Section I: The Domestic Traditions

Chapter III: The Career of Motherhood

"There is an African bird, the hornbills, whose habits in some respects are a model. The female builds her nest in a hollow tree, lays her eggs, and broods on them. Then the male feels that he must also contribute some service; so he walls up the hole closely, giving only room for the point of the female's bill to protrude. Until the eggs are hatched, she is thenceforth confined to her nest, and is in the meantime fed assiduously by her mate.

"Nature has kindly provided various types of bird households to suit all varieties of taste. The bright orioles filling the summer boughs with color and with song, are as truly domestic in the freedom of their airy nest as the poor hornbills who ignorantly make their home in a dungeon. And certainly each new generation of orioles... are a happier illustration of judicious nurture than are the uncouth little offspring of the hornbills... so flabby, and transparent as to resemble a bladder of jelly furnished with head, legs, and rudimentary wings, but with not a sign of a feather."

—Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

"It is a fact kept, perhaps, too much in the background, that mothers have a larger self than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and gone from them... there are wide spaces of time which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt buttons."

—George Eliot.

"Woman is given to us that she may bear children. Woman is our property, we are not hers, because she produces children for us—we do not yield any to her. She is, therefore, our possession as the fruit tree is that of the gardener."

—Napoleon.

Merely to be a woman is not a vocation, though formerly many women were obliged by custom to make it serve in lieu of one; but to be a married mother has long been regarded as a quasi-profession which, for the time being, precluded any other. During the earlier part of the Nineteenth Century, while the family still constituted an industrial unit, child-bearing was incidental in the midst of pioneer toil, and not at all the subject of reasoning. As women began to be released from directly productive labor, and here and there ventured into publicity, there grew up in the Press and the Pulpit a habit of lauding the "glory" of motherhood in much the same manner as they dwelt upon the "dignity" of manual labor. Any thoughtful person could see that the conditions of labor were often inhuman and degrading; and no one who could escape from such toil into a cleaner and easier mode of living was prevented from doing so by his belief in its dignity. So, also, the sentimentality of the midcentury was accustomed to play up the emotional and spiritual compensations of motherhood, while ignoring or glozing over its hardships.

There is slight need of writing on the compensatory aspects of motherhood, since healthy, happy mothers in every age have been satisfied with their lot, and have not needed either flattery or a fence to keep them within their sphere. But many mothers—perhaps a majority in the past century—were neither contented nor adequate to their task. That they did not attempt to escape was chiefly due to their conventional limitations. Without discounting in any degree the beauty or the rewards of normal motherhood, it is necessary to point out how far short, in the past, the actual experience often fell of that ideal so constantly preached; and to analyze it from the rea sonable standpoint of the career for which it was a substitute. If motherhood were, indeed, a holy vocation, for which women had been set apart, it should be able to bear the tests to which other should be able to bear the tests to which other less sacred occupations were subjected. To com prehend why the conditions of motherhood are still so far from what they should be, it is necessary to draw a plain picture of what they were for the average woman of the past century.

We have seen in the chapter on Girlhood that girls were very early imbued with the idea that they did not need to equip themselves for earning a living, nor to acquire more than a limited and superficial education, because they were to be married and, by inference, to be mothers. The Puritan reaction from the sensuality of English society had taken the form of prudery and silence on sex matters, which placed every marriageable girl in an anomalous situation. Marriage and motherhood were constantly referred to in her hearing as the highest, indeed, the only successful, career for woman; yet, nothing in her training had any direct relation to it, and the conventional standard of modesty required her to be wholly ignorant of its physical aspects. When she walked up the church aisle in her bridal veil, she must be as innocent in mind as she was chaste in body, but at any moment after the marriage vows were spoken she might know everything. The conventional attitude is aptly expressed by Dorothea's Uncle in Middlemarch, when he suggests to the bridegroom that he get her to read him "light things, Smollett—Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker; they are a little broad, but she may read anything, now she's married, you know."

