Part 6 (1/2)
”Mother, it makes me think of a little girl I saw at the seaside last summer. She was dancing on the edge of the waves. They came up and washed over her little pink toes and she laughed with delight. After a time the tide rose a little higher and the waves dashed over her feet and still she thought it fun; and then came one big wave and threw her down and carried her out to sea, and if there hadn't been some sailors right there with a boat she would have been drowned,--and all the time she thought it fun till the last wave came, and then she was frightened awfully.”
”Your ill.u.s.tration is a very good one, my daughter, and I fear that poor Belle is dancing in the gentle foam of a wave that will grow in power till it carries her out to sea, a lost girl.”
”Mother, I really don't see how a girl can let a man become so familiar with her. I should think it would disgust her at once; and yet Edith seemed like a perfect lady.”
”No doubt you will understand this puzzling matter better after a few years than you do now, but I can explain it to you partly. It is a part of human nature that men and women are very attractive to each other, and in a way that does not exist between men and men or women and women.
It may be called a sort of personal magnetism. As they begin to develop into men and women, they begin to feel this new attraction. They want to please each other. New feelings and emotions are felt. If their hands touch, they feel a sort of electric thrill, even the glance of the eye may cause the same thrill. They enjoy it, and they do not know what it means. They do not know that, while it is pleasant, it is also dangerous.
”Girls are more ignorant than young men, because, as a rule, they have been taught less. The young men know more, but in all probability they have not learned from sources that are pure. The young girl does not understand that her coquettish glances and tossings of the head and simperings are so many intuitive efforts to awaken that sort of magnetic thrill in the young man. If she knew it, she would see that it is more maidenly to hold in check all actions that would tend to make the young man desire to be familiar with her.”
”But, mother, if it is not right to be familiar, why does G.o.d make us with those desires?”
”G.o.d has given us many desires that are right under certain conditions and wrong under others and He has given us reason with which to control our desires. It is right to eat when the food is our own, but wrong to eat if we have stolen the food. It is right to enjoy the attraction of one to whom our heart and life is given, but otherwise we are defrauding some one else. You can understand that you would not want the man you are to marry to have had familiarities with many other girls, neither would he like to think that other men had been permitted to be free with you.
”If you were going to select a dress that was to last all your life long, you would not choose goods that had been handled and were shop-worn. Even so with husband and wife. Each likes to feel sure that the freshest, purest love of the heart and modesty of person has been kept unstained from the slightest unwarrantable familiarity.”
CHAPTER IV.
”O Mother, I am so glad you are at home again. I had a lovely talk with father last evening, but it wasn't you. He gave me lots to think about, though. He said that mothers need to have such a broad education; that they should even be chemists, mother, think of that!”
”Does that seem such a strange idea to you? Really they need to be much more than that. They should be good teachers, to instruct their children, wise judges, in order to know what justice is, doctors of medicine so as to understand the first symptoms of illness and how to treat it, and surgeons so as to know how to bind up wounds, treat cuts and bruises and even how to reduce a dislocated finger if necessary.
They should be physiologists so as to understand the laws of bodily health, and psychologists so as to know and obey the laws of the mental development of their children.”
”O, mother! How can one girl learn all those hard things?”
Mrs. Wayne smiled indulgently as she replied, ”O, she won't have to learn all of them at once. Taken one at a time, through all the years preceding her marriage, she will find she can learn something of each without taxing herself too severely. For example, you can learn now how to take care of your own health, and that will help you to care for the health of your children when they come. You have already studied First Aid to the injured in your physiology cla.s.s. When you go to College you will study psychology as a part of your course of study.”
”What does that big word mean, mother?”
”Psychology means the science of mind. I said that mothers need to be psychologists; that is, students of the science of mind, so that they will understand the indications of the development of mind in their babies. A child gets the largest part of its education before it is six years old.”
”O, mamma, do you really mean that?”
”I certainly do. In the first place, it has to learn, one by one, and by repeated experiments, its body. You do not realize now that you had to learn, one by one, and by repeated experiments, every one of the muscular movements that you can now make without thinking of them. You remember what hard work it was to learn the piano and that was only learning to use a very few muscles in a certain way. As a baby you had to practice hours a day before you could learn to hold anything in your fingers. Your little hands flew about very wildly at first, but by constant practice you gained skill at last.”
”Why, mamma, I never thought that a baby was practicing when it was throwing its hands about.”
”But it is practicing, and it keeps it up hour after hour, day after day, until it has learned to hold things, to pull itself up, to sit up, to hold its head up, to creep, to walk, to climb.
”Have you any idea what a wonderful feat has been accomplished when a baby has learned to walk? Physiologists tell us that walking is continually beginning to fall and perpetual recovery from falling. It is a greater thing for the baby than those acrobatic feats which so amazed you the other day.
”Then the mental education begins also at birth. The baby is building his brain by everything he sees and does, and it is the mother's duty to see that this brain-building goes on in accordance with the law of his nature. Every baby is a new being with a nature of his own, and what was good for his brother may not be good for him. The training that will give one child self-confidence will make a little tyrant of another; what would render one merely amenable to control might make a coward of another. So you see, my dear, that a mother needs to have great knowledge of the laws of mind and great insight in the applying of those laws to the particular cases she has in hand.”
”It really seems, mamma, as if girls ought to study all those things before they marry.”
”Indeed they ought, but I fear they never will until they come to have a clearer idea of the value and importance of the mother's work. When they realize that the great and lasting work of the world is done in the homes, by the mothers, with their little children, then we shall have men demanding that girls shall be prepared for that important work by previous education.
”There is another way, too, in which women are given great power over the destiny of the world, and that is through heredity.”