The Man‐Made World
Here is the dominant male, largely humanized, yet still measuring life from male standards. He sees women only as a sex. (Note here the criticism of Europeans on American women. “Your women are so sexless!” they say, meaning merely that our women have human
qualities as well as feminine.) And children he considers as part and parcel of the same domain, both inferior classes, “women and children.”
I recall in Rimmer‘s beautiful red chalk studies, certain profiles of man, woman and child, and careful explanation that the proportion
of the woman‘s face and head were far more akin to the child than to the man. What Mr. Rimmer should have shown, and could have, by
profuse illustration, was that the faces of boy and girl differ but slightly, and the faces of old men and women differ as little, sometimes not at all; while the face of the woman approximates the
human more closely than that of the man; while the child, representing race more than sex, is naturally more akin to her than to him. The male reserves more primitive qualities, the hairiness, the more pugnacious jaw; the female is nearer to the higher human types.
An ultra‐male selection has chosen women for their femininity first, and next for qualities of submissiveness and patient service bred by long ages of servility.
This servile womanhood, or the idler and more excessively feminine
type, has never appreciated the real power and place of the mother, and has never been able to grasp or to carry out any worthy system
of education for little children. Any experienced teacher, man or woman, will own how rare it is to find a mother capable of a dispassionate appreciation of educative values. Books in infant education and child culture generally are read by teachers more than mothers, so our public libraries prove. The mother‐instinct, quite suitable and sufficient in animals, is by no means equal to the requirements of civilized life. Animal motherhood furnishes a fresh wave of devotion for each new birth; primitive human motherhood
extends that passionate tenderness over the growing family for a longer period; but neither can carry education beyond its rudiments.
So accustomed are we to our world‐old method of entrusting the first years of the child to the action of untaught, unbridled mother-instinct, that suggestions as to a better education for babies are received with the frank derision of massed ignorance.