She holds that "the child" is the most important of personages, that life should all be bent to its service, that the woman's one, all-inclusive purpose is the right bearing and rearing of children. She shows how painfully inadequate is our present provision for child culture, how unprepared is the average mother, how unsuitable the atmosphere of the average home and also of the average school; and makes searching comment on our methods of teaching—especially in teaching religion.
Her chapter on "The Education of the Child" is so important that it has been taken out and made a book by itself.
There is present throughout the book a deep sincerity, a boundless love and sympathy, and evidence of the widest and most searching observation. It throws a relentless light on our cheap and trivial way of facing the gravest issues of life, and should stir every woman's heart to new enthusiasm for the power and glory of motherhood.
The most controversial chapters—to most of us—are the first, in which marriage is discussed, and the one on religion; but to my mind the most important question here, as in all deep study of child culture, is this: Is the mother the best person to supply the entire care for and culture of the child?
Miss Key holds that she is. For that reason she deprecates any education, any profession, any interest or purpose in a woman's life which at all interferes with this primal claim of motherhood. She allows to women the right, as individuals, to forego motherhood and develop their egos as they will; but of women as a class she demands the most entire consecration to this function. Her requirements are soul-absorbing and exclusive of all others. It is not alone in the hours spent with the child that the mother should be at work upon him, but in every waking hour—in her work and rest times—the child should be always on her heart, and she should ceaselessly revolve in her mind the problems of her work as a mother.
The book is a determined protest against the present tendency to specialization among women: it is thrown up like a rampart against the rising tide of independence and free human life demanded by the girls of today—and its strength lies in the deep truth of its attitude towards the child.
It is true that the child is the most important personage. In him—in her—must appear the inherited growth of the world. Unless our children are born better, born stronger, born cleaner and more beautiful than we, the race does not progress. And unless the first years are rightly treated, we lose in wrong education much of the fruit of right breeding.
It is true that we need among women a new, strong, clear "class conscious" motherhood which shall recognize that this deep duty is superior to that of the wife; that it is woman's worst crime to consent to bear children of vicious, diseased fathers; that it is woman's first duty, not merely to reproduce, but to improve the human race.
So far I am in hearty agreement with Ellen Key, and congratulate the world of to-day upon her book. She herself is a "human mother," a "social mother," loving children because they are children not because they are her own. Such love, such high intelligence and insight, such quenchless enthusiasm, are in themselves the proof that wise and beneficial child-service may be given by extra-maternal hearts, heads and hands. Wherein I disagree with this world-helper will be found in a few remarks on "The New Motherhood," elsewhere in these pages.
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