The familiar comradeship that
ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their
institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals
inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Stael, the Misses Cobb,
Martineau, Fuller, Bronte, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs.
Browning; and while accepting and profiting by what they have done,
and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements,
prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class
of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother
to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to
great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers.
We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with
regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she
can, from surreptitious or worthy sources, what she most of all needs
to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman
and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as
she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of
good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious
indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and
encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health.
Pages:
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473