Just how and when she was to enter upon motherhood she did not know, but if she permitted herself to think of it at all, she naturally supposed that she would at least have some choice as to the convenient season. But since the conventional training of girls prescribed that she should not think of it at all, the conception of her first child was almost certainly "an accident," neither desired nor predetermined, merely incidental to the period of excitement, fatigue, and mixed emotion following upon the wedding display and the honeymoon tour. Any sturdy and vulgar-minded servant maid was in a more natural and wholesome state of mind upon her marriage than the hyper-modest, carefully protected daughter of the house. The ignorant young wife waited upon her fate more often in fear than in joy, and was, not infrequently, the subject of jest on the matter of her pregnancy before she herself learned what the disturbance of her physical rhythm presaged.

Though she might look forward with joy to having a child of her love, the lifelong habits of exaggerated modesty could not be thrown aside, but were rather intensified by the consciousness of her condition. She tried to conceal it as long as she could by corsets and clothing which were injurious, and when it was no longer possible to hide the fact, she stayed indoors like an invalid, venturing out only after nightfall or in a carriage. Such unhygienic living made her appetite capricious and her temper as well; robbed her muscles— undeveloped enough already—of their proper nutrition and exercise; and made her more and more unfit for the severe physical test of childbirth.

If such a degree of ignorance concerning the facts of sex be thought incredible, one has only to inquire of elderly women still living, or to read the biographies of our grandmothers, to know that their prudish habits were maintained throughout a lifetime. Their code did not permit the mention of approaching confinement even to their female relatives. In the biography of Susan B. Anthony there occurs this paragraph about her mother:

"Lucy Read Anthony was of a very timid and reticent disposition, and painfully modest and shrinking. Before the birth of every child she was overwhelmed with embarrassment and humiliation, secluded herself from the outside world, and would not speak of the expected little one even to her mother. The mother would assist her over-burdened daughter by making the necessary garments, take them to her home, and lay them away carefully in a drawer, but no word of acknowledgment ever passed between them."

And yet Lucy Read Anthony was set down as a very "happy wife and mother," and her husband was an exceptionally kind and generous man.

Before the end of the Nineteenth Century the physical poverty and nervousness of American women had become a matter of serious concern. Medical men were searching for subtle causes, while all the time a perfectly patent group of causes were only vaguely recognized. It was still the fashion to attribute all the weaknesses of women to their inherent nature, rather than to look for their origin in social convention and inactivity. When one realizes how widespread was the ideal of girlish delicacy half a century ago, the wonder is that any wife who had been brought up under the restrictions of that period, survived to bear more than a single child. Perhaps all that saved them was the necessity of caring for the child itself, and sometimes of doing their own housework.

It was the husband's exclusive privilege to initiate the innocent girl whom he married into the mysteries of the sex relation. The only other information regarding motherhood that she received was usually obtained after conception from her mother and the neighbor women. This mother-lore was a mixture of old women's traditions and midwives' quackery handed down from one generation to another, and the prospective mother's sensitive organization was stimulated with the details of miscarriages, premature deliveries, still-births, and all the sensational symptoms within their experience. During the later months of pregnancy she remained altogether indoors, more often than not, waiting from day to day in a state of terror for labor to begin.

The thought that a strange man would attend her at childbirth added to her shrinking, and often caused her to prefer the services of a self-trained midwife, whose ignorance of obstetrical practice and hygiene might leave her a semi-wreck for life. Aside from her own undeveloped physique, the lack of properly trained attendants of her own sex was unquestionably a considerable factor in the preventable miseries from which many a child-bearing woman suffered.

When she was on her feet again, and before she had fully recovered her strength, she was confronted with a new duty, for which she had had no preparation whatever, unless she herself had been an elder daughter in a large family. If she were able to nurse her child, she was fortunate, but if not—as often happened—she entered upon a period of almost sleepless vigilance to keep alive the precious creature who had already cost her so much. For her task of nurse she was as unfitted as she had been unprepared for marriage. In her day there were no specialist treatises on the care and feeding of infants, nor trained nurses at call, to supply her deficiencies and to teach her how to care for her baby. The polite education in music, French, and the rise and fall of European kingdoms, of which she had been so proud, had small application seemingly to the problems of nutrition and bacteriology which must be solved. And no blame could fall on so conscientious and inadequate a mother if, after weeks of exacting care, the poor little life flickered out.

