Education for Motherhood: I

I

THE optimism with reference to the mothers of the future which I expressed in the article ‘Motherliness’² is based on my habit of counting by epochs in judging the probable future of humanity. The optimist is often right. But only if he can wait — some hundred years!

The modern woman’s view of motherhood is not calculated to nourish optimism. This view is the natural result of the spirit of the age which is determined fundamentally by the two great vital forces, physical and spiritual, which, since the morning of the race, have had decisive influence on its destinies, — economics and religion. During the last century, economic conditions have been regarded as of greater importance, and religion of less. The souls of nations, as well as the individual soul, have been earth-bound in the fullest sense of the word. Investigations of earth and nature and the utilization of all resources have occupied a race which has made the spirit of Aladdin’s lamp a slave of utility; which, with greedy heart, has gained the whole world, but in the mean time has heedlessly forfeited its own soul.

Science and desire for gain have marvelously broadened the sphere of man’s power over an external world. Simultaneously with this the emancipation of woman has proceeded. The world invaded by woman, both needing and demanding work, has not been a world in which holy voices have spoken of high things. It has been a world in which strong and hot hands have grasped what to their age seemed the kingdom of heaven: material wealth which gave its possessors the power, the honor and the glory. Gain has been God, and man this God’s prophet. Work has been divine worship, especially such work as produced riches. The possibilities of satisfying steadily increasing cravings for pleasure, and of living an ever more care-free and secure life, have multiplied. And women did not stem the tide; they followed it.

In logical conjunction with the raising of utility as the highest of lifevalues, a gifted American woman has offered her programme for the solution of the conflicts between woman’s labor and motherhood, namely, the rearing and educating of children outside the home. Successive institutions are suggested for the bottle-period, kindergarten, and school-age, and so on. Thus, she contends, will the parents, who are usually poor educators, be supplanted by trained and ‘born’ educators; the children would stand in visiting relations to the individual home with its too warm and emasculating tenderness, while in the institutions they would get the bracing air and the training for social life demanded in this age, instead of the egotistical attitude of family life. The social activities of the mothers of the well-to-do classes and the outside work of the wage-earning mothers make mother-care only a figure of speech, and the children are neglected. But, on the other hand, by this plan of reform, the bodies as well as the souls of the children would be well cared for by specialists. The mothers could calmly devote themselves to their gainful work and their social duties. The child’s need of the mother and the mother’s need of the child is a prejudice which must vanish with all other superstitions from lower stages of culture, if the mothers are to be coequal with men, community members, capable of work, and if the children are to be well reared for the social vocations which must soon determine the trend of all lives.

Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s view coincides somewhat with that of the great African author, Olive Schreiner. Both these writers emphasize rightly the fact that since woman’s home work no longer has the same productive value that it had in an age when she was the one to prepare the raw materials and to produce all the necessities for the household, the women of the leisure class, under the shibboleth ‘the care of the home,’ have become the largest class of social parasites of contemporary times, who pay with their body for the freedom from work that the men gain for them. Women have become ‘over-sexed’ because to enhance their sexual attraction has been the surest means of obtaining an idle life through matrimony. Until this and similar economic interests vanish from marriage, love cannot be pure nor can the position of the wife be one of true human dignity. Long ago, in the eighteen-thirties, these truths were expressed by the great Swedish writer, C. J. L. Almqvist.³

If the Spartan plan above mentioned were really a solution of the problem, there would be no occasion for further talk about general education for motherhood. In that case, all young girls could go straight on toward professional training with a remunerative vocation as their goal. And this would be not only a personal, but a national economic gain. For the personal energies and the money spent in acquiring a profession would not be wasted, as is now so often the case, if motherhood were but a short interruption in a woman’s professional work.

This programme, outlined but briefly since it is well known in America, has the enormous advantage of making clear the dilemma before which many women who work for their livelihood play ostrich, namely, that a woman can not be a competent outside worker, working from eight to ten or more hours a day, and at the same time a housewife and mother who performs well the duties these vocations demand. That which many women with exceedingly small claims upon them still insist on — that they are well able to manage outside work, housekeeping, and the rearing of children simultaneously — is just what the reform-programme refutes, making it plain that the present attempts at compromise have resulted in a lessening of value together with an enormous overstrain.

