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

by Ellice Hopkins

Now, it is here that I earnestly desire to give you, if I possibly can, some helpful, practical suggestions, for I feel that it is not in the recognition of a duty, but in its performance, that the difficulty lies which is arresting so many educated mothers at the present time.

With very young children, whether girls or boys, there should be no difficulty whatever. They are too young to understand. Only, when they come to you asking their innocent little questions as to where the little baby brother or sister comes from, I would earnestly ask you never to allow yourself, or your nurse, to inflict on them the usual popular fables, that the baby was brought by the doctor or that it was found under the gooseberry-bush. A child is far quicker than we think to detect that mother is hiding something, and the first tiny seed of evil curiosity is sown. Make no mystery about it; look your child full in the face, and say, "My child, you have asked me a question about what is very, very sacred. If I were to try to explain it to you, you would not be old enough to understand; for the present you must be content to know that the baby comes from God; how it comes mother will tell you when you grow old enough to understand; only promise me that you will never ask any one but mother about it." The child will then see that you are hiding nothing, and will be satisfied to wait for the explanation that mother has promised.

But what when the child is old enough to understand?—an age which doubtless varies in different children, but which with boys must come before their first school, if you are to occupy the ground of his heart with good seed, which leaves no room for the devil's sowing.

Well, with regard to the facts of birth, I do not think we ought to find much difficulty. You can point out how the baby seed has a soft, downy place provided for it in the pod of the parent plant till it has ripened and is fit to be sown, when the pod opens and lets it fall to the earth, and it becomes a plant in its turn. You can point out that the egg in a similar way is carried in the mother bird's body till the shell has hardened and is fit to be laid, when she warms it with her own breast, patiently sitting on it for days, while the father bird feeds her, till the little chick is strong enough to break the walls of its tiny house, and come forth and peck and fend for itself. You can explain how the little kitten the child plays with has in the same way a safe place provided for it in the mother's body, where it grows and grows till all its organs are formed, and it can breathe and suck, when, like the seed from the pod, and the chick from the egg it leaves the mother's body, and is born, a blind and helpless baby kitten, to be fed and tenderly cared for by the mother cat. You will explain that the baby comes in just the same way so far as its infant body is concerned, growing like the kitten from a tiny cell—borne by the mother till all the organs are formed which it needs for its earthly life, when it also is born and laid in its mother's arms, to be nourished and cared for by the love of both father and mother, not for a few weeks, as with animals, but through long years of helplessness. And you mean to tell me that the sacred truth would not endear you to your child far more than the usual cock-and-bull story about the doctor and the gooseberry-bush?

A friend of mine has three boys of widely opposite character and temperament. Owing to circumstances, the eldest lad had to be sent to school at an early age. Young as he was, she resolved to follow Dr. Butler's advice and tell him the facts of birth in the way I have suggested. On realizing the truth, the boy flung his arms round her neck and burst into tears. But though she felt that she had done right, she was not wholly without misgivings that she might have introduced some objectionable talk into her nursery. When the time came to send the second lad to school, she repeated the talk that she had had with his elder brother. But to her surprise she found him in total ignorance of the facts: his elder brother had never confided them to him. And so again with the third boy. Evidently the boys had considered it too sacred a thing to talk about—how much too sacred, then, to allow of their joining in with the unclean gossip of schoolboys! Its only result was to give them an added tenderness for their mother, and to make them resent all such unclean talk as so much mud flung at her.

So far, so good. But we all of us realize that it is not the facts of birth, but the facts of the origination of life, that form the perennial source of obscene talk, and often of obscene action, among boys; and it is in explaining these, without violating those instincts of reserve and modesty with which nature herself surrounds the whole subject, that what often seems an insuperable difficulty arises. Yet these functions are, and must be, the very shrine of a body which is a temple of the Lord and Giver of life; and on the face of things, therefore, there must be some method of conveying pure knowledge to the opening mind with regard to them. The difficulty must be with ourselves, and not in the very nature of things themselves.

Has it not been created in a great measure by a wrong method? We begin with human life instead of ending with it; we isolate it from a great system to which it belongs, and treat what is "the roof and crown of things" as a roof that tops no fair edifice, and is therefore anomalous; as a crown that rests on a head which has been severed from its body, and is therefore unmeaning. We obstinately refuse to live—to quote Goethe's words again—not only "in the beautiful and the good," but also "in the whole," which is equally necessary for a well-ordered life. What it seems to me we need is to teach the facts of life-giving, or, in other words, of sex, as a great, wide, open-air law, running right through animated creation, an ever-ascending progression forming a golden ladder leading up to man.

In explaining the facts of reproduction, I would therefore suggest that you should begin with the lowest rung of the ladder, the simplest organisms, such as the amoeba or the volvox. I should show how these multiply by fission, the creature dividing into two, when it is impossible to tell which is the father and which is the mother. I would then pass upwards to more complex organisms, where two individuals are required to form the offspring. You could explain the whole process by the method of fertilization in plants, as urged in an excellent paper by a lady doctor, published in the Parents' Review.[16] Let me quote her words:

"The child can learn the difference of the names, color, and forms of flowers as soon as it can learn anything. The next step would be to simple lessons in the different parts of a plant—the vegetative organs of roots, stem, leaves, passing on to the reproductive organs in the flower—calyx, corolla, stamen, and pistil. Let the child be taught to notice that all flowers have not quite the same organs, some bearing stamens only, which shed the powdery pollen and are the male, or little father flowers; while others have the pistil only, furnished with the stigma to catch the pollen, and are the females, or little mothers; that the one sort of flowers is necessary to the other in producing the little seed or baby plant."

Let us take a primrose. Here the mother and father elements are found in the same flower. At the base of the flower, packed in a delicate casket, which is called the ovary, lie a number of small white objects no larger than butterfly-eggs. These are the eggs or ova of the primrose. Into this casket, by a secret opening, filmy tubes thrown out by the pollen grains—now enticed from their hiding-place on the stamens and clustered on the stigma—enter and pour a fertilizing fluid, called "spermatozoa," through a microscopic gateway, which opens in the wall of the egg and leads to its inmost heart. The ovule, or future seed, is now fertilized and capable of producing a future primrose. Covered with many protecting coats, it becomes a perfect seed. The original casket swells, hardens, is transformed into a rounded capsule or seed-vessel, opening by valves or a deftly constructed hinge. One day this seed-vessel, crowded with seeds, breaks open and completes the cycle of reproduction by dispersing them over the ground, where they sow themselves, and grow and become primrose plants in their turn, starring the grass with their lovely blossoms.[17]