The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons / A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis

by Ellice Hopkins

Having now laid down the general principles which we have to recognize in the moral training of the young, let me endeavor to make some practical suggestions how these principles may be carried out, suggestions which, as a matter of fact, I have found to be helpful to educated mothers in the great and responsible task of training the men of the future generation.

All I would earnestly ask you to remember is, that in offering these suggestions I am in no way venturing to dictate to you, only endeavoring to place a wide experience at your service. Doubtless you will often modify and, in some cases, very possibly reverse my conclusions. All I ask is that you should weigh them thoughtfully and prayerfully and with an open and unprejudiced mind before you finally reject them.

Let us, therefore, begin with the nursery. It is in the nursery that the roots of the evil we have to contend with are often first planted, and this in more senses than one. In the more obvious sense all experienced mothers know what I mean. But I am quite sure that there are a large number of young wives who become mothers without the smallest knowledge of the dangers to which even infant boys may be exposed. This ignorance is painfully shown by the frequent application for nursemaids from our penitentiaries. At one house where I held a small meeting my young hostess, an intelligent literary woman, came into my room after the household had retired to rest to ask me about some curious actions which she had noticed in her baby boy at night. There could not be a doubt or a question that her nurse was corrupting her little child before that hapless young mother's eyes, and forming in him habits which could only lead to misery hereafter, and only too possibly to idiocy and death; and that young mother was too ignorant to save her own baby boy! Indeed, I know of no greater instance of the cruelty of "the conspiracy of silence" than the fact that in all the orthodox medical manuals for young mothers the necessary knowledge is withheld.[8] But more marvellous still is the fact that women should ever have placidly consented to an ignorance which makes it impossible for them to save even baby boys from a corrupt nursemaid, who by some evil chance may have found her way into their service through a false character or under some other specious disguise, not seeing at once that the so-called delicacy which shrinks from knowing everything that is necessary in order to save is not purity but prurience.

I would, therefore, beseech young mothers who are conscious of their own ignorance to see a lady doctor, if they do not like to consult their own family physician, and ask her to tell them plainly what they have to guard against and the best methods to pursue. All I can say here is to beseech every mother to be absolutely careful about the antecedents of her nursemaids, and only to admit those of unblemished character into the precincts of the nursery. Never, if possible, let your baby boy sleep with any one but yourself, if through illness or any other cause he cannot sleep in his own little cot. Pyjamas, I think, are generally recognized now to be the best form of night gear, as keeping the little limbs warm and covered, when in the restlessness of sleep the child throws off the bedclothes, as well as for other and more vital reasons. If through straitened means you cannot afford an experienced nurse—not that I should altogether allow that even the experienced nurse is to be implicitly and blindly trusted until she has been well tested—then I would entreat you not to let sleepiness or ill health or any other excuse prevent you from being always present at your boy's morning bath. Often and often evil habits arise from imperfect washing and consequent irritation; and many a wise mother thinks it best on this account to revert to the old Jewish rite of initiation by which cleanliness was secured. Teach them from the first self-reverence in touch, as in word and deed, and watch even their attitudes in sleep, that the little arms are folded lightly upwards. Even experienced nurses are not always nice in their ways. Be vigilantly watchful that the utmost niceness is observed between the boys and girls in the nursery, and that childish modesty is never broken down, but, on the contrary, nurtured and trained. Knowledge and watchfulness are the two cherubim with the flaming sword turning all ways to guard the young tree of life and bar the way of every low and creeping thing. If I may venture in some sort to reverse our Lord's words, I should say His word to all mothers is, "What I say unto all I say especially unto you, Watch."

But there is another and a deeper sense in which the root of the evil is first planted and nourished in the nursery. If we are to contend with this deadly peril to soul and body, I cannot but feel that we must bring about a radical change in the training of our boys. There must be some radical defect in that training for men to take the attitude they do. I do not mean bad, dissipated men, but men who in all other relations of life would be designated fairly good men. Once let such a man be persuaded—however wrongly—that his health, or his prospect of having some day a family of his own, will suffer from delayed marriage and he considers the question settled. He will sacrifice his health to over-smoking, to excess in athletics, to over-eating or champagne drinking, to late hours and overwork; but to sacrifice health or future happiness to save a woman from degradation, bah! it never so much as enters his mind. Even so high-minded a writer as Mr. Lecky, in his History of European Morals,[9] deliberately proposes that the difficulty of deferred marriage which advanced civilization necessitates, at least for the upper classes, should be met by temporary unions being permitted with a woman of a lower class. The daughters of workingmen, according to this writer, are good enough as fleshly stop-gaps, to be flung aside when a sufficient income makes the true wife possible—an honorable proceeding indeed! to say nothing of the children of such a temporary union, to whom the father can perform no duty, and leave no inheritance, save the inestimable one of a mother with a tainted name. Verily there must be some fault in our training of men! Certainly an intelligent American mother put her finger on the blot, so far as we are concerned, when, speaking to me many years ago, she said what struck her so in our English homes was the way in which the girls were subordinated to the boys; the boys seemed first considered, the girls in comparison were nowhere. Doubtless our English homes are more at fault here than in America; but, as a mother's pride in her boys is the same all over the world, may not even American homes admit of a little improvement in this respect as well? And, if we choose to bring up our boys to look upon their mothers and sisters as more or less the devoted slaves of their selfishness, can we wonder that they should grow up to look upon all women as more or less the slaves of their needs, fleshly or otherwise?

