In Defense of Motherhood

I know that this is another Chesterton quote and that it does not deal with Mothers directly, but it is a good Chesterton quote and it does deal with Mothers by the fact that it deals with the Family. Now, I believe capitalism to be the best economical system now in operation, but I can also agree with its horrible side effects, notably its attack of the family.

It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt it might have been Communism, if Communism had ever had a chance, outside that semi-Mongolian wilderness where it actually flourishes.  But, so far as we are concerned, what has broken up households and encouraged divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and Power of Capitalism. It is Capitalism that has forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favour of the influence of the employer; that has driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers. It is not the Bolshevist but the Boss, the publicity man, the salesman and the commercial advertiser who have, like a rush and riot of barbarians, thrown down and trampled under foot the ancient Roman statue of Verecundia.  But because the thing is done by men of this sort, of course it is done in their own muggy and muddle-headed way; by all the irresponsible tricks of their foul Suggestion and their filthy Psychology. It is done, for instance, by perpetually guying the old Victorian virtues or limitations which, as they are no longer there, are not likely to retaliate.  It is done more by pictures than by printed words; because printed words are supposed to make a some sense and a man may be answerable for printing a them. Stiff and hideous effigies of women in crinolines or bonnets are paraded, as if that could possibly be all there was to see when Maud came into the garden, and was saluted by such a song. Fortunately, Maud’s friends, who would have challenged the pressman and photographer to a duel, are all dead; and these satirists of Victorianism are very careful to find out that all their enemies are dead.

“There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things—their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived, that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women. It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. They admit, that as nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement does not consist in making beings so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in getting each of them to fulfill their respective tasks in the best possible manner. The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which governs the manufactures of our age, by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman, in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on.”

– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Book Three, Chapter XII

“I am puzzled…when I hear, as we often hear just now, somebody saying that he was formerly opposed to Female Sufferage but was converted to it by the courage & patriotism shown by women in nursing and similar war work. Really, I do not wish to be superior in my turn, when I can only express my wonder in a question. But from what benighted dens can these people have crawled, that they did not know that women are brave? What horrible sort of women have they known all their lives? Where do they come from? Or, what is a still more apposite question, where do they think they come from? Do they think they fell from the moon, or were really found under cabbage leaves, or brought over the seas by storks?…Should we, an of us be here at all if women were not brave? Are we not all trophies of that war & triumph? Does not every man stand on the earth like a graven statue as the monument of the valor of a women.”

—from Fancies versus Fads, G. K. Chesterton

Thoughts I had on Jan. 9, 2009

Last night I went out with the missionaries to go and visit a family. I asked the question, “So, what do you two do?” The Mother was first to reply. She told us that she was a stay-at-home mom. She then went on to joke about how she just stayed at home ALL the time with her kids and made her job seem menial and trite. This was one of those moments when I wish my tongue had been loosed. I was just bursting to tell her that her’s was no small calling! That she was the true warrior of our day, the courageous patriot of the battle of Trafalgar; that she was the builder of the cathedrals of the future; that she was the Queen and Aristotle both! (more…)