no time--especially in women, who present all the various stages of the
sexual life in so emphatic a form--would education be more valuable. The
great burden of reproduction, with all its absorbing responsibilities, has
suddenly been lifted; at the same time the perpetually recurring rhythm of
physical sex manifestations, so often disturbing in its effect, finally
ceases; with that cessation, very often, after a brief period of
perturbation, there is an increase both in physical and mental energy.
Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a vacuum has been created,
and that there is nothing to fill it. The result is that the mother--for
it is most often of the mother that complaint is made--devotes her own new
found energies to the never-ending task of hampering and crushing her
children's developing energies. How many mothers there are who bring to
our minds that ancient and almost inspired statement concerning those for
whom "Satan finds some mischief still"! They are wasting, worse than
wasting, energies that might be profitably applied to all sorts of social
service in the world. There is nothing that is so much needed as the
"maternal in politics," or in all sorts of non-political channels of
social service, and none can be better fitted for such service than those
who have had an actual experience of motherhood and acquired the varied
knowledge that such experience should give. There are numberless other
ways, besides social service, in which mothers who have passed the age of
forty, providing they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably
apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children. It
is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women
whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better
ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by
fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are
no longer children. It is quite true that the children may go astray even
when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of
virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small.