The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1882-05-26
Step.MOthers.


If the pedigree OF a prejudice could
make it respectable, the popular senti-
.ment against step.mothers might claim
respect. Homer had his fling at the
women who marry widower with child
rem; Virgil went out of his way to cast
particularly hard and jagged stones at
their defenselessness; Ovid accused them
of such things that it were better their
mothers had not borne them. Where
these great ones denounced, lesser
voices rallied; and the scandalizing of
step-mothers gradually became as classic
as many other stupidities and falsities.
Medieval literature accepted this con-
ventionality of antiquity, precisely as it
accepted other representations of women
handed down from those mighty ages,
without question as to their probability
or naturalness. 1t was enough for re-
viving intelligence to learn what had
been thought, without thinking on its
own account. But it is a little hard that
the books of modern times, aud espec-
tally the novels of our own day, which
go everywhere, and present to many
people the only mental impressions they
receive, should echo the jests of Ovid
without their wit, or the ISLANDERS of Vir-
gil without their brilliancy.
The matrons of antiquity who pointed
the moral for detraction were never heard
in their own behalf, and NAV have been
neither so fierce nor so frisky as the poets
delig GIFTED to draw them. Besides, the
offending danes of Homer, the half
savage princesses of Thessaly, the slow
witted farmers wives of Epirus, were
hardly of the same humanity with the
fine-fbred womanhood of to-day. Shall,
therefore, some sensitive soul, doing her
best for the happiness of her husbands
children, be dismayed by cheap jests.
stale two thousand years ago, or by de-
traction, which but repeats the comments
of scandal-mongers dead before the
Ionian immigration.
What is there in the contact with ten
der orphans to harden woman's heart
against them? If she have babies of her
own, her love for them, her longing to
live for their sakes, teach her what bitter
ness of parting, what pangs of appre-
hension, the dead mother must have
known, and tonch her spirit to unspeak-
able compassion for the motherless chill
dren given to her to rear. If she be child.
less, then that instinct of maternity which
lives in nearly every woman's heart, and
must be satisfied, reaches out naturally,
almost inevitably, toward her husband s
children, for his sake hardly more than
for theirs. In families where the chill
dren of the first wife are too young to
remember her with regret, when the
step-mother comes to them it is the rule,
and not the exception, that they love their
new protector with love that makes no
abatement, and are perhaps happier than
they would have been had their own
mother lived. ..
For we maintain that the popular i'm
age of the step-mother is so far phan-
tom, a mere Pigment of the imagination,
that mans second wife is likely to be a
much higher type of woman than his
first, Beauty, grace of manner, an
idioic fondness for himself, the most
perishable and accidental charms, en-
chant the boy-lover, and make him the
husband. When his girl-wife becomes
the mother of his children, folly is not
thereby translated into wisdom; and if
she be compact of follies, however pretty
and well-behaved, her offspring will suffer
for that combination. Does anybody
doubt that Agnes would have made far
better mother for Dora's baby, had it
lived, than that poor, sweet-faced, loving,
silly, altogether charming simpleton?
And Agnes is the woman whom the
Davids, in their thoughtful prime, would
choose.
Step-mothers are impatient, unjust.
unable to see its conduct from the child's
point of view, we are told. Are mothers,
then, SO uniformly patient, just, full of
loving Imagination? Their children fret
them, bore them, offend against them
innocently, and are sharply and unfairly
punished constantly. But their love is
taken for granted by censorious world,
and very likely perverse generation
praises their discipline. Against the
laws of the step-mother the young Of
fender may trespass seventy times seven
times, and if her voice be harsh at the
seventy-first infraction, all the child's
surviving relatives on the maternal side
openly pity him, or with Ostentatious
fOrbearance, "with arms encountered
thus, or this head-shake, or by pronounce
ing of some doubtful phrase" aid and
comfort the rebel vastly more than by
espousal of his cause.
We mean merely to assert that the
world is peopled by human beings. Ma
ternity comes by nature, but mother
hood is the fruit Of grace. It is as likely
to be the possession of some maiden
aunt, of some childless matron, of some
misunderstood step-mother. as of her
who has suffered in travail. Children
are wearing, and those who have them
in keeping are worn. The temper of the
race is not fawless, and the list is short
of our own acquaintances who are too
patient, too tolerant. and too Just. But
It is unfair, it is monstrous, to condemn
q whole class of women to reprobation,
and assume their guilt as well, for a
kind of offenses which we do not even
comment upon when another class of
women commits them. The tale runs
that the Queen of Theseus comprised the
death of her step-son by extremely I'M
pleasant and underhand means. But
Ao1oo an tho ,fbar bonI ly;I1od bo,