The nurse and the teacher are social functionaries, performing the duties of social motherhood. The female savage can suckle her child and teach her to prepare food, tan hides, make baskets and clothing, and decorate them. The male savage can teach his child to hunt and trap game, to bear pain and privation, to put on warpaint and yell and dance, to fight and kill.
But the civilized mother and father cannot teach their children all that society requires of its citizens. When trades went from father to son they were so taught; and the level of progress in those trades was the level of personal experience. Our real progress has coincided with our educational processes, in which suitable persons are selected to teach children what society requires them to know, quite irrespective of their parent's individual knowledge. Should the learning of the world, the discoveries and inventions, be limited to what each man can find out for himself and teach his son?
No one expects the father's wisdom to be the limit of his son's instruction; nor the mother's either. She loves her child as much as ever; and for its own sake is willing to have it learn of music-teachers, dancing-teachers, and all the allied specialists of school and college.
In all higher and more special cases, it is clear that the mother is not required to parallel her attentions to our "period of infancy," but perhaps it will still be contended that in the simpler and more universal tasks of earlier years she is indispensable; and that these years so overlap that she is practically confined to the home during her whole period of child-bearing.
The answer to this is, first; that the simpler and more universal the tasks the more there may be found capable of performing it. As a matter of fact we are so accustomed to take this view that we cheerfully entrust the most delicate personal services of our babies to hired persons of the lowest orders; as in our Southern States the proud white mother gives her baby often to be suckled and always to be tended by a black woman.
It is idle to talk of the indispensability of the mother's care in the first years when any mother who can afford it is quite willing to share or delegate that care to women admittedly inferior. If the human race has got on as well as it has with the care of its lower class children solely ignorant mothers, and the care of its higher class children given mainly by ignorant servants; why should we dread to have the care of all children given mainly by high-class, skilled, educated, experienced persons, of equal or superior grade to the parents?
The answer to this usually is the child needs the individual mother's love and influence. This is quite true. The baby should be nourished by his own mother—if she is healthy—and nothing can excuse her from the loving cares of parentage. But just as an ordinary unskilled working woman loves and cares for her child—and yet does ten hours of housework, to which no one objects; or just as an ordinary rich woman loves and cares for her child—and yet does ten or twelve hours of dancing, dining, riding, golfing, and bridge playing (to which no one objects!)—so could a skilled working woman spend six or eight hours at an appropriate trade, and still love and care for her child. A normal motherhood does not prevent the mother from suitable industry. In other words: The prolongation of human infancy does not demand an equal prolongation of maternal services; but does demand specialized social services. When these services are properly given our children will be far better cared for than now.
The best answer of all is simply this. Almost all mothers do work, and work hard, at house service; and are healthier than idle wholly segregated women; yet there are many kinds of work far more compatible with motherhood than cooking, scrubbing, sweeping, washing and ironing.
The fifth premise, and its accompanying question also calls for study. It is true that our Androcentric Culture is co-existent with human history and modern progress, with these qualifications:
Practically all our savages are decadent, and grossly androcentric.
Their language and customs prove an earlier and higher culture, in which
we may trace the matriarchate. Among the less savage savages—as our
Pueblos—the women are comparatively independent and honored.