The Savannah morning news., 1903-02-01
TYRANT OF TIE HEARTH
Is the Baby Despot in the American
Home.

Homer
The dean of one of the largest wom-
ems colleges in this country, writes
Dorothy Dix in the New Orleans Plea
VINE. is reported to have recently made
an address to the graduating class in
her school in which she implored the
Young women, should they. marry, not
IN let wifehood and motherhood in
tarfere with their further studies, but
10 turn their children over to trained
nurses and Undergraduates and devote
their time and energies to their own
intellectual development.
This would be iniquitous advice. if
it were not so utterly futile Fortunate
". the instincts of motherhood are
stronger than college training. The
first shrill cry of a baby is more elo-
ouent and convincing to a woman than
all the logic and precepts of the sages,
and there is no danger of any alarm
ing number of mothers neglecting their
babies while they devote themselves to
the differential calculus, or to the re-
condite investigation of the philosophy
of Hegel.
Motherhood is the touch of nature
that levels all ranks, and reduces all
women to a common intellectual plane.
The queen and the peasant, the blue
stocking and the ignOramus, Aspasia
and Mary Jane, are just women be-
fore the cradle with every interest in
life, every hope, and fear, and ankle
ty bound up in the tiny, red, squirm-
ing bundle within it. The woman of
all schools, and the woman of no
school, talk the same VOlapuk to their
offspring, see in them the same beauty,
and are just as irrationally foolish and
fond.
A college education doesn't cut much
figure in a woman's mental attitude or
actions when she becomes a mother.
1t matters not that her conversation
may once have been redolent of cul-
ture 1t reeks of baby foods now. 1t
is nothing that she once pursued ca
reer. She is now on a still hunt for a
reliable remedy for collie. The voice
on which thousands of dollars and
years of time have been spent fitting
it for grand opera is only used to sing
lullabies now. All of the aspirations,
ambitions, purposes of a lifetime have
been swallowed up in the gulf of moth
erhOOd
Now. no one will argue for minute
but what it is a mothers highest priv
ilege, as well as her duty, to see that
her children are properly clothed, and
taught and fed, and guarded. Hers
is the responsibility for the life she
has brought into the world, and woe
to her if she attempts to shirk one iota
of her duty; but this does not mean,
as the average mother interpretS it to
mean, that she shall bind herself as u
slave at the wheel of the perambulator.
There are plenty of homes in which
the wife is so completely swallowed up
in the mother that her husband never
has a minute of her uninterrupted So
cety after the first baby comes. She
N~sN H. ,r,E TOO lr
cause she has to put the children to
bed. She can't go to the theater be-
cause she can't leave the Children. She
can't dress herself up because baby
pulls at her pretty ribbons and laces.
She can't entertain because the chill
dren are bound to be at the table.
Home becomes one vast nursery, with
baby things scattered all over it, and
the very talk is steriliZed baby talk,
and in desperation the man takes to
his club, or elsewhere, for companion
ship and amusement, for while men
love their children sufficiently, there
are precious few of them who can
live on an unadulterated diet of baby.
Because a woman desires to do her
duty by her children is no excuse for
making herself a slave to them. There
is reason in all things, and while few
would advocate the deans theory of
turning ones children over to trained
nurses ana KlnQergdrCnerS TO raise,
there is no doubt but what it would be
vastly to the child's benefit as well as
the mothers, if she devoted more time
to herself and less to it. In other
countries the children form the back
ground of society. In America they oc-
cupy the center of the stage and get all
the lmelight. They mOnopolize con-
versation, decide what the family shall
do, and where they shall go, and are
the pivot around which life revolves.
The result is appalling. There is no
longer any simplicity of child life.
From the minute a baby is born it
takes the whole family to entertain it,
and in the midst of all this hurly-bur-
ly is the poor wn-trodden mother,
uselessly and foolishly sacrificing her
self.
Somewhere, though, in the seditious
and reasonable utterances of the dean,
there turks a hope that the time will
yet come when the mothers Of this
country will rise and throw off the yoke
of tyranny under which they are suf-
fering, and will assert their inaliena-
BILE right to life, liberty and the pur-
suit of some sort of happiness outside
the walls of the nursery. The trouble
with the American mother is not that
she neglects her children, but that she
doesn't neglect them. She is so afraid
of not doing her duty that she overdoes
1t, and the result. is that there is no
where else in the world such a grind
ing, oVerbearing deSpot as the Ameri-
can child, or any creature so down.
trodden and oppressed as the American
mother.