Then deep into this infant soul sinks the iron weight of what we call Discipline. We women, having small knowledge of child-nature or world-nature, never studying nature at all, but each girl-mother handed on from nursery to nursery, a child teaching children, we undertake to introduce the new soul to life!
We show him, as "life," the nursery, kitchen and parlor group in which we live. We try to teach him the behavior required by these surroundings. Two of the heaviest crosses to both the child and mother lie in his bi- and tri-daily difficulties with clothing, and prolonged initiation to the sacred mysteries of the table. We seek, as best we may, to bend the new soul visiting this world to a correct fulfilment of the polite functions of our domestic shrine; and we succeed unhappily well. We rear a world of people who put manners before morals, conventions before principles, conformity before initiative. Sorely do we strive with the new soul, to choke questionings and crush its resistance.
"Why?" says the child, "Why?" protesting with might and main against the mummery into which he is being forced.
"Because Mother says so!" is the reason given. "Because you must obey!" is the duty given; and to enforce the command comes punishment.
Punishment is a pitiful invention arbitrarily inserted in place of consequence. Its power is in giving pain. Its appeal is to terror. We, immovable and besotted in our ancient sanctuaries, deliberately give pain to little children, deliberately arouse in them that curse of old savagery, blind fear. To compel behavior which we cannot explain even to ourselves, to force the new wine of their young lives into the old bottles of our traditional habits, we keep alive in the little child an attitude of mind the whole world should seek to outgrow and forget forever.
The ethics of the nursery does not give us laws to be learned and understood; relations of cause and effect for instructive practice; matters of general use and welfare not to know and practice which argues a foolish ignorance. It gives command purely arbitrary and disconnected; their profit is not visible to the child; and their penalties, while painfully conspicuous, bear no real relation to offences.
Besides being arbitrary and disconnected, the penalties we give our children have this alarming weakness—they are wholly contingent upon discovery. No whipped child is too young to learn that his whipping did not follow on the act—unless his mother knew he did it. Thus with elaborate care, with trouble to ourselves and anguish to the child, we develop in him the attitude of mind with which our criminals, big and little, face the world—it is not what you do that matters—it is being found out. This is not the position of the thinking being—it is nursery-mindedness.
Pain and terror we teach our babies, and also shame. The child is pure, innocent, natural. One of the first efforts of nursery culture is to smear that white page with our self-made foulness. We labor conscientiously and with patience, to teach our babies shame. We degrade the human body, we befoul the habits of nature, we desecrate life, teaching evil and foolish falsehood to our defenceless little children. The "sex-taboos" of darkest savagery, the decencies and indecencies of primitive convention, we have preserved throughout the ages in our guarded temple of ancient idols, and in that atmosphere we rear the child.
The heaviest drag on progress is the persistence of race-habits and traditions, once natural and useful, but long since outgrown. The main stronghold of this body of tradition is in that uneducated, undeveloped, unorganized, lingering rudiment of earlier social forms—the woman-servant group of primitive industries, in which our children grow.
We have cried out against the crushing restriction of old religions; and, going farther, have seen that these religions have their strongest hold on the woman and the child. It is here suggested that it is not the religion that keeps down the woman and renews its grip on each new generation of children, but that it is the degraded status of the woman and her influence on the child which made possible such religions in the first instance, and which accounts for their astonishing persistence in modern times.