A Good Mother
By Mary Wollstonecraft
1759-1797
(English. The mother of Mary, wife of the poet Shelley. One of the earliest advocates of the right of woman to education, and political rights.)
To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers; wanting their children to love them best, and take their part, in secret against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow. When chastisement is necessary, though they have offended the mother, the father must inflict the punishment; he must be the judge in all disputes; ... I ... mean to insist that unless the understanding of woman is enlarged, and her character rendered firm, but being allowed to govern her own conduct, she will never have sufficient sense or command of temper to manage her children properly.
The Mother a Creator
By C. Josephine Barton
(Contemporary. Formerly associate editor and publisher “The Life,” author of “An Interlude,” “Evangel Ahvallah,” “The Mother of the Living,” etc.)
Thoughts are the blocks out of which children are made.... Your child’s thoughts will flow in the trenches you open for it. During the impressible first few months it will cultivate that which you cultivate. If you love, it will love; if you hate, it will hate. If you have the measles, it will have it; the child will rejoice at your rejoicing, and will weep when you weep. (This is one instance wherein if you “weep you will not weep alone”! Anger indulged in by you will make the foetus helpless in Anger’s toils! Love humanity, find and faithfully perform your work, and your unborn child will one day be a philanthropist....
Two brothers manifested the same criminality their father had been guilty of when begetting them, and they became even worse men, because their weak, unresisting mother took no control over them during the months most important, and their passions developed. Thus the design and form of temple unwittingly carved out in the brain of their two sons, developed the phrenological bumps, criminal protuberances to match the design marked out for them by their father in his unenlightened Temple of Thought. This condition could not have been altered by any process known except that of the mother’s thought-action during the period of pliability in the atom. But being incompetent, unable to systematize her thoughts and purify her heart, or cultivate the philosophical and rational, the begotten shape developed with all the qualities about it that had so blighted the begetter....
It is with pleasure I turn from the above picture and point out to you the laws leading up to the beautiful character of Elizabeth Cady Stanton—one of the bravest of leaders in the cause of woman’s emancipation. Daniel Cady was a distinguished lawyer, a New York judge, later elected to Congress. Though a man of fine qualities, unimpeachable integrity, he was sensitive and modest to a marked degree; while her mother, Margaret Livingston, had the military idea of government, was tall and queenly, self-reliant and at her ease under all circumstances. She was the daughter of Colonel Livingston, who, at West Point, when Arnold made the attempt to betray that stronghold into the enemy’s hands, in the absence of his superior officer, took the responsibility of firing into the Vulture, a suspicious looking British vessel that lay at anchor on the opposite side of the river, leaving Andre, the British spy, with his papers to be captured.