Anna Garlin Spencer

“ The common law "merged the married woman's whole legal being in that of her husband." She might be heir to untold wealth; marriage made her husband legal owner of it all, with unchecked power over it, as well as over her expenses. She might be a Minerva of wisdom, but her every action must be obedient to her husband, though he were little above the idiot. She might be mother of a score of children, but her husband could will them all away from her control, even the unborn babe he should never behold. ”

“ Lester Ward himself said, "Artificial selection has given to man the most that he enjoys in the organic products of earth. May not men and women be selected as well as sheep and horses? From the great stirp of humanity with all its multiplied ancestral plasms—some very poor, some mediocre, some merely indifferent, a goodly number ranging from middling to fair, only a comparatively few very good, with an occasional crystal of the first water—why may we not learn to select on some broad and comprehensive plan with a view to a general building up and rounding out of the race of human beings?" ”

“ And since our legislative changes have been, for the most part, attempts to limit the power of abuse of the domestic control vested in the man, rather than efforts to secure the freedom of women from that control by the husband, the result is an inconsistent medley of laws, which at one time recognize the married woman as an independent unit, and at another time as the mere ward of her husband. The great practical need for the parties most interested—thoughtful, intelligent women—is a clear ideal of the just legal relations of men and women. ”

“ What is that essence of democracy which must be applied as test within the family, as within the state and within the industrial order? It is the fundamental belief in the worth and dignity of every human being and the equal right of each and all to personality. No man, as in the older days, must be obliged to be husband and father, but may choose, if he deems it essential to his own being, to remain in a solitary path outside the current of the generations. ”

“ To sit in a public library and watch the eager interest of each newcomer, to see the patience, the understanding, the sympathetic attitude and the earnest effort to be of utmost service which the librarian almost invariably shows, and to see the absorbed attention of the readers in what they have been assisted in selecting, is to bless the generosity and public spirit of every one who has made the public library so common a blessing. ”

“ Actual old age, senility, failure of physical and mental power, should be postponed in each case as long as possible by active measures of mental and moral discipline consciously undertaken by personal effort. "The making of mind" is not an art of youth alone. It is an art of middle age and of the older years. Says William James: "The man who daily inures himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things, will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." ”

“ May it not be that human beings of the mother-sex who have paid and still must pay a price, one by one, for each single life, and who have at the same time always been held and still must be held as supreme upbuilders of the social fabric, shall lead the race toward the solution of this most spiritual problem of democracy? It is not, however, solely to make women better fitted for a dual rôle in social order and social progress that we are socializing education: men also must be better fitted to the tasks of social serviceableness within as truly as without the family. ”

“ The Social Value of Parental Affection.—Below and within all other gifts to humanity which have come by the way of motherhood's devotion to child-life is that selective and partial affection which secures to each child one adult person at least to whom he or she is supreme in interest. Most normal women feel when they hear the cry of their own new-born that all of life is justly tributary to that one priceless creature who has come at their call out of the mystery of being to travel the difficult road of the generations of mankind. ”

“ Not the old, then, because it is old, nor the new because it is new; not the few who will hold no parley with that which to them is evil, nor the many who cling to what they have inherited lest they lose life's best treasures; not to those who call aloud in the market place, "Behold the coming of the Lord!" nor to those who sit at the fireside and cherish their own only; not on or to any one manifestation of the life in which we have our being can the old, with the spirit of youth, fibre their faith and trust. ”

“ I believe in my people—in the sincerity of their hearts and the sanity of their minds—in their ability to rule themselves and to meet civic emergencies—in their ultimate triumph over the forces of injustice, oppression, exploitation and iniquity.
I believe that good food, pure water, clean milk, abundant light and fresh air, cheap transportation, equitable rents, decent living conditions and protection from fire, from thieves and cut-throats and from unscrupulous exploiters of human life and happiness, are the birth-right of every citizen within my gates ”

“ It is that feeling that consecrates the marriage and gives most assurance of its success. If we could get rid of romantic love we should have no good start toward married happiness. If we got rid of the ideal of life-long devotion we should not build the home on sure foundations. The psychology of permanence is an essential of true marriage.
On the other hand, if we tried to put the family back into the bondage of the old time, when youth was subject and could never exercise its own power of choice, we should lose the one precious gift of freedom to love, the power to find and keep one's own. ”

“ Shall the new sense of personal dignity, so common to the modern woman, increase the already spreading fashion of retention of the maiden name, her inherited family name, as permanently her own, untouched by the fact of marriage union? No one can be cognizant of the conviction and practice of many feminists without understanding that this is a real problem to be settled surely before the marriage ceremony. There is already in the field a "Lucy Stone League" to give the support of the practice of a great and beloved woman to the fashion of keeping one's own name. ”

“ What we are now beginning to be sure of is that all talent is precious, all special power a social asset, all leadership to be conserved, and all real genius a priceless treasure—hence, that all children who are gifted, whether boys or girls, shall be developed to the height of social power. This means that although every gifted child is born in a private family, society must see to it that its chance for right nurture and fitting education is not limited to the resources of any private family, especially to those of the poorer in economic power. ”

