Motherhood - A Look Into The Future

( Originally Published 1914 )

THE various expedients advocated in the preceding article for meeting the perplexities of a modern mother of grown-up children are all very well, as far as they go. And they probably go as far as any of us in this generation are able to go. But there is something more which we can do which will benefit society even more than our makeshift attempts to put ourselves to work after the undertaking of maternity is over. We can do some honest, unfrightened thinking about the whole matter. We can try to put aside our deeply ingrained traditions, to divest ourselves of our passionately held prejudices, and to look at the relations of the modern world to family life as they really are. Since few women are born radicals, and fewer still are trained to any sympathy with ideas that clash with tradition, any such investigation is bound to hurt us, to wound many sensitive places in our souls, and at the very least to startle and shock us. I myself have just emerged from such a long experience of anxious questioning, and though somewhat sore and shaken, I am so much less hurt than I feared that I am eager to set down my adventures, as a reassurance to other mothers who feel as I do, a menacing threat directed at family life by modern conditions.

As a first step to any discussion of the subject, I encountered everywhere, accepted as an axiom by all thinking people, this dictum, " Society needs for its highest development the full, purposeful, well-directed activity of every one of its members." I granted this, of course, making in my own mind the defiant addition, " But what better activity could any woman have than the training of her children? " The authorities, consulted in my effort to find answers to my questions, replied in substance, " In that axiom, 'activity' is modified by three adjectives, ' full, purposeful, and well-directed.' Let us see if they can all be applied to your hypothetical mother training her little children. Take your own case as typical. Suppose you have three children, a year-and-a-half apart, a more favorable condition for their home-life than usually exists. Now it is not only universally admitted that children in a large family are better off than those in a small one, but also that the more nearly children are of the same age, the more in common, naturally, are their tastes, amusements, and capacities. Hence the chosen friend of your six-year-old son is not his four year old brother, but the six and a half year old son of your neighbor, with whom he plays all the time you permit him. But your neighbor is excluded from any continuous service to society because she must care for her little son, while, in the next house, you claim to be in the same situation, although as a matter of fact the two children spend most of their time together. Is there not here a waste of the time of you two women? Why not systematize this very common situation a little? Why could not you and your neighbor combine forces in the following simple manner: you agree to care for both children (who being together and amusing each other are easier to care for than one singly) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while your neighbor takes care of them on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. This would leave you three free days a week, which every busy housekeeper knows might well be employed in attending with more ease to the affairs of your personal house-hold, and perhaps taking more interest in the affairs of your larger household, the municipality, or the State? You allow your little boy to spend half of his time playing with his little friend as it is, why not simply make it a regular thing, on which you can count, in the distribution of your time?

" Suppose now, to make the hypothetical case more apt, that, by an odd chance, your neighbor should also have three children, just about the ages of yours. Why would it not be a good idea for each of you to concentrate on the six children, three days a week, the care and attention which you now waste-fully reduplicate on three children apiece, You can-not claim that it takes every moment of your day to wash, dress, feed, and care for three children. They do not demand something from you at every moment of the day. They only demand something at sufficiently frequent intervals so that you cannot continuously (and hence effectively) attend to anything else. Some grown person must be on hand, though not by any means always occupied."

My latent suspicions sprung into flame. I had a stone wall to oppose to this disquieting innovation, and told myself hotly, " That's simply Communism, revoltingly applied to children ! That would mean that my neighbor was half bringing up my children ! I won't have that ! I want to bring them up myself ! They are my children!" I went on, indignantly naming over to myself the innumerable reasons why I wanted to bring up my own children I brought to mind the nestful of happy fledglings, fluttering to and from my knee, turning their sweet eyes upon me for guidance in the world to which I had brought them, running to me for help in their games, for sympathy in their sorrows, while I, passionately and utterly absorbed in them, felt that the world without them would be unendurably dreary.

