some of the social and economic
evils of our present labor world. However that may be, it is clear
that now the modern housewife has at her hand the means of easy
control of her special family duties such as no ancient woman could
have conceived. The movement henceforward, therefore, we must believe,
is toward such lessening of household burdens by mechanical means, and
such simplification of household requirements by new family ideals as
will make every woman of ordinary strength and of even moderate
capacity and training so sure a master of essentials in that field
that she can dispense with the "help" that so often now hinders the
real family life and make the home more truly the private shrine of
affection and of mutual aid than it has ever been before.
=Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate= if she would hand on the
torch of life the brighter for her handling. Doctor Devine has well
said that "the only satisfactory method of getting babies safely
through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan
of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in
the death-rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of
communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and
humane feeling exercised. To keep babies alive and well is a
prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a
necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health.
So far in human experience babies have declined with one accord to be
happy unless some one person was constantly devoted to their welfare.
That person may be a "hired expert," it is true, but the successful
nurse must have the mother-feeling. Moreover, it is now agreed that
the best physical stamina is secured by mothers breast-feeding their
own babies, and all manner of incentives, even to state subsidies, are
being used to lead women to this personal office.
If mothers thus nurse their babies they must come close to them in
affectional contact, and it is through affectional contact more than
in any other way that babies seem to thrive. No one can claim that
ability to care for and bring up children "comes by nature." The
affectional tie does, however, give an added earnestness to the desire
to learn how to minister wisely and well to the needs of the child.
That same affectional tie on the part of the mother is shown in a
return of affection from the child. Such personal ministrations of the
mother to the child have also a great effect in forming the whole
character in later life. One may worship from a distance, and the
capacity to justly estimate excellence grows with maturity. But the
child knows best those who serve his needs most intimately and gives
his love to that person.
=The Mother's Compensation for Personal Service.=--There is much
compensation, therefore, for the woman who gives herself to her child
in old-fashioned ways of personal service. She gets the charm and the
allurement of the growing bud on life's tree. If she misses that she
loses something of her birthright and some "substitute-mother" gets
something of satisfaction from the child that she does not.
=Early Drill in Personal Habits.=--The third essential of the
inherited obligation of mothers to their children is the early drill
in personal habits that are required for health and decency and
propriety in any given time and place. For this it is an absolute
necessity that either the mother so serve herself or that she secure
some substitute-mother of refinement, knowledge, affection and
devotion which make her an equal in the family circle. How many nurses
fulfil that demand? Many, even of those least recognized by their
employers as entitled to special gratitude and appreciation. The point
to be noted is, however, that even if experts for "hour-service" as
nursery governess could be had in sufficient numbers and even if the
majority of families could financially meet the expense of those fully
competent, such service would not, as a rule, meet the needs of
children under three or four years. It is a constant task, not,
indeed, requiring every minute of time, but requiring constant
readiness to serve at need both day and night to start an infant along
the required rules of daily habit. And that task does not lend itself
to the conditions of group-teaching or to the schedule of shared
service of visiting experts. Some one must be on the job all the time
or it is not accomplished with success, although skilled personal
care-takers can get fine results in gradually lessened attention by
the time the baby becomes the child.
If there are several children in a family, however, the most competent
mother, or substitute-mother, has the process to repeat with each
newcomer, so that for every child we may reckon at least two years of
very constant attention if the bodily habits of health and propriety
and the first steps in social training for agreeable membership in the
family are to be well taken. The public school is full of children for
whom the teachers heroically try to make up for lacks in this intimate
home-training. It may be that some people view with pleasure a "movie
picture" in which large numbers of children go through a "toothbrush
drill," but to some of us it is a sorry exhibit. When Booker
Washington opened Tuskegee he required only a toothbrush as entrance
fee and equipment, and the use of that implement had to be explained
and almost all other agencies for personal neatness and physical care
of the body to be offered and their use enforced. This was the step of
a whole race toward civilization, a step which the slave condition had
not made possible before for the field-hands of the South. The people
coming to us from all the peasant classes of Europe and the East have
many of them lacked also the chance to be drilled in the things that
belong to private and personal habit demanded by our civilization. It
may be that for such the public school is the only medium for the
belated acquirement of such habits; but if publicity in drill and lack
of reserve and modesty be the price paid for wholesale instruction it
may injure those with good breeding at command in their own homes by
lowering their standards, even while it helps upward those who need
the school baths and the school treatment of heads and throats and
teeth and all manner of personal care. It is not easy to get what
children require in these particulars in the crowded tenement. It may
be impossible in the congested quarters of a great city. But the need
thus pathetically shown in the children of many social strata in the
United States indicates that not only should there be own mothers or
substitute-mothers for every little child to start each aright along
the way of life but every own mother or substitute-mother should have
a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in
dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The
housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable
living-place into which to put every home.