The child-bearing woman of the past century was, indeed, the victim of the traditions of her time, which had predestined her to physical weakness, sexual ignorance, and incompetence in the only career which was open to her. Nor did she alone pay the cost. In every large family there was a miscarriage or an infant death for every two or three children that survived to adult years. The physical exhaustion, the sorrow, and the disruption of the family comfort in such infant losses, cannot be measured in economic terms, but were none the less costly to society.

If the young mother were vigorous enough to endure repeated pregnancies at intervals of fifteen or twenty months, she gradually learned her business and outlived some of her maiden fears and griefs, as all her powers were drawn upon by the demands of a growing family. There is a curious literature of what might be called "tired motherhood" hidden away in old albums and the quaint magazines which constituted family reading from 1840 to 1880. In one of these volumes, printed as late as 1872, there is a series of articles on the "Physical Life of Women," which, in process of giving good advice, affords a picture of the ordinary mother's life.

"She cannot be sick-there is no one to care for her if she is; on the contrary, the whole family feel injured because their comfort is disturbed and their habits of dependence upon ' Mother' broken in upon. . . . She grows nervous and irritable . . . she has little time for sentiment, but she is shocked sometimes to find how all light and sunshine seem gradually fading out of her life. . . .

"The children! Ah, well, children are a well-spring of pleasure when the house is wide, the purse long, and the welcome warm; but how is it when they represent so many pairs of worn-out shoes, an ever-ascending pile of unending stockings, continually recurring questions of hats, and suits, and aprons, and innumerable other articles of clothing, which not only have to be made, but made over with every changing season and every addition to the increasing family. . . .

"She is aware that her husband secretly chafes at the change in her appearance, and is growing indifferent to her under the combined influence of family responsibility and the occasional experience of bitterness prompted by her own soreness of heart. She cannot make him understand how the bright, sunny-tempered girl whom he married is dying by inches, leaving a careworn, joyless woman in her place! And so she goes on her hurried, yet monotonous way, each day repeating itself, until some morning she is obliged to take time to die and be buried."

Even when the house was wide, the purse long, and the welcome warm to each successive child, many a tired mother must have felt like Samuel Sewall, the Colonial father, who hoped, when his fourteenth child was born, that "The Lord would think that was enough." For, consider the daily round of the mother of even a moderate family of five children-the actual physical labor involved in merely feeding and clothing them, and attending to their toilet. A man who had seen a woman contractor in a Southwestern city down in a ditch, showing a laborer how to lay sewer pipe, remarked thoughtfully that, perhaps, it was not any more disagreeable than the sanitary duties of the mother of a household. Consider the incessantness of children—their questions and cryings, their demands and naughtiness, all of which must be patiently and kindly and wisely attended to by the competent mother. The typical father, who spent most of his waking hours outside the house, saw only their pleasant qualities, and seldom experienced to the full the monotony of their importunity and distraction. A delightful mother of my acquaintance was accustomed to invite her friends to visit her only in the evening, because, as she said, "I am only a human being after the children are asleep;" and another healthy mother of three vigorous youngsters used to say that Heaven was to her a place where she could sleep as long as she wished.

Nor must it be forgotten that in the intervals of baby-tending and child-rearing, the typical country house-mother of the past century expected to do the larger part of the housework without the aid of any of the modern conveniences; cooking and dishwashing without running water in the house; washing of clothes without set tubs and washing-powders; ironing of garments—for it would have been slovenly to leave them "rough dry"

—without electric and gas devices. Miss Anthony recorded in her Life and Letters how the young married women who were interested in women's rights, and anti-slavery, and temperance, dropped out of the work as soon as they were caught in the "matrimonial maelstrom;" and she remarked in a letter to one of them: "If you allowed yourself to remain too long snuggled in the Abrahamic bosom of home, it required great will power to resurrect your soul."

