Maternalism

“ To them, for long ages, the approach to motherhood has been by the most intense and exquisite love and longing, by the Supreme Desire, the overmastering demand for a child. Every thought they held in connection with the processes of maternity was open to the day, simple yet sacred. ”

“ How beautiful, then, in its adaptation to the situation in which she is placed, and the duties she has to perform, is that instinct of maternal love, which, from its intensity and depth, its all-pervading and inextinguishable vitality, so lives and breathes through every act, thought, word, and look of the fond mother, that sooner would her infant doubt its own existence, than question that of her untiring love! ”

“ Toward him her own attitude rapidly became more and more protecting as a thwarted maternal complex in her—that same mothering instinct which in one shape or another expresses itself in every woman—was roused and quickened. ”

“ The task fairly staggers us with its greatness and its limitless scope; but let us be big enough to look even beyond all this, and, with the glorious capacity for motherhood that lies in every good woman’s breast, let us see not only the millions of homes that are in darkness and sorrow and degradation today, but also realize that the children of today are to be the fathers and mothers of tomorrow. ”

“ What else do you do, when you impose on your wife a maternity unasked and abhorred? You commit the development and education of your child, during the most important and susceptible period of its existence, to one who assures you she is not prepared for the charge, who entreats you to spare her, and who loathes the very thought of its existence. Every element of her womanly nature, for the time being, recoils from its presence in her system. ”

“ There cultivate your intellectual powers together by reading, and by conversation,—especially, on all subjects pertaining to parentage and the ante-natal, as well as the post-natal, development, education and life of your children. How anxious will every true and loving husband and father be, to unite with his wife and the mother of his children, in the nursery, to impart and to receive all possible light in regard to these matters!
Neither should you ever impose maternity on your wife at the expense of her social nature. ”

“ One can scarcely avoid the query, Is it just to place the destiny of one human being so entirely in the power of another? The power of the mother over her child, previous to birth, is absolute. Through what she eats and drinks, during gestation, she can fix the organic and constitutional tendencies of her child to health or disease, to good or evil, to happiness or misery, and thus 21control its character and destiny after it is born, during its infancy, childhood, youth and manhood. ”

“ The expansion of the maternal sentiment until it embraces, or seeks to embrace, humanity, is the vision of the emotional, as opposed to the intellectual, feminist. "The Mother State of which we dream" offers no attraction to many plain and practical workers, and is a veritable nightmare to others. "Woman," writes an enthusiast in the "Forum," "means to be, not simply the mother of the individual, but of society, of the State with its man-made institutions, of art and science, of religion and morals. All life, physical and spiritual, personal and social, needs to be mothered." ”

“ Motherhood in its fulfilment of educational duty can be measured only by its effects. If we take for a standard the noble men and women whose fine physique and character we so fondly attribute to “a devoted mother,” what are we to say of the motherhood which has filled the world with the ignoble men and women, of depraved physique and character? If the good mother makes the good man, how about the bad ones? When we see great men and women, we give credit to their mothers. ”

“ We speak of nothing anterior to the time when our earth assumed the dignity of maternity, and brought forth its first and only child. We shall trace the development of that child which, though millions of years old, is still in dependence on its parent. We shall describe the influence of the parent over the child, and the not less remarkable reaction of the child upon the parent. We shall foreshadow the destiny which still awaits the mother and child when millions of years shall have elapsed. ”

“ The fundamental function of woman being motherhood, this with its secondary manifestations explains much of her behavior. The devotion of the young girl to the cadet who enslaves her reveals the same instinct which holds a wife faithful through difficulties and degradation,—the instinct from which have developed the virtues of loyalty, endurance and self-sacrifice. The period of pregnancy should be (if the imagination be not filled with old wives’ tales) one of health, exhilaration, development of psychic values and social consciousness. ”

“ Assisted only by the force of reason and of principle, a stranger might conduct the steps of childhood to maturity as well as the mother herself; but in the maternal bosom, as has already been observed, is lodged an instinct stronger than any other which is associated with animal existence; and the tendency of these pages will be to show, that wherever there is a strong feeling, there is, if rightly exercised, and under favorable circumstances, a proportionate degree of power,—and that wherever there is power, there is an equal amount of responsibility. ”

“ Why are we not more to them? It is because, I fancy, this modern existence of ours, where every function and duty of maternity—except the actual giving of birth—is performed vicariously for us, destroys any interdependence between parents and their offspring. "Smart" American mothers no longer, I am informed, nurse their babies. ”

“ Ask yourselves honestly how many of the mothers whose action toward their children confronts you in street and shop and car and boat, in hotel and boarding-house and neighboring yard,—how many call forth favorable comment compared with those you judge unfavorably? Consider not the rosy ideal of motherhood you have in your mind, but the coarse, hard facts of motherhood as you see them, and hear them, in daily life. ”

“ I wonder if women feel it commonly? It was a desire for motherhood—a curiously vivid and very definite longing—entirely irrespective of him, you understand, although he inspired it. Without loving him or being at all moved toward him, he made me sheerly want to be a mother! Or is it only that men we don't love make us feel motherly? ”

“ Maternity ": the demand that woman must be given means to prevent conception of undesired and unloved children; that she must become free and strong to choose the father of her child and to decide the number of children she is to bring into the world, and under what conditions. That is the only kind of motherhood which can endure. ”

