With us, off whose tongues "the fathers," "forefathers," "ancestors" (hardly including ancestresses) and the like rolled so glibly, the "Pilgrim Fathers" were glorified long before the "Pilgrim Mothers," and hardly yet has the mother of the "father of his country" received the just remembrance and recognition belonging to her who bore so noble and so illustrious a son. By and by, however, it is to be hoped, we shall be free from the reproach cast upon us by Colonel Higginson, and wake up to the full consciousness that the great men of our land have had mothers, and proceed to re-write our biographical dictionaries and encyclopædias of life-history.
In Latin mater, as does mother with us, possessed a wide extent of meaning, "mother, parent, producer, nurse, preparer, cause, origin, source," etc. Mater omnium artium necessitas, "Necessity is the mother of invention," and similar phrases were in common use, as they are also in the languages of to-day. Connected with mater is materia, "matter,"—mother-stuff, perhaps,—and from it is derived matrimonium, which testifies concerning primitive Roman sociology, in which the mother-idea must have been prominent, something we cannot say of our word marriage, derived ultimately from the Latin mas, "a male."
Westermarck notes the Nicaraguans, Dyaks, Minahassers, Andaman Islanders, Pádam, Munda Kols, Santals, Moors of the Western Soudan, Tuaregs, Teda, among the more or less primitive peoples with whom woman is held in considerable respect, and sometimes, as among the Munda Kols, bears the proud title "mistress of the house" (166. 500, 501). As Havelock Ellis remarks, women have shown themselves the equals of men as rulers, and most beneficial results have flowed from their exercise of the great political wisdom, and adaptation to statecraft which seems to belong especially to the female sex. The household has been a training-school for women in the more extended spheres of human administrative society.
Alma Mater.
The college graduate fondly calls the institution from which he has obtained his degree Alma Mater, "nourishing, fostering, cherishing mother," and he is her alumnus (foster-child, nourished one). For long years the family of the benign and gracious mother, whose wisdom was lavished upon her children, consisted of sons alone, but now, with the advent of "sweeter manners, purer laws," daughters have come to her also, and the alumnae, "the sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair," share in the best gifts their parent can bestow. To Earth also, the term Alma Mater has been applied, and the great nourishing mother of all was indeed the first teacher of man, the first university of the race.
Alma, alumnus, alumna, are all derived from alo, "I nourish, support." From the radical al, following various trains of thought, have come: alesco, "I grow up"; coalesco, "I grow together"; adolesco, "I grow up,"—whence adolescent, etc.; obsolesco, "I wear out"; alimentum, "food"; alimonium, "support"; altor, altrix, "nourisher"; altus, "high, deep" (literally, "grown"); elementum, "first principle," etc. Connected With adolesco is adultus, whence our adult, with the radical of which the English word old (eld) is cognate. From the root al, "to grow, to make to grow, to nourish," spring also the Latin words prôles, "offspring," suboles, "offspring, sprout," indôles, "inborn or native quality."
"Mother's Son."
The familiar expression "every mother's son of us" finds kin in the Modern High German Muttersohn, Mutterkind, which, with the even more significant Muttermensch (human being), takes us back to the days of "mother-right." Rather different, however, is the idea called up by the corresponding Middle Low German modersone, which means "bastard, illegitimate child."
Lore of Motherhood
A synonym of Muttermensch is Mutterseele, for soul and man once meant pretty much, the same. The curious expression mutterseelenallein, "quite alone; alone by one's self," is given a peculiar interpretation by Lippert, who sees in it a relic of the burial of the dead (soul) beneath the hearth, threshold, or floor of the house; "wessen Mutter im Hause ruht, der kann daheim immer nur mit seiner Mutterseele selbander allein sein." Or, perhaps, it goes back to the time when, as with the Seminoles of Florida, the babe was held over the mouth of the mother, whose death resulted from its birth, in order that her departing spirit might enter the new being.