But in the midst of painting this picture of domestic life I seemed to hear my mother's voice, sorrowfully describing an intimacy with adolescent girlhood, just as sweet as mine with my little ones, which she had courageously foregone when, at seven-teen, I ceased forever sharing my daily life and thoughts with her. And yet I had not gone to college against my mother's will. With this new preoccupation darkening my mind, I wondered for the first time how she had been able to summon the resolution to send me. It was, I felt it with a sinking heart, because she knew it would be better for me than anything she could do at home.

I shifted my ground hastily from the personal, and assured myself with dignity that, of course, I do not wish to keep my babies with me for the mere selfish pleasure I take in their presence. I want every mother worthy the name wants to do what is really best for them what is best for everyone concerned. Upon making this admission I was apprehensively aware of a certain mental giddiness, as though I had thrown down a sheltering wall, beyond which I now saw stretching before me a horizon disquietingly wider than the pleasant narrow paths which my feet know so well. I had committed my-self to an impersonal breadth of view, from which, as from all impersonal attitudes, blew a cold breath of logic upon the emotions. It was necessary to begin again at the beginning and consider what conditions are really best for little children are really best for all concerned.

I had already admitted that they fare more normally in the companionship of children of their own age than in solitary or semi-solitary confinement to the society of adults. The universal compassion for an only child is significant. Now, secondly, I reflected, it is true in every other department of human activity, that those who have learned how to do a thing can do it better than those who have not. The difference in the meaning of the words "professional " and "amateur " made this clear to my mind. " Amateur " means, in the first place, a person who does the thing in question out of love, just as a mother does ; but it has emerged from constant daily use in our vocabulary with the added meaning of a person who does not do it very well. The statement, " An amateur carpenter put up that shelf," seldom means that it is an exceptionally good shelf. Whereas in every process, from paper-hanging to playing on the piano, the remark, " Let us get a professional to do it," means, " Let us have some-one who understands the business and can dispatch it competently." It is, of course, apparent that this line of thought was rapidly pushing me towards the possibility that the fact of giving physical birth to a child might not change a woman into a real mother, but only into an amateur one.

It is certainly true that not all mothers axle good ones. Only the other day I myself was instrumental in removing, by legal force, the three children of my washerwoman's cousin, because she was unfit to take care of them. Of course her case was extreme, half insane from drunkenness and vice as she is. The helpless little things might have been beaten and starved and, for all anyone knew, killed outright, if she had continued to have the entire charge of them. And yet she was physically the mother of them just as much as my mother was of her children. If I grant that this physical fact does not give her an inalienable right to care for them as she thinks best, where is the line to be drawn? Will it not soon be drawn across my own circle of comfortable, well to do, middle class families? And ought it not to be so drawn? How about that too high-strung friend of mine, who loves her children dearly, but who occasionally, under stress of some household complication, or one of her terrible headaches, gives way to an outbreak of temper? It is true that she does not beat her children over the head with her fists, as did the cousin of my washerwoman. But that is all a matter of degree. Her children, inheriting her sensitive nerves, are a thousand times more responsive than those of the poorer family. Was she not inflicting on their exquisite sensibilities the far worse torture of undeserved unhappiness? And that cousin of mine, easy going, good natured Cousin Sue, who was married for her good looks how about the obvious fact that, with the best will in the world, she is quite incapable of supplying the amount of mental pabulum needed by those of her children who inherit their father's brains? Her boys and girls are getting oatmeal and beefsteak enough, but can anyone honestly deny that they are being starved? And finally, how about Aunt Molly the Aunt Molly who is in everyone's family masterful, too devoted Aunt Molly, whose powerful personality is only resisted by the adult members of her family with feverish effort, and who, because she has no other exercise for this great and splendid gift of personality, perverts it in dominating the nascent individualities of her little children so overpoweringly that in several of them she has annihilated it altogether. She has not physically killed those children, it is true, but one has only to look at them to see that they are not wholly alive. Yes, absurd though the proposition seemed at first sight, it was apparent to me that, although we well-to-do mothers do not look in the least like my washerwoman's cousin, we are no more perfect and ideal mothers than she.