I, too, am convinced that the present state of affairs is untenable from the economic, hygienic, ethic, and æsthetic point of view. A radical transformation is needed. But I hope that this will go in an opposite direction from the one indicated above.

The programme for the abolition of home-training rests on three unproven and undemonstrable assumptions: first, that women’s mental and spiritual work in the home — the creating of the home atmosphere, the management of the housekeeping and the upbringing of children — is of no ‘productive’ value; secondly, that parents are incapable of acquiring proficiency as educators unless they are ‘born’ educators; thirdly, that nature amply provides such ‘born’ educators, so that the many thousands of institutions — with a professional mother for about every twenty children — could be supplied with them in sufficient quantity and of excellent quality.

These assumptions emanate from a comparison between the present untrained mothers and trained educators, and between all the dark sides of the home and the light sides of collective upbringing. But on so warped a comparison we certainly cannot base a demand for the discontinuance of the up-bringing in the home.

II

The past gives us proof enough that woman’s creation, the home, has been her great cultural contribution to civilization. And even the present main trend of the desires and feelings of the race shows that the home has not lost its value. But nothing is more certain than that there has awakened a need within the people for a renaissance of the home. In my opinion, such a renaissance can come only through a new marriage, where the perfect equality and liberty of both husband and wife are established, — through a strict responsibility towards society in regard to parentage outside as well as within marriage; through education for motherhood; and, lastly, through rendering motherhood economically secure, recognizing it as a public work to be rewarded and controlled by society.

Thus the problem seems to me more complex, involving greater expense, and therefore more difficult of solution.

And yet, it must be solved. The socially pernicious, racially wasteful and soul-withering consequences of the working of mothers outside the home must cease. And this can only come to pass, either through the programme of institutional up-bringing, or through the intimated renaissance of the homes. The self-supporting women of the present day do not want again to become dependent solely upon the husbands’ maintenance in order to be able to fulfill the duties of a mother in the home. And thus there remains only institutional up-bringing or motherhood regarded as a social work.

During the child’s first seven years, years that determine its whole life, its educator cannot well fulfill her mission without having a daily opportunity to observe the child’s nature, in order by consistent action to influence it, encouraging certain tendencies and restraining others. This alone precludes the mother’s working outside the home. To an even greater degree must her work outside the home be rejected in favor of that most essential education, — the indirect, — which radiates from the mother’s own personality, from the spirit she creates in the home. Like the direct education, the indirect cannot be accomplished in stray moments snatched from professional work. A home atmosphere is not a condition which stays permanent of itself, one of those works of art which once created remain unchanged. The creating of a home is, on the contrary, a kind of art which has this in common with all art of life — that it demands the artist’s continuous presence in body and soul. A home life where the mother’s unceasing contribution of self is lacking is like a drama on a film.

Wherever the great and beautiful work of art, a home, has come into being, the wife and mother has had her paramount existence in that home though her interests and activities have not necessarily been limited to its sphere. But husband and children have been able to count on her in the home as they could count on the fire on the hearth, the cool shade under the tree, the water in the well, the bread in the sacrament. Thus upon husband and children is bestowed the experience which a great poet gained from his mother. ‘All became to her a wreath! ’ A wreath where every day’s toil and holiday’s joy, hours of labor and moments of rest, were leaf and blossom and ribbon.

The wise educator is never one who is ‘educating’ from morning to night. She is one who, unconsciously to the children, brings to them the chief sustenance and creates the supreme conditions for their growth. Primarily she is the one who, through the serenity and wisdom of her own nature is dew and sunshine to growing souls. She is one who understands how to demand in just measure, and to give at the right moment. She is one whose desire is law, whose smile is reward, whose disapproval is punishment, whose caress is benediction.

Sometimes fathers, too, are endowed with this genius for education. And it would not be the least of the consequences of outside upbringing, if the children were to lose not only the daily influence of the mothers but also that of the fathers. Because the fathers are the breadwinners, and also because of their lack of training for fatherhood, this influence is as a rule insignificant. But it is very important that this state of affairs be changed. According to the testimony of an American author,⁴ the increasing predominance of women teachers in America is already cause for anxiety, and with good reason, for the good order of things in school, in the home, in the community, demands that men and women coöperate as equals, having like authority and like responsibility. But since a division of labor on the whole is unavoidable, this division must be determined by the experience that in the labor market, in the majority of cases, men are just as able as women, and often better able, to perform the work women perform.

