In reconstructing in our minds the position of woman under conditions of
economic independence, it is most difficult to think of her as a mother.
We are so unbrokenly accustomed to the old methods of motherhood, so
convinced that all its processes are inter-relative and indispensable,
and that to alter one of them is to endanger the whole relation, that we
cannot conceive of any desirable change.
When definite plans for such change are suggested,—ways in which babies
might be better cared for than at present,—we either deny the advantages
of the change proposed or insist that these advantages can be reached
under our present system. Just as in cooking we seek to train the
private cook and to exalt and purify the private taste, so in
baby-culture we seek to train the individual mother, and to call for
better conditions in the private home; in both cases ignoring the
relation between our general system and its particular phenomena. Though
it may be shown, with clearness, that in physical conditions the private
house, as a place in which to raise children, may be improved upon, yet
all the more stoutly do we protest that the mental life, the emotional
life, of the home is the best possible environment for the young.
There was a time in human history when this was true. While progress
derived its main impetus from the sex-passion, and the highest emotions
were those that held us together in the family relation, such education
and such surroundings as fostered and intensified these emotions were
naturally the best. But in the stage into which we are now growing, when
the family relation is only a part of life, and our highest duties lie
between individuals in social relation, the child has new needs.
This does not mean, as the scared rush of the unreasoning mind to an
immediate opposite would suggest, a disruption of the family circle or
the destruction of the home. It does not mean the separation of mother
and child,—that instant dread of the crude instinct of animal maternity.
But it does mean a change of basis in the family relation by the removal
of its previous economic foundation, and a change of method in our
child-culture. We are no more bound to maintain forever our early
methods in baby-raising than we are bound to maintain them in the
education of older children, or in floriculture. All human life is in
its very nature open to improvement, and motherhood is not excepted. The
relation between men and women, between husband and wife, between parent
and child, changes inevitably with social advance; but we are loath to
admit it. We think a change here must be wrong, because we are so
convinced that the present condition is right.
On examination, however, we find that the existing relation between
parents and children in the home is by no means what we unquestioningly
assume. We all hold certain ideals of home life, of family life. When we
see around us, or read of, scores and hundreds of cases of family
unhappiness and open revolt, we lay it to the individual misbehavior of
the parties concerned, and go on implicitly believing in the intrinsic
perfection of the institution. When, on the other hand, we find people
living together in this relation, in peace and love and courtesy, we do
not conversely attribute this to individual superiority and virtue; but
we point to it as instancing the innate beauty of the relation.
To the careful sociological observer what really appears is this: when
individual and racial progress was best served by the close associations
of family life, people were very largely developed in capacity for
family affection. They were insensitive to the essential limitations and
incessant friction of the relation. They assented to the absolute
authority of the head of the family and to the minor despotism of lower
functionaries, manifesting none of those sharply defined individual
characteristics which are so inimical to the family relation.
But we have reached a stage where individual and racial progress is best
served by the higher specialization of individuals and by a far wider
sense of love and duty. This change renders the psychic condition of
home life increasingly disadvantageous. We constantly hear of the
inferior manners of the children of to-day, of the restlessness of the
young, of the flat treason of deserting parents. It is visibly not so
easy to live at home as it used to be. Our children are not more
perversely constituted than the children of earlier ages, but the
conditions in which they are reared are not suited to develope the
qualities now needed in human beings.
This increasing friction between members of families should not be
viewed with condemnation from a moral point of view, but studied with
scientific interest. If our families are so relatively uncomfortable
under present conditions, are there not conditions wherein the same
families could be far more comfortable? No: we are afraid not. We think
it is right to have things as they are, wrong to wish to change them. We
think that virtue lies largely in being uncomfortable, and that there is
special virtue in the existing family relation.
Virtue is a relative term. Human virtues change from age to age with the
change in conditions. Consider the great virtue of loyalty,—our highest
name for duty. This is a quality that became valuable in human life the
moment we began to do things which were not instantly and visibly
profitable to ourselves. The permanent application of the individual to
a task not directly attractive was an indispensable social quality, and
therefore a virtue. Steadfastness, faithfulness, loyalty, duty, that
conscious, voluntary attitude of the individual which holds him to a
previously assumed relation, even to his extreme personal injury,—to
death itself,—from this results the cohesion of the social body: it is a
first principle of social existence.
To the personal conscience a social necessity must express itself in a
recognized and accepted pressure,—a force to which we bow, a duty, a
virtue. So the virtue of loyalty came into early and lasting esteem,
whether in the form of loyalty to one’s own spoken word or vow—“He that
sweareth to his hurt, and doeth it”—to a friend or group of friends in
temporary union for some common purpose, or to a larger and more
permanent relation. The highest form is, of course, loyalty to the
largest common interest; and here we can plainly trace the growth of
this quality.