During the infancy of her children, the mother had very little life of her own, but, if she were a happy wife, found her compensation for her personal sacrifices in the satisfaction of the maternal passion and in the unfolding intelligence of the children. One by one they left her to go to school, and began to bring home new ideas; these furnished excitement and incentive to her vicarious ambition, and throughout their childhood years provided the chief stimulus of the mother's life. But by so much as their opportunities were better than hers had been, they began to outstrip her intellectually. For beyond the three R's her education had not only been useless, but it had not even taught her to think for herself, nor inculcated a taste for serious reading and information. When the smaller children wanted help in the solution of some arithmetical problem, or in the construction of a composition, she found herself too rusty, if not too ignorant, and covered up her chagrin with an excuse of busy-ness.

By the time the boys were in trousers, and the girls in long skirts, they had found out that their mother's ideas were not only old-fashioned, but often foolish. In the family discussions on public events they saw that their father had no respect for her opinions, though he might receive them with polite tolerance. The mother's mind, having been for years wholly absorbed in household and maternal details, gradually lost the power to be interested in impersonal topics. Her conversation became inconsequential, and she was, as a rule, quite incapable of concentrating herself for any length of time upon a single idea. The distinguishing mental characteristic of the domestic, especially of the maternal woman, came to be heterogeneity. The necessity every mother was under of giving her mind simultaneously to a great variety of childish and domestic demands, all day long and for years together, produced a habit of mental scrappiness. Having herself been interrupted incessantly, she had no hesitation in breaking in upon any talk or reading with irrelevant questions and comments. If proof were needed, one need only contemplate the intellectual attempts of certain middle-aged clubwomen who are trying to regain, after a life of distracting domestic detail, the power to think intelligently on wider subjects.

In most cases the mother developed the charac teristic female virtues essential to family peace—industry, patience, devotion to physical comfort, sympathy with petty griefs, discomforts, and ailments, and, above all, unselfishness—to an exaggerated degree, and, in the process, lost sight of the larger values. The children, therefore, however they might depend upon her affection and sacrifice, discounted her opinions. The boys were apt to become unruly before they reached the age of puberty, and had to be turned over to their father in the hope that he might instil good behavior, if not respect, by his technically greater authority. The half-grown girls were likely to begin to model themselves upon the pattern of some younger, more attractive woman, less careworn and old-fashioned than their mother.

If, perchance, by the unselfishness and sweetness of her character, she still was able to keep their confidence, she might remain the confidante of their troubles and ambitions, though without the ability to be a trustworthy and intelligent guide. Like the hen who hatched ducklings, she saw them swim away, though she could not swim herself. Some day, when they were married and had children of their own, they might begin to appreciate, in the light of their own experiences, what they owed to their mother; but in proportion as they developed beyond her, they would also rate her at her true social value, in spite of all affection. For gratitude grows only in rich soil, and filial piety is apt to flower only in proportion to the quality of parental culture.

If the husband and father were a man who, by virtue of integrity, justice, and gentleness, commanded the willing obedience of his children, he enforced upon them respectful behavior toward their mother, no matter how limited or undeserving she might be. But if, as sometimes happened, the titular head of the family were lazy, incapable, eccentric, or drunken, the competent mother's position became well-nigh intolerable. She must obey her husband-by law of Church and State—and she must continue to bear children to a man whose superior she knew herself to be, but without authority to enforce even nominal respect and obedience upon them. Thus motherhood might become a sort of doom.

On the other hand, according to the standard of the time, there was no woman so petty, so vain, so enfeebled in body or mind, that she might not become the wife of an intelligent and honorable man and, hanging like a dead-weight upon him, become the incompetent mother of puny children. A society which was shocked at a female preacher or painter or doctor, complacently acquiesced in the tradition that any woman was good enough to be a mother, if only she wore a wedding-ring. The convenient theory handed down from licentious ages, that parenthood was both inevitable and praiseworthy, whatever the qualifications of the progenitors, reduced some wives to the position of mistresses, without any of the advantages of that more independent position.

