oman's face and head were far more akin to the child than to the
man. What Mr. Rimmer should have shown, and could have, by profuse
illustration, was that the faces of boy and girl differ but slightly,
and the faces of old men and women differ as little, sometimes not at
all; while the face of the woman approximates the human more closely
than that of the man; while the child, representing race more than
sex, is naturally more akin to her than to him. The male reserves more
primitive qualities, the hairiness, the more pugnacious jaw; the female
is nearer to the higher human types.
An ultra-male selection has chosen women for their femininity first, and
next for qualities of submissiveness and patient service bred by long
ages of servility.
This servile womanhood, or the idler and more excessively feminine type,
has never appreciated the real power and place of the mother, and has
never been able to grasp or to carry out any worthy system of education
for little children. Any experienced teacher, man or woman, will own how
rare it is to find a mother capable of a dispassionate appreciation of
educative values. Books in infant education and child culture generally
are read by teachers more than mothers, so our public libraries prove.
The mother-instinct, quite suitable and sufficient in animals, is by
no means equal to the requirements of civilized life. Animal motherhood
furnishes a fresh wave of devotion for each new birth; primitive human
motherhood extends that passionate tenderness over the growing family
for a longer period; but neither can carry education beyond its
rudiments.
So accustomed are we to our world-old method of entrusting the first
years of the child to the action of untaught, unbridled mother-instinct,
that suggestions as to a better education for babies are received with
the frank derision of massed ignorance.
That powerful and brilliant writer, Mrs. Josephine Daskam Bacon, among
others has lent her able pen to ridicule and obstruct the gradual
awakening of human intelligence in mothers, the recognition that babies
are no exception to the rest of us in being better off for competent
care and service. It seems delightfully absurd to these reactionaries
that ages of human progress should be of any benefit to babies, save,
indeed, as their more human fathers, specialized and organized, are able
to provide them with better homes and a better world to grow up in. The
idea that mothers, more human,
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