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Thanks to Our Mothers: Past, Present, and Future

Thanks to Our Mothers: Past, Present, and Future

Last updated on: January 24, 2017 at 6:53 pm by Frank Weathers

Thanks to Our Mothers: Past, Present, and Future 2017-01-24T18:53:18-05:00 Frank Weathers

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Breakfast in Bed (1897) by Mary Cassatt – oil on canvas, Huntington Library

This Sunday in the United States we celebrate our mothers. Though it is a secular holiday, it’s one of the best ones on the calendar. I want to wish a Happy Mothers Day to all of the mothers out there.

The portrait above is by Mary Cassatt and is entitled Breakfast in Bed. I have very fond memories of being cuddled by my mother and of seeing my wife cuddle my children like this (before they grew into bean stalks!) as well.

To help celebrate this life giving vocation, I found these thoughts on the importance of motherhood from one of my favorite Catholic authors. Once again, G.K. Chesterton, the Apostle of Common Sense, hits the nail right on the head.

…the female became the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior. Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything.

Mère et enfant (Reine Lefebre and Margot before a Window), c.1902

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t.

It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world.

But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word.

If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean.

Under the Horse Chestnut Tree by Mary Cassatt, 1898

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it.

How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

But though the essential of the woman’s task is universality, this does not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely wholesome prejudices.

She has, on the whole, been more conscious than man that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if one may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three things which she thinks she stands for.

I would observe here in parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman was set to guard. One’s own children, one’s own altar, ought to be a matter of principle– or if you like, a matter of prejudice.

Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child Before a Pool, ca. 1898.

On the other hand, who wrote Junius’s Letters ought not to be a principle or a prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her employers.

Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.

Mom? We couldn’t have done anything without you!

The Child’s Bath, Mary Cassatt.

All artworks in this post are in the Public Domain, and are presented via Wikimedia Commons.

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