The teaching of the clergy that all children came from God, and that the man who begot the greatest number was a benefactor to the State, was, in fact, left over from an age when the survival of a State might depend upon the capacity of its women to replace those fallen in war. Aside from the fact that the less intelligent a population is, the more recklessly it will breed, the conditions of rural life in America demanded abundant child labor. The farmer's daughter stood on a stool to wash dishes, made patchwork quilts, and acted as a "little mother" to the younger children; while boys, from the time they were ten years old, earned their "keep" by chores and the lighter farm labor.

Children were then an economic asset. Following the English tradition, the prosperous American farmer of the earlier Nineteenth Century often retired from active labor at fifty or fifty-five, allowing his wife and his numerous progeny to support him. By custom the children who went from home to work turned their wages over to their parents until they were of age, and expected nothing more than a "setting-out" when they. left home permanently. In such a society, the more children there were, provided, always, they were vigorous, the richer the parents.

The statistics of the period do not afford any trustworthy information of the death-rate of married women; but, indirectly, the family histories of the time reveal an unusual number of second and even third wives. There is abundant evidence that the large family of which we read so much was often produced at the cost of the first wife's life. Even when the mother of a large family outlived puerperal fevers, lacerations, and the exhaustion of rapidly succeeding pregnancies, it was not—as we often assume—to enjoy a vigorous, intelligent old-womanhood, but in a state of premature decrepitude, similar to that of women among primitive races. In fact, we need only take account of the increasing youthfulness of middle-aged women to infer that many men as well as women have begun to count the cost of parenthood as measured by a rising standard of child quality and child care.

In an economic estimate of motherhood as a vocation, it must be remembered that this "career" became anomalous only when wives ceased to do anything of value, except child-bearing. So long as married women were producers and manufacturers in their own homes, they needed no other justification in the eyes of their husbands or society, whether they bore many or few children. When, however, they became relatively idle and unproductive; as in the latter part of the last century, the sole claim they could make for accepting a parasitic existence, lay in motherhood. Yet for this their feeble physique and childish mentality had in great measure un-fitted them; while, at the same time, children themselves had become less an asset and more of a privilege—or of a burden, from another standpoint—because they must be supported, educated, and launched in life upon a much higher plane.

The confusion involved in the purely sentimental estimate of motherhood was produced by such discordant ideas as the voluntary sacrifice of women to posterity; the dependence of women, whether mothers or not, upon men; and their implied release from economic and social responsibility. Toward the end of the century the cost of such a mixed system became apparent. For the traditions of the home-seeking and homekeeping woman reacted almost as disastrously upon husbands and fathers as upon women. Men were encouraged in reckless paternity—for what else was a woman good for aside from the sex-relation and motherhood! Since home was the woman's sphere, the husband felt himself relieved from all responsibility when he had fulfilled his own notion of being a good provider. He betook himself of an evening to the village store on a plea of business, or to the neighboring town, leaving his wife to the doubtful amusement of gossip and the weekly prayer meeting. He saw no reason for keeping his wife's mind alive by drawing her into the circle of his own broader interests, because he had been brought up to suppose that she had only a puny intellect, and it would be of no use to her anyway. Not until the children were old enough to be interesting in themselves did he take much account of them beyond performing his financial and disciplinary duties. In consequence of this complete division of interests and duties, the fathers and sons, and the mothers and daughters in any town or neighborhood, constituted social cliques separated by a sex-convention analogous to race-prejudice. And each clique had a sort of racial contempt for the ideas of the other, which was a common subject of mutual jests.

