INTRODUCTION
“Seventy-five per cent. of the women of America are married, and most of these have children.” It is not conceivable that women entering into any other vocation of life would think of undertaking it without deliberate preparation. Motherhood is so precious and wonderful that we fear to think of it in terms of definite preparedness. We like to think that it comes natural to be good mothers and that to study in preparation for it or to analyze it might produce more harm than good.
Let me use my own case as an illustration of how ill-prepared even earnest women are for motherhood. I was married twenty-nine years ago. I wanted children with all my heart. My first baby came sixteen months after I was married. I bought all the literature I could find on my new occupation, kindergarten books beginning with Froebel and ending with Susan Blow and her contemporaries; I studied Spencer’s Education, William James’ chapters on habit and attention, and read biographies of great people. My first ambition was to be a good mother, and I was eager to learn all I could about it. My college studies for five years were Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics, with an occasional semester of botany, evidences of Christianity, physics, etc. I do not remember hearing a reference to motherhood during my college experience.
I have had six children, four of whom are living. Had I had the knowledge I now have, or know how to get, it seems that the little seven-months-old boy could have been saved. I was called a scientific mother, my babies were fed regularly, put to bed regularly, and were dressed as sensibly as babies are now, but at that time we did not have the knowledge about the physical care of babies which we now have. What I object to is the amount of time I had to give when my children were little to learn things which I ought to have known before motherhood came to me, so that I could have been free to give myself to them. I knew “education through play” only as a figure of speech. Last summer I took a year-old baby to camp. I had the care of her three consecutive months, and was responsible for her six months. I yielded to the impulse to play with her, and in gratifying this instinct I used all the store of knowledge which experience had brought to me. It was evident that she was learning things every day, and that progress was astonishingly rapid. Most of the things I taught her were taught by the use of signs and objects. I asked her if she wanted to come to me by holding out my hands to her. She understood, and soon asked me to take her by holding out her hands to me. I asked her where her eyes were, her mouth, nose, ears, by touching each in turn. She understood and touched each in turn. It was interesting to note when it was no longer necessary to use the sign, when she understood spoken language without the aid of gesture.
The phrase that “education begins at the cradle” took on a new significance. I felt that I was a teacher as well as a mother and the importance of my part in the education of this baby opened up amazingly. It was play, but it was also education. Those minutes with her when no one was near, when we were all in all to each other, were precious beyond words. Through this love-relation there was intense joy in both learning and teaching. The reason the mother’s part in education is incomparable to any other is because of this love-relation.
We are told that during the first five years of life more is learned than during all the rest of life. The teachers during these years are primarily the mothers. The mother-teacher relation goes on after school days begin, but gradually is regarded less important, and the teacher’s part grows. Mother is forgotten as a teacher. She loses confidence in herself and forgets that no one can take her place.
It does not seem to me that any woman could have more earnestly desired and striven to be a good mother. I studied and worked as hard as I could, but it was not possible for me to secure the training that girls can get to-day. It now seems to me that it is about as rational for a woman to learn by experience with her own children to be a good mother, as it would be for a doctor to get his education merely by practising on his patients. Motherhood offers no less opportunities for success than do the professions of law or medicine. The preparation for it is just as definite and is more important. It has remained for Mary L. Read, with splendid devotion and university training, to put these matters together and to organize and conduct a “School for Mothercraft.”
The time is coming when women will no more go into physical and spiritual motherhood unprepared, trusting to “mother instinct”, than they will go into law or medicine, trusting to their sense of right and of sympathy with the sick to guide them.
CHARLOTTE V. GULICK.