THE MOTHER MUST BE “AMERICANIZED”
The mother is the keystone of the home. Some way must be found to take her into the American life. The citizenship which she gains willy-nilly through the naturalization of her husband, even after she has lived here for ten years, bears no necessary relation to her life or character. As Mr. Crist in the Naturalization Bureau’s report for 1919 implies, she is confined within the four walls of her home, chained to her household routine; and nothing in the ritual or system of naturalization calls upon her to be American in any respect.
The position, reactions, and influences of the foreign-born woman in American social life—any aspect of it, domestic, industrial, political—cannot be intelligently understood or discussed unless and until we cease to think of her as in any sense a peculiar animal, or even a human being different in any fundamental way from other human beings. She lived her life in the old country, grew up from childhood, married, came to this country, bore her children here or before she came here, conducts her home, and participates or fails to participate in all the activities of life, under exactly the same kind of motives and impulses, and with essentially the same kind of results, as would be the case with an American woman with the same antecedents, education, resources, in the same circumstances.
She has, however, an additional handicap, and it is of the utmost importance to bear this handicap in mind in the consideration not only of her place in the general problem of the assimilation of the foreign-born population, but of her possibilities and influence as a potential voter, helping to decide by her ballot the great questions which in America are supposed to be settled at the ballot box.
Consider the native-born woman, of the old stock, as she has actually functioned in the widening field of political activity opening to her with the spread of woman suffrage. It is no wonder, but it is true, that the mass of women thus enfranchised have shown the results of the long-standing belief that “the place of woman is in the home.” She has had no reason for learning, and little opportunity to learn, the things pertaining to political life; she has not understood its problems, grasped the significance of its slogans, or brought her mind to bear upon its significances.
Slowly, very slowly, there has grown up a group, larger and larger in numbers, but still very small in proportion, active and intelligent in the movement for enfranchisement, developing rapidly—perhaps even more rapidly than would have been the case with men—in the intellectual grasp of the subjects involved. But the mass of the American-born, English-speaking women of the country have remained what they were before—devoted mothers, quiet, homekeeping housewives, not only content to leave these matters to their husbands and sons, but more or less bored by “politics” and on the whole somewhat resentful toward the effort to enlist them in the turmoil. A large proportion of them have been, in fact, relatively oblivious to the whole business.