single such utterance hinders progress more than any arguments of the
enemy. For every thoughtful person sees that the cares of motherhood,
though not the whole duty of woman, are an essential part of that duty,
wherever they occur; and that no theory of womanly life is good for
anything which undertakes to leave out the cradle. Even her school
education is based on this fact, were it only on Stendhal's theory that the
sons of a woman who reads Gibbon and Schiller will be more likely to show
talent than those of one who only tells her beads and reads Mme. de Genlis.
And so clearly is this understood among us, that, when we ask for suffrage
for woman, it is almost always claimed that she needs it for the sake of
her children. To secure her in her right to them; to give her a voice in
their education; to give her a vote in the government beneath which they
are to live,--these points are seldom omitted in our statement of her
claims. Anything else would be an error.

But there is an error at the other extreme, which is still greater. A woman
should no more merge herself in her child than in her husband. Yet we often
hear that she should do just this. What is all the public sphere of woman,
it is said,--what good can she do by all her speaking and writing and
action,--compared with that she does by properly training the soul of one
child? It is not easy to see the logic of this claim.

For what service is that child to render in the universe, except that he,
too, may write and speak and act for that which is good and true? And if
the mother foregoes all this that the child, in growing up, may simply do
what the mother has left undone, the world gains nothing. In sacrificing
her own work to her child's, moreover, she exchanges a present good for a
prospective and merely possible one. If she does this through overwhelming
love, we can hardly blame her; but she cannot justify it before reason and
truth. Her child may die, and the service to mankind be done by neither.