In the home, on the other hand, men cannot supplant the spirit and activities of women. Neither can the contribution of the wives and mothers to the homes be replaced by that of professional women within or outside the homes. Can the heart in an organism be replaced by a pumping engine, however ingenious? Any reform programme which does not consider these realities falls under the wise judgment of the shrewd Catherine II: ‘Reforms are easily accomplished on the patient paper. But in reality they are written on the human flesh, which is sensitive.’ Especially is this true of the child who, moreover, must submit to the influence of his educators, unable to choose or evade them. The author of the programme means that the mothers who are gifted as educators should bring up about twenty other children, together with their own. But each young soul needs to be enveloped in its own mother’s tenderness, just as surely as the human embryo needed the mother’s womb to grow in, and the baby the mother’s breast to be nourished by. According to the programme referred to, each child would be allotted a twentieth part of motherliness; the mother’s own children would receive no more than the others.

Of the real outcome of this plan a prominent American woman gave me a touching illustration. As sole support of her son, she had been compelled to send him to a boarding-school where many little motherless boys were brought up. When she went to visit her boy, the other boys fought with him for a place on her lap, so hungry were they for a moment’s sensation of motherly affection!

That many children are unhappy in their homes does not prove that the same children would be happier in an institution; only of such children as were transferred from bad homes to good institutions could this be hoped. That many a careful home education lias failed does not prove that the children brought up in a particular home would have turned out better in an institution. The very best institution cannot show the consideration for a child’s individuality, or furnish the peace and freedom for the development of a talent, that an average middle-class home can.⁵ The more individual a child is, the more it suffers by the uniformity and the leveling forces which are imposed upon it already by the day school. And how much more must this be the case in a boardingschool!

On the other hand, we have the manifold testimonies given by great personalities of the boundless influence of a mother’s, of a fat her’s, understanding affection, in the development of the child’s individuality. In the children’s resemblance to the parents, the latter have a guide to the understanding of the children’s inherent qualities, which the teachers lack. And if, on the one hand, these resemblances contain the seeds of conflict, on the other, they furnish various possibilities of influence.

As against all the cases where the tyranny of the parents — now increasingly rare — has forced the children into an erroneous walk of life, may be put those where the parents have discovered their children’s talents and have encouraged them in the right direction. Sometimes a good teacher has done the same. But a teacher, with some tens of children, has not the same opportunity to observe the individual child as have the parents. The mistakes of the teacher are, therefore, far more numerous than those of the parents. If these children would, in many cases, have chosen other parents, they would, in most cases, have chosen other teachers.

‘Born educators’ with keys to the children’s souls in their pockets are, indeed, the unredeemable promissory notes of the institutional programme. The assurance that the children in collective institutions would be cared for only by ‘born educators’ is as untenable as would be a promise that their musical training would be directed by nobody short of a Beethoven! ‘Born educators’ are not only as rare as other geniuses, but are also most difficult to discover. For how can they demonstrate their genius except in the practice of educational work? And often they find no opportunity to educate; an examination can, for instance, just as little reveal their soul power as it can that of a poet. The brilliant and eloquent graduate often is, and will continue to be, victorious in competition with the ‘born educator.’ And, as everybody knows, the result frequently is that the greatest abominations occur at institutions where perverse principals infernally torment the children — principals chosen by boards of trustees who have felt convinced of having made the best choice! But even in those cases where the choice has been good, how much remains to be desired!

One pedagogue, for instance, may have excellent ideas, but be lacking in nobility of character. Another may possess great psychological insight, but no ability in the psychologically correct treatment of children. Here may be found pedagogical genius, but without warmth of heart. There, heart but no sagacity. Another is a despotic nature, who in spite of all pretty talk of children’s rights, violates them to make the little ones conform to his ideas. Still another is vacillating and has no authority.