First, we see it in the vague, nebulous, coherence of the horde of
savages, then in the tense devotion of families,—that absolute duty to
the highest known social group. It was in this period that obedience to
parents was writ so large in our scale of virtues. The family feud, the
_vendetta_ of the Corsicans, is an over-development of this force of
family devotion. Next came loyalty to the chief, passing even that due
the father. And with the king—that dramatic personification of a nation,
“Lo! royal England comes!”—loyalty became a very passion. It took
precedence of every virtue, with good reason; for it was not, as was
supposed, the person of the king which was so revered: it was the
embodied nation, the far-reaching, collective interests of every
citizen, the common good, which called for the willing sacrifice of
every individual. We still exhibit all these phases of loyalty, in
differently diminishing degrees; but we show, also, a larger form of
this great virtue peculiar to our age.
The lines of social relation to-day are mainly industrial. Our
individual lives, our social peace and progress, depend more upon our
economic relations than upon any other. For a long time society was
organized only on a sex-basis, a religious basis, or a military basis,
each of such organizations being comparatively transient; and its
component individuals labored alone on an economic basis of helpless
individualism.
Duty is a social sense, and developes only with social organization. As
our civil organization has become national, we have developed the sense
of duty to the State. As our industrial organization has grown to the
world-encircling intricacies of to-day, as we have come to hold our
place on earth by reason of our vast and elaborate economic relation
with its throbbing and sensitive machinery of communication and
universal interservice, the unerring response of the soul to social
needs has given us a new kind of loyalty,—loyalty to our work. The
engineer who sticks to his engine till he dies, that his trainload of
passengers may live; the cashier who submits to torture rather than
disclose the secret of the safe,—these are loyal exactly as was the
servitor of feudal times, who followed his master to the death, or the
subject who gave up all for his king. Professional honor, duty to one’s
employers, duty to the work itself, at any cost,—this is loyalty,
faithfulness, the power to stay put in a relation necessary to the
social good, though it may be directly against personal interest.
It is in the training of children for this stage of human life that the
private home has ceased to be sufficient, or the isolated, primitive,
dependent woman capable. Not that the mother does not have an intense
and overpowering sense of loyalty and of duty; but it is duty to
individuals, just as it was in the year one. What she is unable to
follow, in her enforced industrial restriction, is the higher
specialization of labor, and the honorable devotion of human lives to
the development of their work. She is most slavishly bound to her daily
duty, it is true; but it does not occur to her as a duty to raise the
grade of her own labor for the sake of humanity, nor as a sin so to keep
back the progress of the world by her contented immobility.
She cannot teach what she does not know. She cannot in any sincerity
uphold as a duty what she does not practise. The child learns more of
the virtues needed in modern life—of fairness, of justice, of
comradeship, of collective interest and action—in a common school than
can be taught in the most perfect family circle. We may preach to our
children as we will of the great duty of loving and serving one’s
neighbor; but what the baby is born into, what the child grows up to see
and feel, is the concentration of one entire life—his mother’s—upon the
personal aggrandizement of one family, and the human service of another
entire life—his father’s—so warped and strained by the necessity of
“supporting his family” that treason to society is the common price of
comfort in the home. For a man to do any base, false work for which he
is hired, work that injures producer and consumer alike; to prostitute
what power and talent he possesses to whatever purchaser may use
them,—this is justified among men by what they call duty to the family,
and is unblamed by the moral sense of dependent women.
And this is the atmosphere in which the wholly home-bred, mother-taught
child grows up. Why should not food and clothes and the comforts of his
own people stand first in his young mind? Does he not see his mother,
the all-loved, all-perfect one, peacefully spending her days in the
arrangement of these things which his father’s ceaseless labor has
procured? Why should he not grow up to care for his own, to the neglect
and willing injury of all the rest, when his earliest, deepest
impressions are formed under such exclusive devotion?
It is not the home as a place of family life and love that injures the
child, but as the centre of a tangled heap of industries, low in their
ungraded condition, and lower still because they are wholly personal.
Work the object of which is merely to serve one’s self is the lowest.
Work the object of which is merely to serve one’s family is the next
lowest. Work the object of which is to serve more and more people, in
widening range, till it approximates the divine spirit that cares for
all the world, is social service in the fullest sense, and the highest
form of service that we can reach.
It is this personality in home industry that keeps it hopelessly down.
The short range between effort and attainment, the constant attention
given to personal needs, is bad for the man, worse for the woman, and
worst for the child. It belittles his impressions of life at the start.
