hood was to be her compensation. To a consideration of the career afforded by motherhood we must turn, therefore, if we would understand both the glory and the inadequacy of the NineteenthCentury woman.

CHAPTER III

THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD

"There is an African bird, the hornbill, whose habits in some respects are a model. The female builds her nest in a hollow tree, lays her eggs, and broods on them. Then the male feels that he must also contribute some service; so he walls up the hole closely, giving only room for the point of the female's bill to protrude. Until the eggs are hatched, she is thenceforth confined to her nest, and is in the meantime fed assiduously by her

mate. . . .

"Nature has kindly provided various types of bird households to suit all varieties of taste. The bright orioles filling the summer boughs with color and with song, are as truly domestic in the freedom of their airy nest as the poor hornbills who ignorantly make their home in a dungeon. And certainly each new generation of orioles . . . are a happier illustration of judicious nurture than are the uncouth little offspring of the hornbills. . . so flabby, and transparent as to resemble a bladder of jelly furnished with head, legs, and rudimentary wings, but with not a sign of a feather."-THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

"It is a fact kept, perhaps, too much in the background, that mothers have a larger self than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and gone from them... there are wide spaces of time, which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt buttons."GEORGE ELIOT.

"Woman is given to us that she may bear children. Woman is our property, we are not hers, because she produces children for us-we do not yield any to her. She is, therefore, our possession as the fruit tree is that of the gardener."-NAPOLEON.

MERELY to be a woman is not a vocation, though formerly many women were obliged by custom to make it serve in lieu of one; but to be a married mother has long bee:. regarded as a quasi-profession which, for the time being, precluded any other. During the earlier part of the Nineteenth Century, while the family still constituted an industrial unit, child-bearing was incidental in the midst of pioneer toil, and not at all the subject of reasoning. As women began to be released from directly productive labor, and here and there ventured into publicity, there grew up in the Press and the Pulpit a habit of lauding the glory" of motherhood in much the same manner as they dwelt upon the "dignity" of manual labor. Any thoughtful person could see that the conditions of labor were often inhuman and degrading; and no one who could escape from such toil into a cleaner and easier mode of living was prevented from doing so by his belief in its dignity. So, also, the sentimentality of the midcentury was accustomed to play up the emotional and spiritual compensations of motherhood, while ignoring or glozing over its hardships.

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There is slight need of writing on the compensatory aspects of motherhood, since healthy, happy mothers in every age have been satisfied with their lot, and have not needed either flattery or a fence to keep them within their sphere. But

many mothers-perhaps a majority in the past century-were neither contented nor adequate to their task. That they did not attempt to escape was chiefly due to their conventional limitations. Without discounting in any degree the beauty or the rewards of normal motherhood, it is necessary to point out how far short, in the past, the actual experience often fell of that ideal so constantly preached; and to analyze it from the reasonable standpoint of the career for which it was a substitute. If motherhood were, indeed, a holy vocation, for which women had been set apart, it should be able to bear the tests to which other less sacred occupations were subjected. To comprehend why the conditions of motherhood are still so far from what they should be, it is necessary to draw a plain picture of what they were for the average woman of the past century.

We have seen in the chapter on Girlhood that girls were very early imbued with the idea that they did not need to equip themselves for earning a living, nor to acquire more than a limited and superficial education, because they were to be married and, by inference, to be mothers. The Puritan reaction from the sensuality of English society had taken the form of prudery and silence on sex matters, which placed every marriageable girl in an anomalous situation. Marriage and motherhood were constantly referred to in her

hearing as the highest, indeed, the only succcessful, career for woman; yet, nothing in her training had any direct relation to it, and the conventional standard of modesty required her to be wholly ignorant of its physical aspects. When she walked up the church aisle in her bridal veil, she must be as innocent in mind as she was chaste in body, but at any moment after the marriage vows were spoken she might know everything. The conventional attitude is aptly expressed by Dorothea's Uncle in Middlemarch, when he suggests to the bridegroom that he get her to read him "light things, Smollett-Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker; they are a little broad, but she may read anything, now she's married, you know."

Just how and when she was to enter upon motherhood she did not know, but if she permitted herself to think of it at all, she naturally supposed that she would at least have some choice as to the convenient season. But since the conventional training of girls prescribed that she should not think of it at all, the conception of her first child was almost certainly "an accident," neither desired nor predetermined, merely incidental to the period of excitement, fatigue, and mixed emotion following upon the wedding display and the honeymoon tour. Any sturdy and vulgar-minded servant maid was in a more