In the following pages it is my wish to impress on women the grave truth, than which none can have more importance, that with them, with the mother, rests the greater power to mould for good or ill, for power or weakness, for beauty or deformity, the characters of her unborn children, and that with power comes the responsibility for its use.

Laying down a few self-evident propositions I shall illustrate the same by facts which have come under my own immediate notice during a period of nearly forty years, simply changing in each case the names of persons and locality.

The subject is by no means a new or original one. The principles involved are found scattered throughout all the journals which embody modern thought, and even find their way, accompanied by much contradiction, into our lighter literature. Yet it is certainly not universally understood that on the mother’s state of mind and body during pregnancy depend such vital interests. The shadow thrown on the subject by false modesty keeps the masses in ignorance and arrests the upward progress of the race.

The mother’s office was, and is yet, by the majority held to be a secondary one and comparatively unimportant. “She merely nourishes the germ given by the father” is the common supposition. What singular infatuation is this when anatomy shows that the ova or eggs exist in the mother, and that the material supplied by the father vivifies them!

In ancient, as well as modern, times it was admitted that during the period of gestation the mother was keenly sensitive to hideous impressions, and was through this equal to the production of deformity and monstrosity. It seems strange that the converse of this did not suggest itself, so that her sensibility could have been tested for the creation of beauty and symmetry.

It was also seen that the pregnant woman could affect the temper, the disposition of her child by yielding to angry emotions, but she was not credited with the ability to convey a serenity and sweetness of nature surpassing her own.

Through all the dark ages that have preceded us, woman has known herself a slave with less questioning as to the rightfulness of the position awarded her by man than she is sensible of to-day. This was the inevitable order of development for primitive man. That the unjust domination continues is but another proof of how unwillingly usurped power is relinquished.

The slave woman respects her master, not herself. The children she has borne have been the children of their father, not of their mother. Darwin declares that “qualities induced by circumstances inhere in that sex on which the circumstances operated,” passing by the opposite sex born of the same mothers. Thus women have given birth to independent sons and subservient daughters.

In civilized lands it is now almost universally admitted that conditions produce a race. The included truth that conditions, governed by invariable law, produce each individual of that race is scarcely recognized by the most enlightened, so deeply seated in the minds of men is the belief in woman’s inferiority and unimportance in the realm of causes.

“My children will represent ME,” is the unexpressed thought of nearly every father until the baseless assumption is slowly dispelled by the irresponsible mediocre children before him. Men, and women too, are astonished and perplexed when the superficial, but pleasing young wife of the man of genius proves the mother of dull boys and girls without possibilities. Still more incomprehensible to them is the mysterious Providence which has awarded the vicious or deficient child to the excellent and sensible couple, and presented the lazy and disorderly one with a delicate saint, or an inventor. When the education, the training, had been exactly alike for all the children, why did the second or the sixth o’ertop the others in talent, high ambition, nobler presence? If the exceptional child were dull, the mother was held measurably responsible; if it were brilliant and beautiful, the qualities were traced back to some great-grandfather or grand-aunt of the father’s.

At length, if almost unwillingly, we have found the right track. In the early part of this century it began slowly to dawn on the minds of the most enlightened men that women were in a truer sense the mothers of the race than had been previously supposed, and through the influence of these pioneers in the world of ideas, woman begins to realize her great maternal power. With this knowledge, and the higher education now offered her in the schools, her character will broaden, her thoughts enlarge. Subserviency, personal gossip, and paltry rivalries will no more belong to her than to her brother. Courage and sincerity will belong to both, equally with purity and gentleness may we hope.