Mary Wood-Allen

“ When I see you with your young girl friends, when I look into your bright faces and listen to your merry laughter and your girlish chatter, I wonder if any one of you understands how much you are worth. Now you may say, "I haven't any money in the bank, I have no houses or land, I am worth nothing," but that would only be detailing what you possess. It is not what you possess but what you are that determines what you are worth. One may possess much wealth and be worth very little. ”

“ By her virtue, courage, patience, purity, she is storing up those qualities for the men and women of the future. By her demanding of her future husband that he shall be without fear and without reproach, as clean in life and thought as herself, she is building up protections around the children of generations to come. Even the young girls of to-day are creating national conditions for the future, are deciding the destiny of the nation,—yes, of the race. The great structures that men build will in time perish, but character is eternal. ”

“ Shall this be, in a hundred years, a nation of drunkards? The young people of to-day are deciding that question. Shall it be a nation of invalids? This, also, the young people are deciding. Shall it be a nation filled with greed of gain, with a low standard of morals, with dishonest methods in business, or shall it be a nation wherein vigorous health is the rule, unflinching courage, absolute integrity and pure morality shall everywhere reign? What the young people of to-day are making of themselves physically, mentally and morally, is deciding what shall be the future of the country. ”

“ It is difficult for us, as mothers, to realize that our daughter is just as much a separate individual as is our neighbor's daughter, and that we have no right to thrust ourselves upon her, no right to demand that she shall love us. We have the right to sympathize, to counsel, to direct her conduct so long as she remains in our personal care, but we should remember that she must be responsible, that she is a soul and must live her own life, learn her own lessons, suffer her own experiences. Our deepest love can only enable us to help her to choose wisely, to think truly, to act judiciously. ”

“ Men, by their nature, are prone to fight. They will fight for any cause or none. It is for you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid when there is no cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the guilt of it lies with you.
“Queens you must always be: queens to your lovers: queens to your husbands and sons: queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself and will forever bow before the myrtle crown and the stainless sceptre of womanhood.” ”

“ Oh, how sweetly those baby eyes look up into the loving eyes that are brooding over them. Is it possible those baby brows will ever lie low in the gutter, those sweet lips be stained by oath or glass; those crumpled rose-leaf fingers ever strike the murderous blow incited by alcohol? It must be, if that front rank of one hundred thousand drunkards is to be recruited, for the drunkards of the future are to-day babies in their mother’s arms. ”

“ If a lover would be disenchanted to see the room from which his blooming, beauteous adored one had departed, bearing the marks of carelessness and disorder, with soiled clothing, unmade bed, shoes, hose and dresses all in tumbled heaps on chairs and floor, remember that the marriage ceremony does not make such a room more attractive to the husband, who must not only see but share its discomforts. ”

“ I am more and more convinced that right knowledge not only safeguards purity, but really produces true modesty. To give a young person a reverent knowledge of self is to insure that delicacy of thought which preserves the bloom of modesty. If the girls who are engaged in street flirtations could only be taught the lesson of true womanhood, I am sure they would become quiet and lady-like in conduct. ”

“ I know a woman who says that there should never be marriage where there are unpleasant peculiarities, idiosyncrasies, or even mannerisms; but should we act on that principle, few would marry. Love is sometimes said to be blind in the days of wooing, but wearing magnifying glasses after wedlock. True love is never blind, but he is capable of judging of true relative values, and will count as naught the slight defect when measured by the overwhelming perfection. Who has not seen men devoted to wives who were homely or peculiar, but who were genuinely pure and true? ”

“ I have said that we are not responsible for the dower of virtues or of vices which are ours by inheritance, but we are responsible for the inheritances of our children, and this is a most solemn thought. Do you not begin to see that we cannot value ourselves too highly if we have the right idea of what our real worth is? We can scarcely overestimate the results of our own deeds. ”

“ What made such a mere child imagine a beau to be an essential agent of a girl's life? Because she had been taught by the jests and suggestions of her elders that every boy was a possible lover, and, young as she was, that thought was woven into her very life. It is pitiable to see how early the mind of the child is tainted by sentimentality, by the unwise suggestions of older friends. ”