But, I asked myself, what can be done about it? Even though we do not do as well as we might, is there any reason to expect anything better in the future? I tried to put the question to myself honestly, suppressing, as well as I could, the instinctive anger I felt at the idea. " Could any other woman, trained though she might be, care for my children better than I? " I tried conscientiously to make a fair mental comparison of teachers and mothers. Is it possible that there are any elements in the teacher's training and in the nature of her contact with the children which, in the future, as her training is improved and the milieu in which she works is perfected, will do more than offset the extreme affection we mothers bear to our little ones, that passionate, personal attachment to them, which is all that, as a class, we have to offer as reasons why we should have the exclusive care of them.

In the first place, considering critically the circle of my personal acquaintances, I was bound to admit that very frequently this extreme affection of mothers for their children does not result in a correspondingly extreme wisdom in their treatment. That fact is as obvious as it is melancholy. Almost without exception, all the mothers I know love their children to distraction, and yet some bring them up well, and others very badly. Evidently, the excellence of the child's preparation for life does not depend exclusively on his mother's affection, which is a practically unvarying factor in the situation, but largely on other qualities, which some mothers have and some do not. , Is there any reason to think that in the long run a larger proportion of professionally trained teachers would have these other qualities?

One of the first answers to this question is that teachers, unlike mothers, consciously choose their profession and, if they feel that they have made a mistake and would be more useful as stenographers or bookkeepers, are for all practical purposes free to change their occupations without blame. Whereas American girls marry generally because they are in love, because they want a home, because someone is in love with them, because they are tired of work or of idleness, because they are ambitious, but seldom consciously in order to become mothers. As wives they accept, in most cases, with heartfelt gratitude the benediction of maternity, but as unmarried girls they are universally trained (and possibly wisely trained) by the tradition of our society not to let their thoughts linger on this subject. As a consequence it must be admitted that the majority of them have the profession of motherhood imposed upon them without regard to their temperamental fitness for its arduous cares, and nearly always without the slightest preparation for it. The most poorly prepared teacher has learned more of the technic of her profession than the average young mother. Another difference between the teacher and the mother which occurred to me is that the teacher is not left alone, as most mothers are, to cope single-handed with the dizzying effects of illimitable power, proverbially too much for the strongest human heads. A teacher who only once, under no matter what stress of ill-health or nervous strain, loses her temper with the children, loses her job, because there is someone besides the children to know of the outbreak. If she is not well enough to do her day's work she is not forced like the amateur mother to do it badly because it must be done somehow; and the children are not forced to suffer for the perfectly excusable impatience and irritability which come from her ill-health. She is able to stay at home in bed and send word that a competent substitute be put in charge of her group of children.

Furthermore, she has and will have increasingly in the future infinitely better conditions to work. with, a number of children together, educating them selves in a milieu especially intended for them, instead of the average adult home, intended primarily for adult-life, most of the equipment of which is unsuitable for children.

Finally, to her training for the work, to her natural aptitude for it (shown by her free choice of it), to her feeling that she can leave it if she finds she cannot do it well, to the steadying knowledge that her conduct with the children is under constant observation, and to the improved processes possible with a number of children together, she has added the obvious fact that in the course of even two or three years she has accumulated more practical experience in her profession than even the mother of seventeen children. How many such mothers have been heard to exclaim, " Oh, if I could only go back and begin over again ! How many mistakes I would avoid ! " The teacher of some experience is just that mother, able to begin over and over again, and to avoid with certainty the faults of the fumbling amateur.

If I am to give an honest account of myself, I must confess that at this point I was quite carried away by what I felt to be righteous primal instinct, coming from the very depths of human nature, a passionate, angry refusal longer to consider arguments which were leading me to conclusions not only inexpressibly painful, but which, I sincerely felt, would, in spite of their logical plausibility, injure human life more than aid it. I cried out that under the conditions indicated nothing of value would be left of family life; that marriage would mean nothing; that those institutions, founded on the most sacred instincts of our hearts, should be allowed to stand without unhallowed pryings into their foundations. I turned my attention resolutely elsewhere and for some time thought no more about the whole puzzling question.

