In the following pages it is my wish to impress on women the grave
truth, than which none can have more importance, that with them, with
the mother, rests the greater power to mould for good or ill, for power
or weakness, for beauty or deformity, the characters of her unborn
children, and that with power comes the responsibility for its use.
Laying down a few self-evident propositions I shall illustrate the
same by facts which have come under my own immediate notice during a
period of nearly forty years, simply changing in each case the names of
persons and locality.
The subject is by no means a new or original one. The principles
involved are found scattered throughout all the journals which
embody modern thought, and even find their way, accompanied by much
contradiction, into our lighter literature. Yet it is certainly not
universally understood that on the mother’s state of mind and body
during pregnancy depend such vital interests. The shadow thrown on the
subject by false modesty keeps the masses in ignorance and arrests the
upward progress of the race.
The mother’s office was, and is yet, by the majority held to be a
secondary one and comparatively unimportant. “She merely nourishes the
germ given by the father” is the common supposition. What singular
infatuation is this when anatomy shows that the ova or eggs exist in
the mother, and that the material supplied by the father vivifies them!
In ancient, as well as modern, times it was admitted that during
the period of gestation the mother was keenly sensitive to hideous
impressions, and was through this equal to the production of deformity
and monstrosity. It seems strange that the converse of this did not
suggest itself, so that her sensibility could have been tested for the
creation of beauty and symmetry.
It was also seen that the pregnant woman could affect the temper, the
disposition of her child by yielding to angry emotions, but she was not
credited with the ability to convey a serenity and sweetness of nature
surpassing her own.
Through all the dark ages that have preceded us, woman has known
herself a slave with less questioning as to the rightfulness of the
position awarded her by man than she is sensible of to-day. This was
the inevitable order of development for primitive man. That the unjust
domination continues is but another proof of how unwillingly usurped
power is relinquished.
The slave woman respects her master, not herself. The children she has
borne have been the children of their father, not of their mother.
Darwin declares that “qualities induced by circumstances inhere in that
sex on which the circumstances operated,” passing by the opposite sex
born of the same mothers. Thus women have given birth to independent
sons and subservient daughters.
In civilized lands it is now almost universally admitted that
conditions produce a race. The included truth that conditions, governed
by invariable law, produce each individual of that race is scarcely
recognized by the most enlightened, so deeply seated in the minds of
men is the belief in woman’s inferiority and unimportance in the realm
of causes.
“MY children will represent ME,” is the unexpressed thought of nearly
every father until the baseless assumption is slowly dispelled by the
irresponsible mediocre children before him. Men, and women too, are
astonished and perplexed when the superficial, but pleasing young wife
of the man of genius proves the mother of dull boys and girls without
possibilities. Still more incomprehensible to them is the mysterious
Providence which has awarded the vicious or deficient child to the
excellent and sensible couple, and presented the lazy and disorderly
one with a delicate saint, or an inventor. When the education, the
training, had been exactly alike for all the children, why did the
second or the sixth o’ertop the others in talent, high ambition,
nobler presence? If the exceptional child were dull, the mother was
held measurably responsible; if it were brilliant and beautiful, the
qualities were traced back to some great-grandfather or grand-aunt of
the father’s.
At length, if almost unwillingly, we have found the right track. In the
early part of this century it began slowly to dawn on the minds of the
most enlightened men that women were in a truer sense the mothers of
the race than had been previously supposed, and through the influence
of these pioneers in the world of ideas, woman begins to realize her
great maternal power. With this knowledge, and the higher education now
offered her in the schools, her character will broaden, her thoughts
enlarge. Subserviency, personal gossip, and paltry rivalries will no
more belong to her than to her brother. Courage and sincerity will
belong to both, equally with purity and gentleness may we hope.