=Early Practice in Walking, Talking, Obedience, and Imitation.=--The
fourth obligation which the past has laid upon the modern mother is to
teach the little child to walk, to talk, to obey, and to imitate. All
these are a part of the habit-drill of the very earliest years. They
are bound up with the acquirement of those personal habits of health
and propriety before indicated. It is not for nothing that women from
the oldest time have been noted for their power of speech and habit of
talking. They have had to give every little child the start toward
that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and
understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for
the mother, knows what the child says before any one else can
understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and
other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's
language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art.
In learning to walk it is the desire to get closer to those most
beloved that helps the child to balance on his feet and try the
fearful voyage across the room to where father or mother waits to
welcome his approach. And here in most families the mother has the
practice in hand far more hours in the day than any one else in the
family. Yet for talking and walking in families where there are
several children the most efficient instruction of the youngest is
often given by the older brothers and sisters. The first child has all
to do or to try to do alone; the only child has to pioneer all through
childhood and youth so far as his own family life is concerned, but
the child in a family of several children learns almost by unconscious
absorption from those just a step in advance of his own attempts.
Where there are children too near in age the inevitable jealousy or
unhappiness of the baby too soon pushed from his throne defeats this
end of easy accomplishment through imitation. Where there are too many
children in the family for the father to properly support, or the
mother to healthfully or happily care for, the nearness of age often
means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older
children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be
defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a
tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the
development of either. The coming of new members to the family,
however, in right spacing and right conditions, means that each child
gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and
makes it far easier for all to learn the ways of life. The art of
obedience which is learned in such conditions is a share in a family
public opinion, outlined, indeed, by the parents, but maintained by
all the younger members of the group. Not that the same elements enter
into the early character-drill of each child. There are as many
temperaments and as many capacities and as many differing reactions to
like conditions in any family, as a general thing, as there are
children to be considered. This difference, however, while it makes
family discipline more difficult, makes it also usually more
effective, for it insures that parents shall study reasons for rules
and try at least to reach an obvious basis for them in personal and
social well-being rather than in the parents' will. This leads the way
to later democracy by stimulating the sense of justice and the sense
of individualistic right, together with the sense of mutual tolerance
and mutual aid in the very beginnings of family living together.
=Special Responsibility of the Average Mother.=--The burden of this
preliminary training toward social order and social welfare rests
to-day more heavily upon the mother than upon any one else, even the
father. He often has pressing business down-town whenever hard
questions of family discipline must be faced. He is often so
overburdened with the financial support of the family that he cannot
give time or attention necessary to the constant helping of children
to escape from the savage to the civilized, from the selfish to the
helpful, from the ignorant to the ever-learning. At any rate, just as
many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers,
although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger
concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all
their younger children in the hands of the mother.
What teachers can do in school comes later in life than the period of
which we now speak. Even the kindergarten, with its short hours and
its more artificial life, only shows each day a picture of what the
child may do later on in his own self-culture. The home nursery is the
real place of actual experience for the average child, with the family
table and the intimate association with father and mother and brother
and sister. These make a school of preëminent importance to the later
training.
=Women's Relation to More Formal Education.=--The fifth obligation
which the modern mother inherits from the ages is that relating to the
more formal education of all girls and of all little boys in the
folk-lore, the vocational skill, and the methods of social arrangement
which set moral fashions and demand personal obedience to the social
order into which one is born. This obligation is so largely shared
to-day that many see in it no special burden for the modern mother.
