WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD

I always groan in spirit when any advocate of woman suffrage, carried away by zeal, says anything disrespectful about the nursery.  It is contrary to the general tone of feeling among reformers, I am sure, to speak of this priceless institution as a trivial or degrading sphere, unworthy the emancipated woman.  It is rarely that anybody speaks in this way; but a single such utterance hinders progress more than any arguments of the enemy.  For every thoughtful person sees that the cares of motherhood, though not the whole duty of woman, are an essential part of that duty, wherever they occur; and that no theory of womanly life is good for anything which undertakes to leave out the cradle.  Even her school education is based on this fact, were it only on Stendhal’s theory that the sons of a woman who reads Gibbon and Schiller will be more likely to show talent than those of one who only tells her beads and reads Mme. de Genlis.  And so clearly is this understood among us, that, when we ask for suffrage for woman, it is almost always claimed that she needs it for the sake of her children.  To secure her in her right to them; to give her a voice in their education; to give her a vote in the government beneath which they are to live,—­these points are seldom omitted in our statement of her claims.  Anything else would be an error.

But there is an error at the other extreme, which is still greater.  A woman should no more merge herself in her child than in her husband.  Yet we often hear that she should do just this.  What is all the public sphere of woman, it is said,—­what good can she do by all her speaking and writing and action,—­compared with that she does by properly training the soul of one child?  It is not easy to see the logic of this claim.

For what service is that child to render in the universe, except that he, too, may write and speak and act for that which is good and true?  And if the mother foregoes all this that the child, in growing up, may simply do what the mother has left undone, the world gains nothing.  In sacrificing her own work to her child’s, moreover, she exchanges a present good for a prospective and merely possible one.  If she does this through overwhelming love, we can hardly blame her; but she cannot justify it before reason and truth.  Her child may die, and the service to mankind be done by neither.  Her child may grow up with talents unlike hers, or with none at all; as the son of Howard was selfish, the son of Chesterfield a boor, and the son of Wordsworth in the last degree prosaic.

Or the special occasion when she might have done great good may have passed before her boy or girl grows up to do it.  If Mrs. Child had refused to write “An Appeal for that Class of Americans called Africans,” or Mrs. Stowe had laid aside “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or Florence Nightingale had declined to go to the Crimea, on the ground that a woman’s true work was through the nursery, and they must all wait for that, the consequence would be that these things would have remained undone.  The brave acts of the world must be performed when occasion offers, by the first brave soul who feels moved to do them, man or woman.