Now, what I want all boys taught from their earliest years is, roughly speaking, that boys came into the world to take care of girls. Whatever modification may take place in our view of the relation of the sexes, Nature's great fact will remain, that the man is the stronger—a difference which civilization and culture seem to strengthen rather than diminish; and from his earliest years he ought to be taught that he, therefore, is the one that has to serve. It is the strong that have to bear the burden of the weaker, and not to prostitute that strength by using it to master the weaker into bearing their loads. It is the man who has to give himself for the woman, not the other way on, as we have made it. Nay, this is no theory of mine; it is a truth implanted in the very heart of every true man. "Every true man," as Milton says, "is born a knight," diligently as we endeavor to stub up this royal root, constantly, as from the very nursery, we endeavor to train it out of him. You may deny the truth and go on some theory of your own in the training of your boys, but the truth cannot deny itself. It is there, whether you will have it or not, a root of the tree of life itself.

Now there is not a day that need pass without opportunities of training your boys in this their true knightly attitude. You can see, as I have already said, that they learn in relation to their own sisters what in after years they have to practise towards all women alike. To give up the comfortable easy-chair, the favorite book or toy, the warmest place by the fire, to the little sister—this ought to become a second nature to a well-trained boy. To carry a parcel for her, to jump up and fetch anything she wants, to give in to her because he is a boy and the stronger—all this ought to be a matter of course. As he grows older you can place him in little positions of responsibility to his sisters, sending them out on an expedition or to a party under his care. In a thousand such ways you can see that your boy is not only born but grows up a knight. I was once in a house where the master always brought up the heavy evening water-cans and morning coal-scuttles for the maids. And if these were placed at the foot of the stairs so as to involve no running in and out of the kitchen, it might be no mean exercise for a boy's muscles.

I was told only the other day of a little six-year-old boy whose mother had brought him up from babyhood on these principles. He was playing with his little sister on a bed, when suddenly he perceived that she was getting perilously near the edge which was farthest from the wall. Instantly he dismounted and went round to the other side, and, climbing up, pushed her gently into the middle of the bed, remarking sententiously to himself, "I think boys ought always to take the dangerous side of their sisters." Ah me! if only you mothers would but train your boys to "take the dangerous side of their sisters," especially of those poor little sisters who are thrust forth at so early an age to earn their own living, alone and unprotected, on the perilous highways of the world, skirted for them by so terrible a precipice, what a different world would it be for us women, what a purer and better world for your sons!

Surely the womanhood in our homes ought to enable us to bring up our boys in such an habitual attitude of serving a woman, of caring for her, of giving himself for her, that it would become a moral impossibility for him ever to lower or degrade a woman in his after-life.

In concluding these suggestions there is one point I must emphasize, the more so as in treating of one particular moral problem it is difficult not to seem to ignore a truth which is simply vital to all moral training. Let us clearly recognize that there is no such thing as moral specialism. Our moral being, like Wordsworth's cloud, "moveth altogether if it move at all." You cannot strengthen one particular virtue except by strengthening the character all round. Cardinal Newman points out—I think in one of those wonderful Oxford sermons of his—that what our ancestors would have called "a bosom sin" will often take an underground course and come to the surface at quite an unexpected point in the character. Hidden licentiousness, which one would expect to evince itself in over-ripe sentiment and feeling, manifests itself instead in cruelty and hardness of heart. The little habit of self-indulgence which you in your foolish fondness have allowed in that boy of yours may, in after-life, come out as the very impurity which you have endeavored so earnestly to guard him against. This mystical interdependence and hidden correlation of our moral and intellectual being is a solemn thought, and can only be met by recognizing that the walls of the citadel must be strengthened at all points in order to resist the foe at one. Truthfulness, conscientiousness that refuses to scamp work, devotion to duty, temperance in food and drink, rectitude—these things are the bastions of purity of life, as well as of all high character.