“ With the world's conditions what they are to-day, with the physical, moral and mental chances to run, with woman, the character-forming producer of the race a half-educated subordinate to masculine domination, it is little short of madness; it is not far from a crime. It is a crime unless the mother is a physically healthy, a mentally developed and comprehending, morally clear, strong, vigorous entity who knows her personal responsibility in maternity and, knowing, dares maintain it. ”

“ If your nature prompts you to reveal yourself to her in the relation that leads to maternity control yourself, and be sternly true to yourself, to your wife, and your child that may ensue, until, by all other loving and endearing manifestations, you have created in her nature an earnest call for maternity. Then would she joyfully accept of you the germ of a new life, and, for the sake of her husband and her child, consecrate all the energies of her soul to its true development. ”

“ Does not the well-being of such children as she may righteously bring into existence loudly call for a full and practical recognition, on the part of every husband and every man, of her right to decide for herself when, how often, and under what circumstances, she shall assume the office of Maternity, or be subjected to the relation that may issue in maternity? Does not the happiness, the best interest of the husband, require it? Does not Humanity itself demand it? ”

“ Before this question of Maternity, and the relation that leads to it, so far as the character and destiny of the race are concerned, in this and in the future state, all others sink into insignificance. It is most painful to hear woman, in her vanity, her shallowness, and intellectual, social and moral debasement, array herself against the only movement that ever can raise her to a true estimate of herself as the mother of the race. ”

“ A thought, or dim raw-material of a thought, was fermenting all night, universally in the female head, and might explode. In squalid garret, on Monday morning, Maternity awakes, to hear children weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the streets, to the herb-markets and Bakers'-queues; meets there with hunger-stricken Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we unhappy women! But, instead of Bakers'-queues, why not to Aristocrats' palaces, the root of the matter? ”

“ A loathed and hated maternity! A woman, a mother, shrinking with disgust and horror from the thought of giving existence to her child! A mother’s heart throbbing with murder toward the child over whose development and education it is presiding! Do you say this is strong language?—too strong? That it cannot be? Do you say a mother does not, cannot, hate and loathe her unborn babe? ”

“ In spite of all the best knowledge I have, sooner or later I'd have some damned uprush of maternity to the brain and start making a lot of the mistakes all mothers make—including some my own mother made with me, no doubt—and nobody to check me, nobody to fill the father's place that must not be empty if a child is to grow up straight and good. ”

“ The necessity of a better physical and intellectual education for the mothers of the race, as a preparation for the adequate performance of their duties, must be, at the present time, especially emphasized. The task of the mother in the early training of children is one that requires practical knowledge of the world, broad views, and that power of judgment which is possible only through mental discipline. Superstition, narrowness, subjection to tradition and dogma, are incompatible with efficient motherhood. ”

“ These are the hereditary predispositions of the child, the resources available for its education, and finally, the ideals of the mother. It is the last which is perhaps the most important for the progress of culture, for of the three factors the ideal of the mother is the most variable, the most modifiable, and therefore the most subject to control and guidance. The mother's ideal is a compound of the types of humanity that have most appealed to her in actual life, in romance, and in history. ”

“ Mothers owe a 'thinking love' to their Children.--"The mother is qualified," says Pestalozzi, "and qualified by the Creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child; ... and what is demanded of her is--a thinking love ... God has given to the child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point remains undecided--how shall this heart, this head, these hands be employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated? A question the answer to which involves a futurity of happiness or misery to a life so dear to thee. Maternal love is the first agent in education." ”

“ It has remained for Mary L. Read, with splendid devotion and university training, to put these matters together and to organize and conduct a “School for Mothercraft.”
The time is coming when women will no more go into physical and spiritual motherhood unprepared, trusting to “mother instinct”, than they will go into law or medicine, trusting to their sense of right and of sympathy with the sick to guide them. ”

“ This providential guardianship of the portals of life is a special endowment of maternity, and it is the potential motherhood of all experienced women which fits them to understand and to guide the growth and development of the sexual powers of our human nature. The tact of a mother will never suggest evil to her child, but her quick perception of danger will enable her to detect its signs, and avert it. ”

“ In her passionate, excitable brain, inflamed with love for the man, the idea of maternity can merely present itself like an unwelcome, grey-clad Quaker at a banquet.
She hesitates, choosing her words. She knows so little of the man in front of her. ”

“ But through it all, in the building and nurturing of the ideal, there runs—ever and always—the thread of thought that self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-effacement, are the grandest attributes of maternity. That in order to be a perfect, an ideal wife and mother, the woman must be sunk, the individual immolated, the ego subjugated. ”

“ I have seen a young and beautiful mother, herself like a brilliant and graceful flower. Nothing could divide her from her infant. It was to her as a twin-soul. She had loved society, for there she had been as an idol. But what was the fleeting delight of adulation, to the deep love that took possession of her whole being? ”

“ Many girls of this kind, unmarried and pregnant, do not realize motherhood. It is a misery remote from their consciousness, not a part of their being. With this girl it is. She is 100 per cent feminine, it seems to me, yet with a spirit which is brave and fine. If her maternal instinct dominates, the child will be born. If consciousness to outside influence gets the better, she will have an abortion. ”