Читать книгу The Family and its Members - Anna Garlin Spencer - Страница 12

Says Schiller, "Knowledge and culture demand a blissful sky, much careful nursing and a long number of springs." Who shall be able to secure this for every son of man if no one stands at the door of young life to make these the first demand upon time and strength and devotion for every child in the interest of every child? "The community" has been called "an endowment for human progress." Parental love, so often supremely expressed by the mother, works still and in any future in sight must work ever more devotedly and wisely to secure for each child his rightful share in that endowment. The main business of life is the carrying on of life, and in that business women were drafted long ago for the heaviest end of service and with little social permission to do their work by proxy. Many social helps in her task now make possible leisure and opportunity for individual vocation as never before. Her primal duty to the race remains, however, a debt to be paid as a first obligation wherever and whenever a woman accepts the august function of motherhood. And to-day the majority of most successful families absorb in large measure the time and strength of the housemother.

What Women Need Most is moral sanity and mental poise; the ability to adjust themselves to radical and rapid changes in their relationship to society without losing the finest and most useful results of their past social discipline. Woman is acquiring a new relationship to the home—that of mutual headship with man in the social institution in which for ages she has been a legal subordinate. Social welfare demands that she take into the new copartnership of domestic life the old devotion to family interests. Woman is acquiring a new relationship to the school—that of learner in the highest educational opportunity and of teacher in an ever-widening area. Social welfare demands that she take into the modern school her ancient devotion to child-life.

The mass of women are acquiring a new relationship to the industrial order—that of spenders instead of producers. Social welfare demands that the modern woman put into her function of purchasing consumer of staple products the same conscientious standardizing of those products and the same sense of responsibility for the conditions surrounding laborers which she displayed in the old handicraft days of domestic industry. A minority of women are acquiring also a new relationship to the industrial order in becoming the recipient of wages or salary, instead of being paid for work as of old in "truck" or in "kind." The feel of the pay envelope on her palm is an unaccustomed but a delicious pleasure to the modern woman. Social welfare demands that she be not beguiled thereby into complicity with industrial exploitation of the weak and the poor, such as she would not have tolerated in the old days of personal relationship in labor in domestic handicraft.

Woman is acquiring a new relationship to recreation and the social control of the customs ruling leisure hours. Social welfare demands that gambling be not made fashionable in the drawing room as it is being driven out of the business world; that dancing be not vulgarized and the mother-tongue not corrupted, but that self-control, purity, dignity, mark the "new woman" as it did her best ancestors. Woman is acquiring a new relationship to the state—that of citizen with full responsibility instead of her old perpetual minority under man's control. Social welfare demands that she take into the body politic the same devotion to the weak and undeveloped, the same patient, wise dependence upon the spiritual elements of justice and wisdom which have made her private motherhood so successful. She must not now, on peril of a social setback, take up man's weapons of selfishness, of violence, of impatient revolution—weapons the best of men have already discarded.

Women should now be clear-sighted enough to see that the world needs from them not the same but different contributions to the upreach and onward march of the race from those elements in which man has excelled. If society-at-large is to become truly a family of those who love and serve each other, then human beings of the mother-sex must take into public life and public service the best they have learned and taught in the individual home. What women most need now is to "retain all the good the past hath had" as they step forward to their full liberty and responsibility in new relationships to life.