Chapter 10:
Parental Affection
Parental affection is perhaps, the blindest kind of perverse self-love. Parents often love their children in the most brutal [see Glossary] manner, and sacrifice every duty to anyone else in order to promote their children’s advancement in the world. The aim to promote the future welfare of the very beings whose present existence they embitter by the most despotic stretch of power—that’s a sign of how perverse an unprincipled prejudice can be.
In fact, every kind of power. . . .wants to reign without control or inquiry. Its throne is built across a dark abyss that no eye must dare to explore, for fear that the baseless fabric might totter under investigation. Obedience, unconditional obedience, is the catch-word of tyrants of every description, and to make ‘assurance doubly sure,’ one kind of despotism supports another. Tyrants would have cause to tremble if reason were to become the rule of duty in any of the relations of life, for the light might spread until perfect day appeared. And when it did appear, men would smile at the sight of the bugbears that had made them jump during the night of ignorance or the twilight of timid inquiry. . . .
If man’s great privilege is
•the power of reflecting on the past, and
•peering speculatively into the future,
it must be granted that some people enjoy this privilege in a very limited degree. Everything new appears to them wrong; and not able to distinguish what could happen from what couldn’t, they fear where there should be no place for fear, running from the light of reason as if it were a firebrand. . . .
Woman, however, being in every situation a slave to prejudice, seldom exerts enlightened maternal affection; for she either •neglects her children or •spoils them by undue permissiveness. Also, the affection of many women for their children is (I repeat) very brutish, because it eradicates every spark of humanity. Justice, truth, everything is sacrificed by these Rebekahs, and for the sake of their own children they violate the most sacred duties, forgetting the common relationship that binds the whole family on earth together. [MW is echoing the story in Genesis 27, where Rebekah schemes with her favourite son Jacob to cheat his brother Esau.] Yet reason seems to say that someone who allows •one duty or affection to swallow up the rest doesn’t have enough heart or mind to fulfil •that one conscientiously. . . .
As the care of children in their infancy is one of the grand duties that naturally fall to the female character, this duty—if it were properly considered—would provide many forcible arguments for strengthening the female understanding.
The formation of the mind must be begun very early, and the temperament (in particular) requires the most judicious attention; and that attention can’t be paid by women who love their children only because they are their children, and don’t try to base their duty on anything deeper than the feelings of the moment. It is this lack of reason in their affections that makes so many women be the most foolishly attentive mothers or—at the other extreme—the most careless and unnatural ones.
To be a good mother a woman must have •sense and also •the independence of mind that is possessed by few women who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are usually foolish mothers, wanting their children to love them best, and to side with them in a secret conspiracy against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow—the one who must punish them if they have offended the mother, the one who must be the judge in all disputes: but I’ll discuss this subject more fully when I deal with private education. At present I want only to insist that unless woman’s understanding is enlarged and her character made more firm through her being allowed to govern her own conduct, she will never have enough sense or command of temperament to manage her children properly. A woman who doesn’t breast-feed her children hardly counts as having parental affection, because the performance of this duty contributes equally to maternal and filial affection; and it is the indispensable duty of men and women to fulfil the duties that give rise to affections that are the surest preservatives against vice. So-called natural affection is a very weak tie, I think; affections ·that strongly bond people together· must grow out of the habitual exercise of a mutual sympathy; and a mother who sends her babe to a nurse, and only takes it from a nurse to send it to a school—what sympathy does she exercise?
In the exercise of their natural feelings, God has provided women with a natural substitute for love: when the lover becomes only a friend, and mutual confidence replaces overstrained admiration, a child then gently twists the relaxing cord ·thereby tightening it up again·, and a shared care produces a new mutual sympathy. But a child. . . .won’t enliven the parents’ affections if they are content to transfer the charge to hirelings; those who ‘do their duty’ by having someone do it for them shouldn’t complain if they miss the reward of duty, namely the child’s dutifulness towards them.