Hardly did the busy mother and wife of the Nineteenth Century reach the mid-plateau of her life and begin to rest a little from absorbing family cares, when the second great apprehension of her life would begin to creep upon her. The children grown up, married, and gone away; the finances of the household eased, making hard work and strict economy no longer necessary; she feared to find herself gradually isolated, and of less and less use. She, who had been important to several, was now reduced to petting her grandchildren, seeing that all her husband's tastes were indulged, reviving the semi-ornamental handicrafts of her youth, gossiping over the tea-table with other capable, restless middle-aged ladies as busily idle as herself-striving to pass from wifehood to old age. Coerced by the tradition current among women that she must be physically miserable at the time of the climacteric, and morbidly afraid that her husband would not continue to love her, she wore out the last years of her potential motherhood in teaching herself to be semi-idle, and accustoming herself to be "laid on the shelf." With so little worth while to do, and twenty or thirty years yet to do it in, she descended prematurely upon the tiresome road to her grave.

If she lived out the allotted span of years, they were passed swathed in mourning for those who had gone before; as a widow, perhaps living round in the houses of one child or another, whose more modern habits left her behind; losing through inertia the last ray of the brightness of her maidenhood, and cherishing pitifully the motherhood which had given her life its only profound meaning. To the end the glory of motherhood remained her pride and comfort. Whether her later years proved busy with grandmotherly cares, or merely wasted away in the futile busyness of old-womanhood, she had, at any rate, fulfilled the appointed destiny of her sex in achieving marriage and children. Even if the man had been a bad husband, and though some of the children turned out poor human specimens, she had, nevertheless, justified her own existence.

For practical purposes in life the Universe is no larger than the limits of perception. The fly sees no farther than the infinitesimal radius of his vision, and is at the mercy of the huge thing beyond it; the dog exists to follow his nose; and the doves that cross the Mediterranean beat themselves to death against the snares of men. So it has been with womankind, whose nature in the course of evolution has been restricted to the narrow demands of an inner domestic circle whose periphery has been constantly expanded by man.

The zoologists are well aware that in spite of every care the higher animals will rarely breed in captivity-yet womankind is expected to do so successfully. Not a little of the growing discontent of women with their lot in the past century arose from the unformulated but justihable resentments of those elected to be mothers. In proportion as they were intelligent they knew themselves the victims of a sort of social pretense; the solemn talk about the "glory of motherhood" and the "only worthy sphere"

was by no means always borne out by the facts. Motherhood was, indeed, glorious when joyously and intelligently undertaken; and, as a career, worthy of the best ambition and much sacrifice when the parents were equally yoked to bear the load, and the mother fit for her share of it. But in many instances the mothers had been led to marry by the deceiving glamor of love, while little more than children themselves in physique and mind, and while wholly ignorant of the serious import of that to which they committed themselves; and in so doing they had been placed absolutely at the mercy of the man who only nominally guaranteed them support.

The mother, even in her best estate, knew herself a sort of charitable dependent; and it is to the credit of men that they were so often more generous than law and social custom. Yet the logical result of a social arrangement which, in the guise of protection, afforded an opportunity for outrage or neglect, could only be resentment and ultimately protest, on the part of married women. The startling proposals of the present day, the transition from unalterable wedlock to more and more divorce, the resistance of many women to involuntary motherhood; the entrance of protected women into wage-earning occupations; these and many other symptoms are phases of evolution engendered in part by the hiatus between the high rank which women believed motherhood should hold, and the realities of married women's lives in the past generation.

If it be thought that too dark a picture has been drawn, let it be compared with the educated and relatively competent motherhood of the present day. Among younger women there are not a few-though still too few-who, after a thorough education, became engaged to men whom they had known in college or in industry. Taking their future task as mothers and wives intelligently and seriously, they informed themselves on sexhygiene and the care of children. For the marriage ceremony they chose a period of highest health, declining to make a public display. During the months of gestation they developed their muscles in anticipation of childbirth, putting themselves in training as for a race, under the direction of a physician. Often overcoming their own hereditary weakness, they have brought lusty, much-desired children into the world, whose physical and mental development they are capable of directing. Such motherhood may well be called a worthy career, and the joys and glory of it only bring into darker contrast the childish, unprepared, enfeebled motherhood of the times whose legacy of miserable children and unhappy homes has not yet passed away.