The school training once so largely within the home, or for the older
boys so definitely obtained in fraternities or war-groups of men, is
now a separate institution. The customs, tribal or national, that once
ruled the family-training are now solidified and definitely outlined
in laws written on statute books. The illiterate parent cannot, if he
would, disobey the compulsory school law. The poverty-stricken parent
must either starve himself to feed his children according to the
demands of the health board or he must accept public or private
charity for their sustenance according to modern demands. The ignorant
parent must submit to treatment of his children by public nurse or
doctor of whom he may be afraid. The parent not ignorant, but
differing from the majority as to what will prevent disease or cure
it, must accept the public rule.
The decay of domestic industry and the growth of the factory system
have given rise to so many and serious social dangers that laws are
now passed forbidding home manufacture on grounds of need to abolish
sweatshop conditions, although to many such prohibition seems, and to
some may be, the denial of parental moral protection to children and
youth in families of the very poor. The training for self-supporting
work, which came about so naturally from within the household in the
handicraft stage of industry, now requires many public agencies of
education. The new social "mores" accepted by the majority and
supported by law and court may be directly opposed to the inherited
ideal of right living of large numbers of people in any given
locality, especially in the United States with our large immigrant
population.
To have education so much a public concern seems to many to so
minimize the mother's share in it that she is placed in the same
general relation as the father to what was once her special duty.
Ideally, both parents are equally bound to decide all questions
concerning the formal education of their children within the limits of
personal choice made possible by the public provisions of which all
parents may now take advantage. In some favored families this really
occurs. Actually, however, in most families the mother has more
leisure to learn of possible opportunities, to influence possible
improvement, and, above all, to help to wise individual choice in the
use by the family of these socially provided educational facilities
than has the father. She is also now more likely to belong to
associations or clubs or classes for adult study in which educational
problems are discussed than is he, and often more intimately
acquainted with children's desires or needs in education.
=Women's Relation to Educational Agencies.=--A glance at the list of
national and local associations for the study and application of
educational science and art will show the vast majority of women over
men (in the United States at least) who are trying to find out what
real education in modern life should be and how to secure that best
training for their own children and for the children of all. The
educational obligation is, therefore, not taken from the average
mother's duty; it has changed its form only and often is the more
difficult to meet successfully because of the high specialization of
the teachers and the confusion of the school direction. No one would
claim that fathers, if loyal and worthy, are less anxious than mothers
for the trailing of their children toward successful living. The fact,
however, that most mothers stand nearest to the lives of the children
make them most often the necessary purveyors of educational
opportunities from the public provision to private use.
=The Social Value of Parental Affection.=--Below and within all other
gifts to humanity which have come by the way of motherhood's devotion
to child-life is that selective and partial affection which secures to
each child one adult person at least to whom he or she is supreme in
interest. Most normal women feel when they hear the cry of their own
new-born that all of life is justly tributary to that one priceless
creature who has come at their call out of the mystery of being to
travel the difficult road of the generations of mankind. Nor is this
inherited tendency toward partial affection a sign of undeveloped or
selfish quality in the woman of to-day. It is a provision of nature
still supremely useful in helping each tiny atom of the social whole
to find and keep its own place in a world of struggle and hardship.
The fear of defeat handicaps many a purpose before it is put to the
test. The sense of loneliness drives many to lower companionship when
higher is hard to attain. The lack of courage and the paralysis of
faith in one's self or in others makes invalid many a nature which
might otherwise achieve. To prevent such waste from inner weakness and
to "encourage excellence in each individual," to use Doctor Small's
fine phrase, we need a childhood saturated with the sense of personal
values on the plane of affection. Selfishness may indeed pollute this
mainspring of personal power, and selfishness sometimes reaches its
acme in motherhood's partiality for its own. The ideal of social
solidarity and the claim of all upon each one must never be absent
from the family influence if that influence is to be wholesome. The
family, however, exists to make a small spot in which there may be a
unity found nowhere else, and at the centre of the family life is
still the mother.
