The woman movement is setting the perception of mind feminine over against the conceptions and speculations, the theological systems and interpretations, of the mind masculine, in the realm of the religious quality of human nature.
It is on this ground that a higher standpoint for human progress is to be achieved. Woman is becoming the possessor of her brains and of an equipment that will facilitate her use of them. When through generations of experience she has fully learned her true position in the order of the universe and of human unfoldment, a new created world of humanity will blossom on this old earth.
Man is normally the builder in the material realm. It is his to press the more tangible elements and forces into the service of man’s material and intellectual needs, and to master and subdue the earth. It is woman’s to become builder in the spiritual realm of the higher nature. It is woman’s first’ to give bias to the brain cells and soul impulses of ante-natal and post-natal infantile life. It is woman’s, the normal mother and teacher, to look, and feel, and speak into impressible child life, the fine ennobling sentiments, the solid truths of social relations, the sterling principles of rightness, and honor, and honesty, and fraternal love.
This trained experience and exercise of motherhood is a precious wealth that the race needs to carry it on and up toward its perfectness.
All that was pronounced “good,” in man, in “the beginning” is innate in human nature. Social life and social relations are the life school in which this “good”-ness can be educed, strengthened, matured, in the individual.
Woman is not only the creative agency for building bodies, but the perfecting agency to build character, and to gestate and bring to birth the higher nature in humanity. Woman is man’s mother spiritually as well as physically. He is to be born into his spiritual life through the divine feminine, as he has been born into the physical life through the natural (or physical) feminine.
It is to this end that evolution is in every direction placing woman to-day in the foreground and quickening her to make new demands upon the resources of intelligence and moral power.
Having furnished to the child the “three R’s,” manual training, industrial habits, and quickening the higher sentiments with a solid foundation of principles of right conduct and pure habits, are more important to the advancement of the human race than literary researches, languages, or higher mathematics. To know the physiological and psychological processes of embryotic growth, and the possible influences of motherhood over the coming child, and how to neutralize poor heredity, would achieve more for race elevation than the combined wisdom of schools and pulpits minus these.
There would be no need of laws for the suppression of vicious literature, were all mothers faithful and capable of pre-empting the plastic mind and imagination of childhood by intelligent explanations and true statements concerning the origin of life, and the vital purities and sanctities that can save every child from demoralization and debauchery. The boy who has been blest with a wise conscientious motherhood is not the boy to dwell in secret on lascivious thoughts and vile communications, nor will he be led away by vicious associations.
The true place of woman in the order of all things, is a link between the material and spiritual, especially in her creative function.