And if thus already the first-rate teachers are deficient, how much more so will this be the case with those mediocre teachers of whom every school and boarding-school has a majority!

These professional educators, — as they are called in the programme for upbringing outside of the home, — so far from being wholly filled by their calling, spiritually liberated from all side interests, which, according to the same programme, are supposed to impede the parents’ capabilities as educators, — these professionals are very much like other people, absorbed by their own sympathies and antipathies, conflicts and rivalries, in which the children frequently become involved.

The parents would stand in the same relation to all these institutions as they now do to the day schools, in that what they objected to they could seldom change. But if the parents were not content to remain simply automata, who deliver the child-material to the institutions, they must, on the one hand, endeavor to assert their own opinion as against the institutions which cause contentions, and, on the other, try to make use of the children’s home visits for counteracting such influence of the school as they consider unfavorable. But here they would meet with the same fundamental difficulty which arises in cases where children, as a consequence of divorce, are periodically with either father or mother. So many requisites for understanding are lacking: constraint and strangeness have to be overcome; a nervous tenderness or a cold criticism often destroys attempts at intimacy. In a word, even the best institutions would show the same dark sides as do the homes, or similar ones, but unaccompanied by the bright sides of the homes, which outweigh their shortcomings.

Let us assume, however, that the choice of principal in one of these proposed institutions has been a happy one. Yet such a teacher has not the spontaneous love for the child which may, to be sure, on the one hand, cause parental blindness, but, on the other hand, gives the clearness of vision which belongs to love alone. At best the teacher extends to the children a general love, or a personal love to one child here and there. But it is just this personal love which the human soul needs in order to burst into blossom.

The conditions here indicated furnish one of the reasons why children from charitable institutions hardly ever become prominent members of society. The main reason, it is true, is that the children for whom society has had to care in institutions have often sprung from poorly equipped parents. Moreover, to be sure, the prominent individuals in a nation are always few in comparison with the others. Still, if we can expect one great genius in each million of inhabitants, one in a million institutional children may be expected to be really excellent. But has a single one ever appeared? Is not, on the contrary, the insignificance of such children a rule with few exceptions? And must not this partly depend on this very system of upbringing? ⁶

Even where the child-material is excellent, as for example in the English country schools for boys, observations have led to the belief that these schools are more favorable for the preservation of the national type — for good as well as evil — than for the development of the individual. Here, as in other boarding-schools, certain social virtues are developed, certain qualities useful in public life. But the springing up of new types, stronger individual aptitudes, more sensitive and fine soul life is not favored by any kind of collective education extending through the larger part of youth. A period of institutional life has often been a splendid thing for children who have been lonely or spoiled at home, has hardened them, forced them to subordinate their own egotism, taught them consideration for others, and common responsibilities. But even if institutions can thus rough-plane the material that is to become a member of society, nevertheless they cannot — if they take in the major part of t he child’s education — accomplish that which is needed first of all if we are to lift ourselves to a higher spiritual plane in an economically just society: they cannot deepen the emotional life. Continuity of impressions is a first condition for such a deepening. But the upbringing outside of the home, which would leave the nursing infants in Miss A.’s hands, the kindergarten children to Miss B., the primary school children to Miss C., the school to various Misses, would again and again disrupt the fine fibres with which the child-heart has become tied to these various mother-substitutes. At last the heart would lose its power of attachment, just as is the case when children spend their lives traveling and only get into hotel relations, never into home or homeland relations with the world.

The psychological progress of the development of the emotions indicates that the child should learn to love a few in the home and in its native place; that the soul should broaden to feelings for the comrade circle, finally to embrace society and humanity. Every effort to change the order in this progress of growth is as fruitless as to put plants in the ground blossom downward and roots in the air. Want of insight into those spiritual conditions of growth is the principal error in the programme for collective upbringing. What youth would have left of soul after such an education, would barely be sufficient for social and community purposes; for the needs of the personality it would not suffice.

And even if collective education, when the school age is reached, were arranged as it is in some of the German (in many ways excellent) “Landerziehungsheime,’⁷ where a small number of children and teachers live in a separate cottage and constitute the so-called ‘ family,’in the long run it would be only a poor substitute for the natural family, where care and anxiety, help and comfort, memories and hopes, work and festivity crystallize around a nucleus, combine and intensify the emotions, while in a larger, oftenchanging circle even the most beautiful impressions become weakened and shallow.

