Congress of Mothers
The Congress of Mothers likewise refuses to ignore a matter so vitally related to motherhood. This organization has for one of its chief aims the promotion of high ideals of marriage “and the maintenance of its sacredness and permanence.” Its attitude toward life is primarily religious, and the leaders believe that more religious education in the home is the crying need which will prevent immorality. The Congress of Mothers is active and successful in forming mothers’ circles, fathers’ circles, and parent-teacher associations for the purpose of discussing the needs of childhood and increasing the sense of responsibility among parents.
Such responsibility undoubtedly can be improved and needs to be improved. The social evil is not solved thereby, however, for economic conditions affect that responsibility in varying degrees. The mother who must work out of the home long hours, or the father who toils on a night-shift or for ten, twelve or fourteen hours a day has no time or strength to devote to children, however great the inclination.
Parents who have themselves grown up in a congested area, who have been overworked and underfed and surrounded from infancy with a vicious environment cannot be reached always with a religious or moral appeal and, even if they are, they cannot always persuade their children to forsake the attractions of the street and the saloon and the resort for a quiet evening of prayer at home with the father and mother. Many women accept the judgment and observation of Dr. Abraham Flexner that the social evil swallows up in greater proportion than any other “the unskilled daughters of the unskilled classes,” and they would therefore substitute for, or supplement, the instilling of moral precept, by industrial training, housing reform, regulation of hours and conditions of labor, control of recreational facilities, the minimum wage, mothers’ pensions and many other reforms.
In these articles of a social program, the Congress of Mothers would join forces part of the way. It is when suffragists insist on the need of political power for mothers that the forces separate, for the Congress of Mothers inclines to the individualist theory of causation and responsibility.
The value of the agitation carried on by the Congress of Mothers lies in its appeal to middle- and upper-class men and women who often lightly ignore their family duties and entrust the care of children to incompetent nurses or maids during their formative years. The organization of parent-teacher associations increases the knowledge of both of these important agencies in the molding of the child’s character and is of inestimable value in the sphere where it can be employed. Just as hospital work has to be supplemented by family treatment of an economic character, so this work has to be supplemented by social-economic work to cover larger sections of the community.
This wider social program is now on the horizon of all those women who supplement individualistic morality by social morality and attempt to understand the causes which operate on men and women in masses. Where the women have this larger vision, they are demanding to know the facts—the plain, unvarnished facts. They will not be put off by a “There, there, now,” or “The time is not propitious.” We see women everywhere backing movements for commissions to study the social evil in all its aspects, individual and social, and where such commissions are established we frequently find women serving on them or coöperating in the investigation.