This dogged adherence to the sanctity of the status quo was broken down by the visit of a great-aunt of mine, who happened to arrive while the household was going through a siege of the measles. I noticed that Great-Aunt Victoria eyed with asperity the trim, quick-stepping, trained nurse, but I was quite unprepared for the bitterness of her outbreak when she suddenly turned on me one day with, " I don't know what the world's coming to! It seems to me as though folks weren't made of flesh and blood any more! I don't see what earthly satisfaction you get out of having a family and being married! At your age, I'd ha' marched that woman to the door and locked it behind her, long before this ! "

I stared at her, entirely at a loss as to her meaning. We are all devoted to Miss Haines, the nurse, who has ushered all of the children into the world and has gone down to the gates of death with nearly every member of the family. Serious though the malady may be, we all feel that the worst is over when she steps quietly into the house with her reassuring smile. My old relative went on, very pale, and shaking with an emotion which astounded me by its violence, " You modern mothers don't love your children any more—you can't—or you wouldn't let an-other woman step in and look out for them just when they are sick and need you the most ! Why, there wasn't a child of mine who'd take a drop of medicine from any hand but mine ! "

I began a hasty answer, amused by the patent in-consistency of her attitude—" But, Auntie, the trained nurse can take care of them better than I, when it is something serious. She has had the most splendid training and lots of experience into the bargain. Suppose after little Alice's operation I had refused to allow the nurse to care for the baby be-cause I wanted to hold her in my arms every minute? Of course I wanted to ! What if I did? What difference does it make what I want to do? what if—"

I stopped, transfixed by the arrow of a perfect analogy. And the next day, with a chastened spirit, took up once more my investigation of the direction in which modern society seems to be leading mothers. The prevailing mood in which I continued these colloquies with myself was one of dreary emptiness. If we mothers are not to devote our lives to our little ones, what are we to do? What will become of the family? What of the home?

A little historical study of the home and the family, which I had thought the most stable institutions in the world, showed me, to my artless astonishment, that, on the contrary, they are kaleidoscopic in their flexible adjustment to the economic conditions about them. The only thing they have not done, in the course of centuries of metamorphosis, is to cease for an instant to exist. Not only does our twentieth-century home differ as widely as it is possible from the home in which the Romans under the Republic found happiness, and from the equally happy Chinese home of the present day, but it differs almost as widely from the American home at the beginning of the, nineteenth century. The change from the home as a center for domestic industries to its present state of helpless dependence on factories is one that is familiar to all women. We have had it, in the language of our school-boy sons, " rubbed into us " with virulence that we modern American housekeepers are no longer the spinning, weaving, soap-making, pork-curing housewives of our great-grandmothers' time ; and our idleness has not been the less flung in our ' teeth because we have protested with perfect justice that it is enforced, and that it would be the height of folly for us to weave linen slowly and imperfectly by hand, when we may buy, for a song, fine and regularly woven cloth, or to cure our own pork,' when that method would cost more and be less reliable in its results than to buy pork cured by wholesale, scientific methods. As I ran over in my mind this familiar attack on modern married women, and our familiar defense, the idea dawned on me that both attack and defense are beside the mark. It may be that we are being at-tacked, not because we do not labor productively in our home laboratories, but because we do not, as a class, labor productively anywhere?

I recalled with the vividness of all recollections of youth a summer in my adolescence when, through some exigencies of family affairs, my sisters and I and my girl cousins kept house together for several weeks, without any adult supervision. We parceled the work out in equal shares, like the miniature edition of society which we were, and would have lived together in perfect concord if it had not been for my Cousin Anna's lace centerpiece. I fairly laughed to myself as I remembered the youthful bitterness of our resentment of that piece of fancywork. No-body had asked Anna to make it, certainly nobody had dreamed of suggesting that it be finished by a certain date. As a matter of fact, none of us had the slightest interest in it, except that before the end of the summer we all hated the sight of it, because it came to mean Anna's everlasting shirking of her share of the work in order to achieve those elaborate lace-stitches. Every scallop in it rep-resented to us badly made beds, scamped dishwashing, and unswept floors. And yet none of us worked harder than Anna did, bending her back and straining her eyes over that self-imposed task.

