[INTRODUCTION.]
In the following pages it is my wish to impress on women the grave truth, than which none can have more importance, that with them, with the mother, rests the greater power to mould for good or ill, for power or weakness, for beauty or deformity, the characters of her unborn children, and that with power comes the responsibility for its use.
Laying down a few self-evident propositions I shall illustrate the same by facts which have come under my own immediate notice during a period of nearly forty years, simply changing in each case the names of persons and locality.
The subject is by no means a new or original one. The principles involved are found scattered throughout all the journals which embody modern thought, and even find their way, accompanied by much contradiction, into our lighter literature. Yet it is certainly not universally understood that on the mother’s state of mind and body during pregnancy depend such vital interests. The shadow thrown on the subject by false modesty keeps the masses in ignorance and arrests the upward progress of the race.
The mother’s office was, and is yet, by the majority held to be a secondary one and comparatively unimportant. “She merely nourishes the germ given by the father” is the common supposition. What singular infatuation is this when anatomy shows that the ova or eggs exist in the mother, and that the material supplied by the father vivifies them!
In ancient, as well as modern, times it was admitted that during the period of gestation the mother was keenly sensitive to hideous impressions, and was through this equal to the production of deformity and monstrosity. It seems strange that the converse of this did not suggest itself, so that her sensibility could have been tested for the creation of beauty and symmetry.
It was also seen that the pregnant woman could affect the temper, the disposition of her child by yielding to angry emotions, but she was not credited with the ability to convey a serenity and sweetness of nature surpassing her own.
Through all the dark ages that have preceded us, woman has known herself a slave with less questioning as to the rightfulness of the position awarded her by man than she is sensible of to-day. This was the inevitable order of development for primitive man. That the unjust domination continues is but another proof of how unwillingly usurped power is relinquished.
The slave woman respects her master, not herself. The children she has borne have been the children of their father, not of their mother. Darwin declares that “qualities induced by circumstances inhere in that sex on which the circumstances operated,” passing by the opposite sex born of the same mothers. Thus women have given birth to independent sons and subservient daughters.