It accustoms him to magnify the personal duties and minify the social
ones, and it greatly retards his adjustment to larger life. This
servant-motherhood, with all its unavoidable limitation and ill results,
is the concomitant of the economic dependence of woman upon man, the
direct and inevitable effect of the sexuo-economic relation.
The child is affected by it during his most impressionable years, and
feels the effect throughout life. The woman is permanently retarded by
it; the man, less so, because of his normal social activities, wherein
he is under more developing influence. But he is injured in great
degree, and our whole civilization is checked and perverted.
We suffer also, our lives long, from an intense self-consciousness, from
a sensitiveness beyond all need; we demand measureless personal
attention and devotion, because we have been born and reared in a very
hotbed of these qualities. A baby who spent certain hours of every day
among other babies, being cared for because he was a baby, and not
because he was “my baby,” would grow to have a very different opinion of
himself from that which is forced upon each new soul that comes among us
by the ceaseless adoration of his own immediate family. What he needs to
learn at once and for all, to learn softly and easily, but inexorably,
is that he is one of many. We all dimly recognize this in our praise of
large families, and in our saying that “an only child is apt to be
selfish.” So is an only family. The earlier and more easily a child can
learn that human life means many people, and their behavior to one
another, the happier and stronger and more useful his life will be.
This could be taught him with no difficulty whatever, under certain
conditions, just as he is taught his present sensitiveness and egotism
by the present conditions. It is not only temperature and diet and rest
and exercise which affect the baby. “He does love to be noticed,” we
say. “He is never so happy as when he has a dozen worshippers around
him.” But what is the young soul learning all the while? What does he
gather, as he sees and hears and slowly absorbs impressions? With the
inflexible inferences of a clear, young brain, unsupplied with any
counter-evidence until later in life, he learns that women are meant to
wait on people, to get dinner, and sweep and pick up things; that men
are made to bring home things, and are to be begged of according to
circumstances; that babies are the object of concentrated admiration;
that their hair, hands, feet, are specially attractive; that they are
the heated focus of attention, to be passed from hand to hand, swung and
danced and amused most violently, and also be laid aside and have
nothing done to them, with no regard to their preference in either case.
And then, in the midst of all this tingling self-consciousness and
desire for loving praise, he learns that he is “naughty”! The grief, the
shame, the anger at injustice, the hopeless bewilderment, the morbid
sensitiveness of conscience or the stolid dulling of it, the gradual
retirement of the baffled brain from all these premature sensations to a
contentment with mere personal gratification and a growing ingenuity in
obtaining it,—all these experiences are the common lot of the child
among us, our common lot when we were children. Of course, we don’t
remember. Of course, we loved our mother, and thought her perfect.
Comparisons among mothers are difficult for a baby. Of course, we loved
our homes, and never dreamed of any other way of being “brought up.”
And, of course, when we have children of our own, we bring them up in
the same way. What other way is there? What is there to be said on the
subject? Children always were brought up at home. Isn’t that enough?
And yet, insidiously, slowly, irresistibly, while we flatter ourselves
that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from
year to year, from day to day. Education, hiding itself behind a wall of
books, but consisting more and more fully in the grouping of children
and in the training of faculties never mentioned in the
curriculum,—education, which is our human motherhood, has crept nearer
and nearer to its true place, its best work,—the care and training of
the little child. Some women there are, and some men, whose highest
service to humanity is the care of children. Such should not concentrate
their powers upon their own children alone,—a most questionable
advantage,—but should be so placed that their talent and skill, their
knowledge and experience, would benefit the largest number of children.
Many women there are, and many men, who, though able to bring forth fine
children, are unable to educate them properly. Simply to bear children
is a personal matter,—an animal function. Education is collective,
human, a social function.
As we now arrange life, our children must take their chances while
babies, and live or die, improve or deteriorate, according to the mother
to whom they chance to be born. An inefficient mother does not prevent a
child from having a good school education or a good college education;
but the education of babyhood, the most important of all, is wholly in
her hands. It is futile to say that mothers should be taught how to
fulfil their duties. You cannot teach every mother to be a good school
educator or a good college educator. Why should you expect every mother
to be a good nursery educator? Whatever our expectations, she is not;
and our mistrained babies, such of them as survive the maternal
handling, grow to be such people as we see about us.
The growth and change in home and family life goes steadily on under and
over and through our prejudices and convictions; and the education of
the child has changed and become a social function, while we still
imagine the mother to be doing it all.
