The position of woman: actual and ideal / with preface by Sir Oliver Lodge.

Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The position of woman: actual and ideal / with preface by Sir Oliver Lodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    95/192 (page 79)
    In the working classes, where wage-earning begins at an early age, it is difficult to preserve the tight relation of parent and child, unless the habit of obedience to rightful authority has been learnt in the plastic years of infancy. Among the richer classes, many a mother has thoughtlessly or wilfully abrogated her position and handed over her authority to her nurse. Many parents and children are comparatively unacquainted, because they only meet at stated times. Small wonder that when the nursery stage is past, a gulf is fixed between the child’s inmost soul and the mother. In homes full of work, and of social activities, some limitation of intercourse may be necessary; but to secure as much as possible is surely worth very careful and definite endeavour. In later years it has increasingly become the custom to send chil- dren to boarding schools at a very early age. Peabody, who writes so ably on social questions, very strongly condemns this custom, and in trenchant words speaks of the “boarding out system, which used to be reserved for the home- less poor, but is now the accepted refuge of the homeless rich.”’ People say, ‘“‘ What else can we do? We cannot take our children to the North to shoot, to London for the season, and to Homburg for our ‘ cure.’”” Peabody would have them alter their own way of living, and while their children are young, inhabit for longer periods those west end terraces, which for so many months in the year are veritable streets of tombs. A woman who lives