The question now went home to me, whether I too were not being an Anna in the world of adults, I with my tense life of " high class " domesticity, with my careful ordering of our pretty home, and the two servants, with my attention to the way the table is set and the kind of clothes the children and I wear, and the sort of curtains which hang at our windows, and the refreshments I serve to our Bridge Club, and my endless conversations over the tele-phone, " arranging " this date and that of my social life, and " seeing to " all the details of the entertainment given at the Country Club for new furnishings for the ballroom there.

Like other reading Americans, I was perfectly familiar with the attacks on very wealthy women for their parasitic lives of entire idleness and pleasure seeking. Was it possible, I now asked myself, astonished that the madly hurrying occupations which fill the lives of all the rest of us hard-working middle-class American women are only another form of idleness, only lace-stitches which are of no interest to anyone but ourselves, and no value to any-one at all? Are we perhaps, like Anna, blinding ourselves to the fact that we are doing something not worth doing, by the simple process of doing it very hard and very fast? The fact that our intentions are' the best possible does not make this disconcerting likeness any the less striking, for Anna had not the least conscious intention of making the rest of us work harder than we needed. She was one of the best-natured girls who ever lived. She simply could not see any connection between her pretty, dainty, futile work and our potato-stained hands and flushed faces. It occurred to me that a great deal of the over-emphatic, crudely hostile, " socialistic " talk and writing, which I had lightly waved away as " malcontent " and " incendiary," resembled precisely the old angry powwows we girls used to have in the pantry about Anna and her embroidery hoop out on the front porch. Perhaps the angry growl of the world at prosperous modern married women is simply the inarticulate expression of an unformulated demand that we go out into the kitchen and bake the bread before we sit down to fancywork. And perhaps our reluctance to do productive work comes not from real laziness or a wish to shirk, but because we do not see that the work of the world has changed its form and is no longer, even for married women with families, found exclusively in the home.

I had begun far from this disconcerting idea, with a simple attempt to make a little sense out of a confusing situation, but, although I ended with an astonished recognition of my busy self as a parasitic member of society, the sequence of my reasoning was not surprising ; for the question of the care of children is inextricably bound up with the economic position of women (a book phrase which means, "Are they Annas or not? ") We modern prosperous matrons say, in substance, to society that we are mothers and hence cannot be expected to be in any other way productive members of society ; and we shut our eyes to the fact that a large share of what used to be the business of a mother has been taken away from us by the new organization of the community. Children over six are all at school now, six hours a day, for practically the rest of their lives up to maturity (and no one thinks of crying out " Communism, revoltingly applied to children!") We have not left to us, to occupy profit-ably those six hours, the necessary domestic activities of our great-grandmothers, and we have taken to filling our lives with the innocent but futile and profitless fancywork of household decoration, dinner-giving, entertainments, dancing, card-playing, fol-lowing the fashions in dress—a hundred other occupations, none of which has any bearing on the fact that we are mothers, and hence no excuse for us in the face of society's demand that everybody shall do his fair share of the work.

It is true that these changed conditions are not our fault. We did not decree that knitting-machines should make it unprofitable for us to knit all the stockings for our children. And we ought not to be blamed for our inability to turn back the hands of the clock of economic development, so that we may continue to be sufficiently useful inside our homes to justify our existence to humanity. But we are to be blamed if we refuse to look facts in the face. There the conditions are. Or at least there they are rapidly tending. Like everyone else, we must accept them and make the best of them. Happy the woman whose husband is so poor that her actual labor is honestly needed in the house. She is still in those halycon days of economic simplicity when a life-work lay before every woman because she was a woman and not a man. But woe to the prosperous woman, who, bewildered in the dark confusion of conditions about us, wastes and perverts her valuable productive energy on the elaboration of a social hierarchy, even a very tame middle-class social hierarchy, which bears as little relation to the sane, necessary interdependence of human beings as the hieroglyphic carvings on an Alaskan totem-pole to the ordered system of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The profession of being a mother nowadays actually absorbs all the energies of a woman, in the moderately prosperous classes, only during the babyhood of each child, which, in the case of the average small American family, means only a very few years out of the sixty or seventy which the mother lives. Let her look to it that she gives a good account of the rest !