In its earliest and most rudimentary manifestations, education was but
part of the individual maternal function of the female animal. But no
sooner did the human mind begin to show capacity for giving and
receiving its impressions through language (thus attaining the power of
acquiring information through sources other than its own experience)
than the individual mother ceased to be the sole educator. The young
savage receives not only guidance from his anxious mother, but from the
chiefs and elders of his tribe. For a long time the aged were considered
the only suitable teachers, because the major part of knowledge was
still derived from personal experience; and, of course, the older the
person, the greater his experience, other things being equal, and they
were rather equal then. This primitive notion still holds among us.
People still assume superior wisdom because of superior age, putting
mere number of experiences against a more essential and better arranged
variety, and quite forgetting that the needed wisdom of to-day is not
the accumulation of facts, but the power to think about them to some
purpose.
With our increased power to preserve and transmit individual experience
through literature, and to disseminate such information through
systematic education, we see younger and younger people, more rich in,
say, chemical or electrical experience than “the oldest inhabitant”
could have been in earlier times. Therefore, the teacher of to-day is
not the graybeard and beldame, but the man and woman most newly filled
with the gathered experience of the world. As this change from age to
youth has taken place in the teacher, it has also shown itself in the
taught. Grown men frequented the academic groves of Greece. Youths
filled the universities of the Middle Ages. Boys and, later, girls were
given the increasing school advantages of progressive centuries.
To-day the beautiful development of the kindergarten has brought
education to the nursery door. Even our purblind motherhood is beginning
to open that door; and we have at last entered upon the study of
babyhood, its needs and powers, and are seeing that education begins
with life itself. It is no new and daring heresy to suggest that babies
need better education than the individual mother now gives them. It is
simply a little further extension of the steadily expanding system of
human education which is coming upon us, as civilization grows. And it
no more infringes upon the mother’s rights, the mother’s duties, the
mother’s pleasures, than does the college or the school.
We think no harm of motherhood because our darlings go out each day to
spend long hours in school. The mother is not held neglectful, nor the
child bereft. It is not called a “separation of mother and child.” There
would be no further harm or risk or loss in a babyhood passed among such
changed surroundings and skilled service as should meet its needs more
perfectly than it is possible for the mother to meet them alone at home.
Better surroundings and care for babies, better education, do not mean,
as some mothers may imagine, that the tiny monthling is to be taught to
read, or even that it is to be exposed to cabalistical arrangements of
color and form and sound which shall mysteriously force the young
intelligence to flower. It would mean, mainly, a far quieter and more
peaceful life than is possible for the heavily loved and violently cared
for baby in the busy household; and the impressions which it did meet
would be planned and maintained with an intelligent appreciation of its
mental powers. The mother would not be excluded, but supplemented, as
she is now, by the teacher and the school.
Try and imagine for yourself, if you like, a new kind of coming
alive,—the mother breast and mother arms there, of course, fulfilling
the service which no other, however tender, could supervene; but there
would be other service also. The long, bright hours of the still
widening days would find one in sunny, soft-colored rooms, or among the
grass and flowers, or by the warm sand and waters. There would be about
one more of one’s self, others of the same size and age, in restful,
helpful companionship. A year means an enormous difference in the ages
of babies. Think what a passion little children have for playmates of
exactly their own age, because in them alone is perfect equality; and
then think that the home-kept baby never has such companionship, unless,
indeed, there are twins!
In this larger grouping, in full companionship, the child would
unconsciously absorb the knowledge that “we” were humanity, that “we”
were creatures to be so fed, so watched, so laid to sleep, so kissed and
cuddled and set free to roll and play. The mother-hours would be
sweetest of all, perhaps. Here would be something wholly one’s own, and
the better appreciated for the contrast. But the long, steady days would
bring their peaceful lessons of equality and common interest instead of
the feverish personality of the isolated one-baby household, or the
innumerable tyrannies and exactions, the forced submissions and
exclusions, of the nursery full of brothers and sisters of widely
differing ages and powers. Mothers accustomed to consider many babies
besides their own would begin, on the one hand, to learn something of
mere general babyness, and so understand that stage of life far better,
and, on the other, to outgrow the pathetic idolatry of the fabled
crow,—to recognize a difference in babies, and so to learn a new ideal
in their great work of motherhood.
This alone is reason good for a wider maternity. As long as each mother
dotes and gloats upon her own children, knowing no others, so long this
animal passion overestimates or underestimates real human qualities in
the child. So long as this endures, we must grow up with the false,
unbalanced opinion of ourselves forced upon us in our infancy. We may
think too well of ourselves or we may think too ill of ourselves; but we
think always too much of ourselves, because of this untrained and
unmodified concentration of maternal feeling. Our whole attitude toward
the child is too intensely personal. Through all our aching later life
we labor to outgrow the false perspective taught by primitive
motherhood.