“ This heredity, the transmission of the qualities of the parent to the child, is found among plants and animals as well as in the human race. The seed of a plant produces another plant of the same kind, and the farmer knows when he sows wheat, that his harvest will be wheat, and he should know just as certainly that if he “sows wild oats” in his youth he may expect “wild oats” in his children. The character of the food we eat, the air we breathe, the occupations we follow, the habits we create, are the forces which shape not only our own destiny, but create the tendencies of our children. ”

“ Every baby is a new being with a nature of his own, and what was good for his brother may not be good for him. The training that will give one child self-confidence will make a little tyrant of another; what would render one merely amenable to control might make a coward of another. So you see, my dear, that a mother needs to have great knowledge of the laws of mind and great insight in the applying of those laws to the particular cases she has in hand.”
“It really seems, mamma, as if girls ought to study all those things before they marry.” ”

“ We have evidence of it in the material world about us, and when we use our reason we are "thinking God's thoughts after Him."
God has the marvelous power of imagination, using that word in its noblest sense. He has the power to conceive something in thought before it actually exists. He must have seen all the glories of the material universe, worlds upon worlds circling through space, moon and stars, the beauty of forest and stream, of tinted flower and iridescent insect wing before they were brought into being, and He had the power to create them. ”

“ It is not our fault if we are born of a family in which consumption is an inheritance; and, on the other hand, we can claim no credit to ourselves if we have inherited strong bodies with healthful tendencies. It is our misfortune, and not our fault, if we are not quite perfectly poised by nature; it is our good fortune, not our foresight, if we have genius instead of mediocrity. ”

“ The girls had not maintained their own self-respect, and therefore had not secured the respect of the young men. The girl who respected herself compelled respect from them, and that is the idea I wish to impress on your mind. Never expect any one to respect you more than you respect yourself, nor to shield your honor if you have placed yourself in their power.”
“But, father,” said Helen hesitatingly, “most of the girls and boys think it no harm to kiss each other good night, and the girls say the boys would be offended if a girl refused.” ”

“ In fact there seems to me more indelicacy and more danger from long evenings spent in murmuring ardent protestations of love and indulging in embraces and endearments than in a frank, serious conversation on the realities and responsibilities of marriage, an exchange of earnest thoughts, voiced in chaste, well-chosen language—a conversation which by its very solemnity is lifted out of the realm of sense-pleasure into the dignified domain of science and morality. ”

“ I can assure you of one thing,—even if you never have children, you will never regret having cultivated yourself in every talent and virtue, but you may have great cause for sorrow if you fail to develop the best in yourself. There is no grief in the world like that caused by wilful or wicked sons and daughters. Their waywardness brings not only sorrow but self-condemnation on the parents who must feel that in some way they have been to blame, either in the inheritance they passed on or the training they gave. ”

“ And even if you cannot trace in yourself a likeness to any family representative, you may still be assured that from some of them your traits have come to you. You have only to recall the complexity of your sources of inheritance and then remember how many words can be spelled from the twenty-six letters of the alphabet to see that you can hardly measure the peculiar forces of mind and body that may come to you though that power of transmission which we call heredity. ”

“ What more worthy of our devout study? In this reverent attitude of mind let us study this gift of creative power, learning what we may of its scope and purpose and the material organs through which it works.
In your study of physiology in school you took up the organs of individual life. You studied the framework of the body, its machinery, its internal vital mechanism. You studied about digestion, nutrition, respiration, elimination, and in this you learned nothing of physical differences between individuals. ”

“ More than one young man has said to me: “I was never taught that my conduct and thought would impress themselves upon my children, but now that I see that such is the case, I am sure that I will hereafter be more careful of my life than I ever have been.” ”

“ There is a beauty in a golden wedding that truly celebrates a happy union of half a century. But when life is all untried, when perhaps the two young people know nothing of what is before them, it may be are but little acquainted with each other, and have mistaken the thrill of passion for the steady [271] exaltation of love, then it would seem wiser to make the occasion one of most solemn import, free from glitter and show, and full of that deep meaning which makes the heart stand still in reverence for life's deepest mysteries. ”