We are aware that a very large part of the material work of " mothering," the preparation of food and garments from the crude, raw materials, and the care of the children during severe sickness, have been taken from us by the factory and the trained nurse. But we do not, as a class, grasp the fact that a considerable part of the other phases of mothering has also been taken away, even from the best of us, by the better-trained teacher and the more perfectly equipped school. What child gets his teaching at his mother's knee nowadays? We would not dare to attempt it, for we know that he would rank far be—hind his fellows. Who of us would venture to teach arithmetic to our children, or physiology? We have not the outfit to make physics seem real to them or the apparatus to make geography understandable.

We may regret it, we may think it a step in the wrong direction, but for good or evil the change has come. The child now lives a great part of his life, and a very important part of his life, away from his home and his mother. And soon, so the signs of the time run, even the very little child will do this, and do it to his own advantage. With this change will go the Iast of our excuses for staying exclusively within the walls of the home. The first exodus was that of the father, who once had his cobbler's bench or his printing-press in one room of the common dwelling house. He went away to the factory and the office. Then the older children went away to school, first the boys and then the girls. Later the younger ones followed their brothers and sisters, and every year takes them away to the teacher at a younger age. The mother stands bewildered at this desertion, which is none of her doing, and when she is unguided by the steadying press of economic necessity makes the pathetic effort to fill her life by the pretty decoration and comely ordering of the empty shell. The fact is that her work is no longer exclusively there. The home has become a meeting-place—no longer a place where the family lives together. Frightened as we may be at the sound of those words, they ring in the ears of everyone who honestly considers the conditions about him.

In my own ease I own to considerable faint-hearted blenching at the queer look of things before me, and I have been humbled to understand a historical per-son and an exclamation which I had always thought the typification of unprincipled cowardice. I am making a conscientious effort not to cry triumphantly, " After me the deluge ! " but it is very hard to avoid some satisfaction in the extreme rapidity with which the children grow up. No matter how soon the change may come, I myself could not better matters by leaving home to do office work, and having my children brought up by another woman. My own children will have passed their infancy under my own eyes.

And yet—and yet—I see other sides to the matter. For one thing, I am oddly comforted by Great-Aunt Victoria's horror over our dear Miss Haines, the nurse, whom I know so well to be one of the sweetest elements in our family life. I may be needlessly frightening myself over the prospect of the introduction into family life of elements which the next generation will find as beneficent as we do the trained nurse.

Furthermore, a solution of my difficulties as simple as Columbus' egg occurs to me. The new order of things will not mean, cannot mean, that all women will do other work than care for little children. Someone must do this. If society ordains that children shall leave the amateur home for the professional school, why should not the mothers travel there after them? Why in the world should there be a tacit understanding in America that " teacher" means a childless spinster? " Teacher," in any broad significance of the word, should mean only " motherby-choice," a woman, who, of her own free will, chooses to devoteher life to the training of children, and who has systematically prepared herself to care for them in the best possible way. She should be the mother-by-choice of the children of the world, leaving the many mothers-by-chance to do other useful parts of the work of the community for which they may be more fitted. Why should not the antagonism between " teacher " and "mother " be ended by the simple expedient of fusing the two characters into one? Why should not the real "born mothers" become the teachers? In the future, why should not those of us who have a passion for maternity and all that it means devote ourselves even more to children than we do now under the present narrowly parochial system of confining our efforts to the children of our own family? If we show our-selves capable of being trained fully and fitly for the great and splendid task of caring for the young, may we not become the mothers-by-choice, not only of our own children, but of those of the mothers who though they all love their babies, have strong intellectual, artistic, or temperamental interests elsewhere. Will not the children of the world ultimately be gathered together in small groups for most of the day, cared for by scientifically trained mothersby-choice, who benefit not only their own little ones, but the whole of the human race by their natural fitness for the undertaking? And they will have among the children under their care sons and daughters of their own flesh and blood. Why not?