Woman & womanhood : a search for principles / by C.W. Saleeby.

  • Caleb Saleeby
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Woman & womanhood : a search for principles / by C.W. Saleeby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    are able to spend a vast amount of our time and energy on the production of luxuries and evils. How little, then, is our excuse if we fail to provide the first con- ditions for continuance and progress! Our first principles of the value of the child and therefore of motherhood are unchallengeable, nor will anyone nowadays be found to question that neither children nor mothers should work in the ordinary sense of that word, since the proper work of children who are to work well when they grow up is play, and since the mother’s natural work is the most important that she can perform. It remains, then, for us to deter- mine by whom mothers and children in the modern and future State are to be provided for. The conditions of mothers are various, and we shall best approach the problem by the consideration of dif- ferent cases. The simplest is that of the widowed mother who is without means. It is only too common a case, and we have already seen certain causes which contribute to the enormous number of widows in the community. Men do not live as long as women, and men are older jwhen they marry. These natural causes of widow- hood, as they may be called, are greatly aggravated by the destructive influence of alcohol upon father- hood, as will be shown in the chapter dealing with alcohol and womanhood. On the individualistic theory of the State, a theory so brutal and so impracticable that no one consistently upholds it, the widow’s misfortune is her private af- fair, but does not really concern us. Her husband