A baby, brought up with other babies, would never have that labor or
that pain. However much his mother might love him, and he might enjoy
her love, he would still find that for most of the time he was treated
precisely like other people of the same age. Such a change would not
involve any greater loss to home and family life than does the school or
kindergarten. It would not rob the baby of his mother nor the mother of
her baby. And such a change would give the mother certain free hours as
a human being, as a member of a civilized community, as an economic
producer, as a growing, self-realizing individual. This freedom, growth,
and power will make her a wiser, stronger, and nobler mother.
After all is said of loving gratitude to our unfailing mother-nurse, we
must have a most exalted sense of our own personal importance so to
canonize the service of ourselves. The mother as a social servant
instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. She will
love her child as well, perhaps better, when she is not in hourly
contact with it, when she goes from its life to her own life, and back
from her own life to its life, with ever new delight and power. She can
keep the deep, thrilling joy of motherhood far fresher in her heart, far
more vivid and open in voice and eyes and tender hands, when the hours
of individual work give her mind another channel for her own part of the
day. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to
the home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure,
cleansed of all the fret and friction and weariness that so mar it now.
The child, also, will feel this beneficent effect. It is a mistake to
suppose that the baby, more than the older child, needs the direct care
and presence of the mother. Careful experiment has shown that a new-born
baby does not know its own mother, and that a new-made mother does not
know her own baby. They have been changed without the faintest
recognition on either side.
The services of a foster-mother, a nurse, a grandma, are often liked by
a baby as well as, and perhaps better than, those of its own mother. The
mere bodily care of a young infant is as well given by one wise, loving
hand as another. It is that trained hand that the baby needs, not mere
blood-relationship. While the mother keeps her beautiful prerogative of
nursing, she need never fear that any other will be dearer to the little
heart than she who is the blessed provider of his highest known good. A
healthy, happy, rightly occupied motherhood should be able to keep up
this function longer than is now customary,—to the child’s great gain.
Aside from this special relationship, however, the baby would grow
easily into the sense of other and wider relationship.
In the freedom and peace of his baby bedroom and baby parlor, in his
easy association with others of his own age, he would absorb a sense of
right human relation with his mother’s milk, as it were,—a sense of
others’ rights and of his own. Instead of finding life a place in which
all the fun was in being carried round and “done to” by others, and a
place also in which these others were a tyranny and a weariness
unutterable; he would find life a place in which to spread out,
unhindered, getting acquainted with his own unfolding powers of body and
mind in an atmosphere of physical warmth and ease and of quiet peace of
mind.
Direct, concentrated, unvarying personal love is too hot an atmosphere
for a young soul. Variations of loneliness, anger, and injustice, are
not changes to be desired. A steady, diffused love, lighted with wisdom,
based always on justice, and varied with rapturous draughts of our own
mother’s depth of devotion, would make us into a new people in a few
generations. The bent and reach of our whole lives are largely modified
by the surroundings of infancy; and those surroundings are capable of
betterment, though not to be attained by the individual mother in the
individual home.
There are three reasons why the individual mother can never be fit to
take all the care of her children. The first two are so commonly true as
to have much weight, the last so absolutely and finally true as to be
sufficient in itself alone.
First, not every woman is born with the special qualities and powers
needed to take right care of children: she has not the talent for it.
Second, not every woman can have the instruction and training needed to
fit her for the right care of children: she has not the education for
it. Third, while each woman takes all the care of her own children
herself, no woman can ever have the requisite experience for it. That is
the final bar. That is what keeps back our human motherhood. No mother
knows more than her mother knew: no mother has ever learned her
business; and our children pass under the well-meaning experiments of an
endless succession of amateurs.
We try to get “an experienced nurse.” We insist on “an experienced
physician.” But our idea of an experienced mother is simply one who has
borne many children, as if parturition was an educative process!
To experience the pangs of child-birth, or the further pangs of a baby’s
funeral, adds nothing whatever to the mother’s knowledge of the proper
care, clothing, feeding, and teaching of the child. The educative
department of maternity is not a personal function: it is in its very
nature a social function; and we fail grievously in its fulfilment.
The economically independent mother, widened and freed, strengthened and
developed, by her social service, will do better service as mother than
it has been possible to her before. No one thing could do more to
advance the interests of humanity than the wiser care and wider love of
organized human motherhood around our babies. This nobler mother,
bearing nobler children, and rearing them in nobler ways, would go far
toward making possible the world which we want to see. And this change
is coming upon us overpoweringly in spite of our foolish fears.