The Mother’s Influence
By “Ouida”
(Mlle. Louise de la Ramee, Author of “Under Two Flags,” “A Dog of Flanders,” etc. Died Jan. 28, 1908. The following is from one of a series of articles written and sold to Lippincott’s 28 years ago with the request that they be not published until after her death. The articles appeared in the May, June, and July, 1909, issues.)
When we reflect on the enormous weight which the woman’s influence has on the growing child; when we consider the incurable superstitions, the unreasonable fables, the illogical deductions, the warped and stifled judgments, which millions of young boys learn in education and religion at their mothers’ knees in infancy,—it is impossible to over-rate the invaluable consequences of any introduction of geist into the minds of women. But for the backward pressure of woman—woman ever conservative, ever reculante, ever wedded to form and precedent, and to tradition—the world of men would have forsaken many a cultus built on fable, many a dominion of priestcraft, many a limbo of worn-out and oppressive credulity. The evil mental influence of women is fully as great as can be the good moral influence of the best of their sex. Wars hounded on; fetters freshly riveted; the withes of dead beliefs binding down the free action of living limbs; the pressure of narrow ties, and of egotisms deified to virtue, forcing men aside from paths of greatness or justice—all those, and much more, are due to the baleful intellectual influence of women.
Fatherhood Cannot Be Motherhood
By Ada M. Kassimer
(From Introduction to “Representative Women.”)
Womanhood now as always recognizes motherhood as its highest duty, its greatest obligation; and the present awakened womanhood sees its mission of motherhood—not only in the narrowed home immediately about it, but in the large human family, in the world of activity, it sees how the affairs of men, women and children need the true mother instinct, which in every phase of nature is one of unselfish devotion, of unlimited service, of freedom from combat for financial, social and personal supremacy. The inherent attributes of motherhood must combine with those of fatherhood to square the balance of justice for childhood.
The world needs woman, her ideas, her way of reasoning, her insight, her sense of justice, her tender hands and her loving heart. The children of the world need her; for a long time they have been governed by the masculine mind which has made laws for them, established educational plans for them, opened juvenile courts for them, founded factories, mills, mines, in which little hands have hardened, little bodies have dwarfed, young minds and hearts grown prematurely old—and this, not because the masculine mind and the masculine heart would intentionally be drastic, but because men are not women, and fatherhood cannot be motherhood.