This servile womanhood, or the idler and more excessively feminine type, has never appreciated the real power and place of the mother, and has never been able to grasp or to carry out any worthy system of education for little children. Any experienced teacher, man or woman, will own how rare it is to find a mother capable of a dispassionate appreciation of educative values. Books in infant education and child culture generally are read by teachers more than mothers, so our public libraries prove. The mother-instinct, quite suitable and sufficient in animals, is by no means equal to the requirements of civilized life. Animal motherhood furnishes a fresh wave of devotion for each new birth; primitive human motherhood extends that passionate tenderness over the growing family for a longer period; but neither can carry education beyond its rudiments.
So accustomed are we to our world-old method of entrusting the first years of the child to the action of untaught, unbridled mother-instinct, that suggestions as to a better education for babies are received with the frank derision of massed ignorance.
That powerful and brilliant writer, Mrs. Josephine Daskam Bacon, among others has lent her able pen to ridicule and obstruct the gradual awakening of human intelligence in mothers, the recognition that babies are no exception to the rest of us in being better off for competent care and service. It seems delightfully absurd to these reactionaries that ages of human progress should be of any benefit to babies, save, indeed, as their more human fathers, specialized and organized, are able to provide them with better homes and a better world to grow up in. The idea that mothers, more human, should specialize and organize as well, and extend to their babies these supreme advantages, is made a laughing stock.
It is easy and profitable to laugh with the majority; but in the judgment of history, those who do so, hold unenviable positions. The time is coming when the human mother will recognize the educative possibilities of early childhood, learn that the ability to rightly teach little children is rare and precious, and be proud and glad to avail themselves of it.
We shall then see a development of the most valuable human qualities in our children's minds such as would now seem wildly Utopian. We shall learn from wide and long experience to anticipate and provide for the steps of the unfolding mind, and train it, through carefully prearranged experiences, to a power of judgment, of self-control, of social perception, now utterly unthought of.
Such an education would begin at birth; yes, far before it, in the standards of a conscious human motherhood. It would require a quite different status of wifehood, womanhood, girlhood. It would be wholly impossible if we were never to outgrow our androcentric culture.
COMMENT AND REVIEW
With the May issue of the American Magazine closes the first set of papers on "The American Woman," by Miss Ida Tarbell. She has to a high degree the historian's power to collate facts and so marshall them as to give a clear picture of the time and scenes in question. I always read her work with admiration and respect, also with enjoyment, personal and professional. The strong, far-seeing mind at work; the direct style; and the value of the subject matter, place this writer high among our present day teachers.
For these reasons I was wholly unprepared for the painful shock caused by reading the opening page in the March number of these articles. Preceding issues had treated of the rise of the Equal Suffrage movement in this country; while not wholly sympathetic, these were fair, and ably treated.
The March number begins: "What was the American Woman doing in the '40's and '50's that she went on her way so serenely while a few of her sex struggled and suffered to gain for her what they believed to be her rights?" And she goes on to show for what reason she kept out of the Woman's Rights Movement, "reasons, on the whole, simple and noble."