The very worst suggestion which has appeared from any side is that of the family colony, with common kitchen and dining-room, common play-room and care of the babies, etcetera. Even this would give the mothers freedom to pursue professional work and yet in some measure retain the home for the children. But if Satan announced a prize competition for the best means of increasing hatred on earth, this reform proposition ought to receive the first prize. That seclusion and introspection which are necessary for mutual communication between husband and wife, if they want to grow into complementary personalities, would be as difficult to attain as silence in the market-place for the enjoyment of music. The unfortunate children growing up in such a family colony would be cross-questioned, commissioned, corrected, and teased. Such a colony, far from broadening the children’s interests outside their own circle — as the proposers contend — and teaching them amiable social ways, would cause torment to independent spirits, and increase dullness in the constrained. Besides, children seldom have more affection than they abundantly need for their parents, and parents seldom have more patience than they abundantly need for their own children.

Countless causes for friction would arise among the grown-ups as a result of differences between the children, between husbands on account of wives and between wives on account of husbands. Though in the beginning all were harmony, it would end in discord, after the well-known pattern of most similar or even less intimate groupings.

These reasons against the disintegration of the home might be multiplied. I wish now only to emphasize one point of view, which I have often advanced before. Women have always, and not least in America,⁸ by the trend their own social work has taken, been able to show to what an extent society needs that the specially womanly, that is, motherly, feelings and outlook be asserted in action. These motherly ways of feeling and thinking have acquired their characteristics and their stability by reason of the hitherto existing division of labor, in which the task of making the home and rearing the children created ‘womanliness’ with its strength and its weakness, just as the outward struggle for existence, the competitive field of labor, created the strength and weakness of ‘manliness.’

That women, during their protected, inwardly concentrated life, would acquire other emotional standards, other habits of thought than men, is obvious. Hitherto, however, they have had very small opportunities to invest their stored wealth in the upbuilding of this ‘man-made world.' Consequently, there is a crying need of womanliness, especially motherliness, in public life. But motherliness is no more permanent than any other state of the soul. Soul states are like the water in nature, sometimes abundant, sometimes scant, clear to-day, turbid to-morrow, now flowing, then again frozen — all according to the soil through which it finds its way, and the temperature it meets. If now the division of labor be changed to such an extent that all women during the whole work-period — that is, about forty years — devote themselves to outside occupations, while a minority of women, who are often not mothers themselves, professionally fill the need for child-rearing, then motherliness will diminish generation after generation. For it is not alone the bearing of children, neither is it the upbringing alone, that develops motherliness, but both together are needed. The result will be that women’s contribution to society will be similar to that of men. They will fill with stones the ‘springs in the valley of sorrow’ which the homes, in spite of everything, have been hitherto in our hard and arid existence. The new world, which the women soon will have a hand in making, will be no more beautiful, no warmer, than the present. Even a very much more rational and just social order cannot furnish compensation for all the subtle and immeasurable riches which directly and indirectly have flowed from the home.

If the destruction of the homes were the price the race must pay for woman’s attainment of full human dignity and citizenship, then the price would be too high. If the female parasites cannot be gotten rid of in any other way than by driving all women out of the homes to outside departments of labor, let us rather, then, allow the parasites to flourish, since of two social evils this would be the lesser.

But humanity will not have to choose between two such evils. The parasitical family woman just as much as the worn-out family drudge, the family egoism piling up wealth and the economically harassed family life, as well as other ignoble constituents which riches as well as poverty bring into the homes, are all part and parcel of the present social order. A society which sharply restricts inheritances, but protects the right of all children to the full development of their powers; which demands labor of all its members, but allows its women to choose between motherhood and outside work; a society in which attempts to live without work will be dealt with in the same manner as forgery — such a society is coming. But without such radical social transformations, a renaissance of the family life is not even conceivable. And it is likely to become actual when the changing orders of economics and religion combine forces.

[In the next issue of the Atlantic Miss Key will set forth her positive programme for educational reform in preparation for family life.]