Says Schiller, "Knowledge and culture demand a blissful sky, much
careful nursing and a long number of springs." Who shall be able to
secure this for every son of man if no one stands at the door of young
life to make these the first demand upon time and strength and
devotion for every child in the interest of every child? "The
community" has been called "an endowment for human progress." Parental
love, so often supremely expressed by the mother, works still and in
any future in sight must work ever more devotedly and wisely to secure
for each child his rightful share in that endowment. The main business
of life is the carrying on of life, and in that business women were
drafted long ago for the heaviest end of service and with little
social permission to do their work by proxy. Many social helps in her
task now make possible leisure and opportunity for individual vocation
as never before. Her primal duty to the race remains, however, a debt
to be paid as a first obligation wherever and whenever a woman accepts
the august function of motherhood. And to-day the majority of most
successful families absorb in large measure the time and strength of
the housemother.
=What Women Need Most= is moral sanity and mental poise; the ability
to adjust themselves to radical and rapid changes in their
relationship to society without losing the finest and most useful
results of their past social discipline. Woman is acquiring a new
relationship to the home--that of mutual headship with man in the
social institution in which for ages she has been a legal subordinate.
Social welfare demands that she take into the new copartnership of
domestic life the old devotion to family interests. Woman is acquiring
a new relationship to the school--that of learner in the highest
educational opportunity and of teacher in an ever-widening area.
Social welfare demands that she take into the modern school her
ancient devotion to child-life.
The mass of women are acquiring a new relationship to the industrial
order--that of spenders instead of producers. Social welfare demands
that the modern woman put into her function of purchasing consumer of
staple products the same conscientious standardizing of those products
and the same sense of responsibility for the conditions surrounding
laborers which she displayed in the old handicraft days of domestic
industry. A minority of women are acquiring also a new relationship to
the industrial order in becoming the recipient of wages or salary,
instead of being paid for work as of old in "truck" or in "kind." The
feel of the pay envelope on her palm is an unaccustomed but a
delicious pleasure to the modern woman. Social welfare demands that
she be not beguiled thereby into complicity with industrial
exploitation of the weak and the poor, such as she would not have
tolerated in the old days of personal relationship in labor in
domestic handicraft.
Woman is acquiring a new relationship to recreation and the social
control of the customs ruling leisure hours. Social welfare demands
that gambling be not made fashionable in the drawing room as it is
being driven out of the business world; that dancing be not vulgarized
and the mother-tongue not corrupted, but that self-control, purity,
dignity, mark the "new woman" as it did her best ancestors. Woman is
acquiring a new relationship to the state--that of citizen with full
responsibility instead of her old perpetual minority under man's
control. Social welfare demands that she take into the body politic
the same devotion to the weak and undeveloped, the same patient, wise
dependence upon the spiritual elements of justice and wisdom which
have made her private motherhood so successful. She must not now, on
peril of a social setback, take up man's weapons of selfishness, of
violence, of impatient revolution--weapons the best of men have
already discarded.
Women should now be clear-sighted enough to see that the world needs
from them not the same but different contributions to the upreach and
onward march of the race from those elements in which man has
excelled. If society-at-large is to become truly a family of those who
love and serve each other, then human beings of the mother-sex must
take into public life and public service the best they have learned
and taught in the individual home. What women most need now is to
"retain all the good the past hath had" as they step forward to their
full liberty and responsibility in new relationships to life.
QUESTIONS ON THE MOTHER
1. What, in general, have been the social demands upon wives and
mothers, and how have these been met in the past?
2. What, if any, of these inherited social demands are now met by
social agencies outside of the private family?
3. What, in general, may be defined as the line of demarkation
between the private obligations resting still upon mothers for
personal service to family life and agencies of public
child-care and social standardization?
4. How far is a trend toward minimizing the demand for personal
service of the housemother in the private family to be
encouraged?
5. If a mother, in average financial condition, has the "three and
one-half children" eugenists demand of each family, and does
her duty by them in private family life, how much of her time
and strength must go into the housemother's service and for
what period of years?
6. What amount of time and strength might be left, in the case of
strong and competent women, for other vocational work?
7. Is the modern "nursery school" an adequate substitute for the
early home-training? (See report, "A Nursery School
Experiment," published by "Bureau of Educational Experiments,"
144 West Thirteenth Street, New York City.)
FOOTNOTES:
[3] (_a_) See, for example, "Conveniences for the Farm Home," Farmers'
Bulletin No. 270, and (_b_) "The Farm Kitchen as a Workshop," Farmers'
Bulletin No. 607.