"Does your child walk better if you make his shoes for him?" I asked.
It is a pretty sentiment that the mother's love in some mysterious way makes all she does for the child superior to what another could do. But apply the test of fact. Can she, with all her love, make as good a shoe as the shoemaker? as good a hair-brush, tooth-brush, tumbler, teacup, pie-plate, spoon, fork, or knife, as the professional manufacturers of these things? Does mother-love teach her to be a good barber? Can she cut her darling's hair so as to make him happy? Can she make a good chair or table or book or window? How silly it is to imagine that this "personality" inserted between the sheets makes the bed more conducive to healthy sleep than any other clean, well-aired, well-made bed!
Let the mother put the child to bed by all means, if she wishes. In the last sweet words and the good-night kiss is truly the place for personality. That is a mother's place, and not a tradesman's. But there is no more need for maternal personality between the sheets of a bed than between the leaves of a book or the bricks of a wall.
In our narrow-mindedness we have assumed that to care for any other children would mean to neglect our own. As if the human heart, the mother-heart, could love but one or six, and not more! As a matter of fact, we neglect our own by not caring for others. That is, we fail to take those general measures for the protection and development of all children which would so greatly benefit our particular children. Only to-day, at last, we see in some few advanced communities the mothers' club and congress, the women's civic associations, and other forms of union for the improvement of social conditions, all helping to enlarge the application of mother-love, and set that great force free to bring on the better day for children. These clubs and societies are jeered at by the majority of mothers, who proudly say that they are too busy taking care of their children to go to a mothers' congress and learn how.
Imagine, again, a majority of men, each saying he was too busy teaching his children to go to a school meeting and plan for the education of them all! It is not a shifting of duty that is required,—to cease to take care of one's own in order to take care of others instead. So ingrained are our primitive habits, so unable are we to conceive of anything but the one-woman method, that our only idea of change is a simple exchange of responsibility. It is not exchanging that is needed, but an enlarging, an embracing of the less in the greater.
The mothers of the world are responsible for the children of the world; the mothers of a nation, for the children of a nation; the mothers of a city, for the children of a city. We may ignore and deny this claim; but it is there none the less, and, because we do not do our duty as social parents, a corrupt society injures our children continually. The diseases of other children infect ours. What have the mothers ever done to prevent these diseases? They nurse their own sick little ones religiously, and bury them with tears; but what do they do before or after to learn the cause and prevention of these "family afflictions," to spread their information, and enforce measures to put a stop to them? The bad habits of other children affect ours,—their ignorance, their ill manners, their sins. Our children suffer individually from bad social conditions, but cannot be saved individually.
When the Philadelphia water supply is so foul as to poison young and old, mothers are responsible for not doing their share to make the city water fit for their families to drink. It is not a private filter on a private faucet that will do it, but public purity in the public works.
In Boston in 1899 the Society of Collegiate Alumnæ exposed a disgracefully insanitary condition in the public schools,—undisturbed filth in cellar and vault, unwashed floors, a slovenly neglect of the commonest sanitary decency worthy of an Oriental slum. Any mother in Boston would have been filled with shame to have such an exposure of her own private housekeeping. There is room for shame at this exposure of their public housekeeping, school-house-keeping, city-keeping.
Like an ostrich with his head in the sand, the mother shuts herself up in the home and imagines that she is safe and hidden, acting as if "the home" was isolated in space. That the home is not isolated we are made painfully conscious through its material connections,—gas-pipes, water-pipes, sewer-pipes, and electric wires,—all serving us well or ill according to their general management. Milk, food, clothing, and all supplies brought in bring health or disease according to their general management. The mere physical comfort of the home needs collective action, to say nothing of the psychic connection in which we all live, and where none is safe and clean till all are safe and clean.
How far does the duty of the State extend, and how much should be left to individual responsibility? This is the working point to which this discussion tends. A more serious sociological question could hardly be propounded.