The Mother : Part 2

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 4 of 22)

In peaceful periods, however, in the long ages when the father-rule was a despotism tempered only by natural affection and the skill of women in securing advantages while simulating submission, mothers had large use of their protective function in easing family discipline and in gaining relief from harsh conditions affecting childhood. Theirs was then no open fight for the well-being of their offspring, and often not a wise effort to that end, but ancient song and story all show that childhood and youth depended upon the mother-love in crises of family experience and that without such refuge many young lives would have been utterly sacrificed.

Social Elements in Modern Protection of Children. - To-day the dangers to which babies and children are exposed are more subtle in form and more complex in action. They are less within than without the average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants, the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of "normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but rather that we are newly aware of them. Not that savage or early civilized life had conditions more favorable to health and normality but that the easier modern conditions save alive many who in harsher times would have died in babyhood. Moreover, we are beginning at last to set a standard, in ever-clearer outline, of what is health and of what is normality in physical, mental, and moral human life. Moreover, we are seeing as never before that the dangers that beset the child to-day are not those from which the mother alone, or the individual father and mother working together, can adequately protect. They are dangers that only society can prevent and that society alone can abolish.

Women's Leadership in Social Protection. - Why, then, do we say that the protective function of individual motherhood is still demanded and still a large part of the modern mother's obligation? Because she is to-day the one most clearly required, in our own country at least, to summon the social forces to lessen or abolish those dangers to which children are exposed. The action of the solitary, primitive mother fighting off the despoiler of her child does not much resemble the banding together of modern women by the hundreds and by the thousands to abolish typhoid fever in some city in which it has become endemic through the greed of manufacturers who pollute the water supply. It is, however, the same spirit in both; and in the modern instance it wakes, first, the fathers to their protective duty, and then the guardians of the public health, and then educates the public mind, and at last accomplishes the desired result through appropriate laws, well enforced. It is a long step from the indirect "influence," the often deceitful cunning, the appeal to sex-attraction and the pleading of weakness by which for ages women sought to protect their children against harsh punishments, their daughters against marriage to those whom they loathed, and their sons to apprenticeship to work they could not choose, to the openly exercised power of the modern mother. In the days when wives and mothers had no legal rights which society was bound to respect, appeal was woman's only weapon; now the modern mother has command of her protective function and exercises it fearlessly. The same spirit is in all the long process of change, however, and women to-day banding openly together and joining also with men on equal terms, to secure laws protecting children from cruelty even against their own parents; to raise the "age of consent" in order to prevent the unwitting moral suicide of little girls; to sweep the streets free from vicious allurements that young boys may be preserved from debauchery and disease; to place trustees of society's power of public protection as chaperones in every place of moral danger; these modern women are near of kin to all motherhood of any past. So also are those of the same spirit as the ancient mother who band themselves together, again with men on equal terms, but oftenest, perhaps, with men whom their own social interest has summoned to the task, for the establishment of "Health Centres", of adequate and efficient clinics and dispensaries; for securing necessary education and care of mothers before the birth of their children, and for mothers and babies alike needing good, fresh air, rest and comfort after birth; for the raising of standards of physical well-being all along the line of life from youth to age. The ancient mother was too ignorant and had too little power to save her children and family from physical ills, but she did her best. The modern mother is able to learn about requirements and to act with power for the better health and better training of every child. Is she always ready for and equal to the task?

At least we can claim this for the mother devotion in modern times, that it shows, and in exact proportion of its increasing social power, an alertness and a moral earnestness in all that concerns the welfare of children that have perpetuated and extended the protective functions of society as no other agency has done. Much of the modern legislation and social work directed toward the physical and moral safeguarding of the young has been instituted and is carried out in detail largely by women. The passage of the so-called Maternity Bill by our National Congress, at the recognized instigation of women of the United States, and the call it makes for a large staff of women workers to carry out its provisions, is a case in point. This protective work for mothers and babies is not always done by women who are themselves mothers. Perhaps too often its details are in charge of those lacking deep experience of life, and hence not able to interpret new laws of social control to parents of ancient ideals and backward social culture. But women in any case are called for in large numbers to translate the ancient personal duty of protective care of the young in terms of social obligations.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.