“ No woman who has had right opportunities for education and family life in her own experience can work in intimate comradeship with those who have been denied such advantages without aiming directly for social arrangements in labor which will no longer cheat any young life of its joy, its culture, or chance for its possibility of right relation in the home. The signs are full of hope that more and more members of each class will feel that society as a whole has claims upon them above all that any group may attain by working only for its own advantage. ”

“ Some flowers of the family bloom late and come to their beauty only when some disaster threatens destruction of the home or some sorrow wrecks its happiness. Simple, plain, unassuming, neither very wise nor very strong in other matters, they have a heart that can love with such intensity that it warms the coldest spot and is the refuge most sought when misfortune appears. ”

“ When we remember that higher education for women is a child of less than a hundred years' growth, and that all the higher walks of achievement in the intellectual, the political, the scientific, and the industrial field have been masculine monopolies in custom and even in law for ages after men had opportunity of specialized development and work, this is not a sure proof of the intellectual and vocational inferiority of women. Until women have had several centuries of equal education and freedom of activity with men no one can tell what they can do in any special line. ”

“ New Social Advantages for Fathers.—Meanwhile, again, the father-office stands out in actual living function as never before. The fathers that now show what fatherhood was meant to be—they are legion. Holding the wife and mother in her place of sacred honor, they are to their children the Supreme Court of appeal in grave questions of discipline, the highest functionary of the family in the distribution of honors and rewards, the best comrade in fun, the most delightful companion in games, the strongest challenger in effort, and the symbol of knowledge and power of the community life. ”

“ It is in the new comradeship of men and women on all the levels of life that such auspicious promise of better social life is found. It is on the new basis of reverence of each personality for every other, not only for the person that other is but for the person he or she may become if given fair chance for best achievement, that the new social ethics rests. It is on that basis that we may build a faith assured and strong that the family will not be lost in the time that needs it most but will shape itself to finer issues and more useful service. ”

“ No truly enlightened person believes that he or she is as wise or as good as the best friend thinks; and no truly enlightened person believes that the affection of one's family is a just gauge of the value of one's life to the world. We all need, however, and children particularly need, some inner circle of love which comes to us by virtue simply of our being, to help us when we make excursions of moral and affectional adventure in the world outside, in a world in which we are valued only for what we can achieve. ”

“ Parental Love for the Black Sheep.—The attitude of parents toward the black sheep who does not change his ways of evil and does not become a comfort but remains always a burden and sorrow, is one of the saddest and one of the noblest of human exhibits in sympathy and affection. A woman of the finest nature who as a girl was captured in imagination by a man of brilliant quality but of peculiar cruelty and wickedness of nature, and guilty, after their marriage, of many crimes, had two sons. One was like herself and became a man honored by all, and of the greatest help to his mother. ”

“ Not alone the vision of youth, never lost and always dear; not only the strength of open-eyed effort to achieve so much of the ideal, even its very least atom, as the times and the conditions allow and not lose heart that it is so little, but also the interpretative and harmonizing spirit of those who see, beyond the personal ideal and vision and far beyond the personal achievement, the upward march of all mankind—not alone the leaders of that march ”

“ The new aids to the housemother's task may give her a better chance than any women ever had before to see the real social significance of the personal offices of home life. The poets have seen it all through the centuries and have pictured the myth goddesses bringing the cup and the bread and the fruit and weaving the web of ceremonial or of simple garment in household poetry. All human need for sustenance and the nurture of our physical being has made the wife the loaf-giver and the mother a nourisher of the young, and as such artists have portrayed her. ”

“ It is indeed an almost immeasurable distance from the primitive mother scratching the soil with her sharpened stick, her baby bound to her bended back, in order to plant a few seeds for a tiny harvest to save the life of her child when the hunt should be poor, to the modern mother whose food supply for her family comes to the table from all parts of the earth at the call of her telephone. ”

“ We are fast coming to a united conception of social duty as requiring help to all parents that they may bring up their children in health and give those children the physical training which they need. Let us all, then, push hardest first for the standardization of health in the case of children and youth and the best possible arrangements of tax-supported aids to the realization of that standard. That is surely one of the ways in which the parental burden of child-care can be socially shared without starting embarrassing questions of radical or conservative theories of logical next steps. ”

“ When the human male did learn that he was a father, as his mate was a mother, it seems to have mentally intoxicated him, and led the way to many social vagaries. The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very exciting. ”

“ The fact that most professional or business women find it far easier to get good help where but one domestic worker is kept, than do most women who have no outside duties, gives one key to the situation. As one woman of character and education far above that of most household workers said, "I do housework for Mrs. So and So, for she teaches and there is a reason why she needs help. I would not take a place where there were women in the family who could do the housework themselves perfectly well and wait upon them." ”

“ The Moral Elite in the Modern Family.—Above all, we have to-day a growing number who live in the spirit of a true marriage and a noble cradle of infancy and show by actual example what the family is meant to be. These prophesy a marriage that 45demands each of the other that a perfect life shall perfect their love. These give a new pattern and type of parenthood, woven of the tears and joy, the aspiration and the service of those who call children from the storehouse of universal life, not in response to careless passion but in the solemn joy of creative purpose. ”