Such a mother will teach not what will expose her son or daughter to the temptations presented by being able to escape labour, but whatever will enable them to bear the labour of life. She will not need to ask what she should teach her children or for what she should prepare them: she knows what man’s vocation is, and what to teach and what to prepare them for.
Such a woman will not only not incite her husband to sham, false work which aims only at making use of other people’s labour, but will regard with aversion and horror an activity which serves as a double temptation to her children. Such a woman will not choose a husband for her daughter by the whiteness of his hands and the refinement of his manners, but knowing well what real labour is and what is deceit, she will always and everywhere, beginning with her own husband, respect and value in men and demand of them, real labour with expenditure and danger of life, and will despise that false, showy labour which aims at emancipating oneself from real work.
And let not those women who while renouncing woman’s vocation wish to profit by its rights, say that such a view of life is impossible for a mother, she being too intimately bound by love to her children to refuse them dainties, amusements, and fine clothes, and not to fear to leave them unprovided for if her. husband has no fortune or assured position, and not to fear for the future of her marrying daughters, and for her sons who have not received an ‘education’.
All that is a lie, a most glaring lie!
A true mother will never say it. You cannot refrain from the desire to give them sweets and toys and to take them to the circus?
1 The diplomas of the higher educational establishments in Russia were essential for entry to various branches of Government service and to various professions.-A. M.
But you do not give them poisonous berries to eat, do not let them out alone in a boat, and do not take them to a cafe chantant! How is it you can refrain in the one case, but not in the other?
Because you are saying what is untrue.
You say you love your children so that you fear for their lives, fear hunger and cold, and therefore value the security given you by your husband’s position which you admit to be unjustifiable.
You so fear those future possible misfortunes for your children-very distant and doubtful ones-that you encourage your husband in things you yourself regard as unjustifiable; but what are you doing now in the present conditions of your life to secure your children from the unfortunate occurrences of present-day life?
Do you spend much of the day with your children? It is much if you spend one-tenth of it!
The rest of the time they are in the hands of strangers, hired people often taken from the street, or they are in institutions, exposed to physical and moral infection.
Your children eat, are nourished. Who prepares their dinner, and of what? For the most part you do not know. Who instils moral perceptions into them? You do not know that either. So do not say that you put up with evil for your children’s good-it is not true. You do evil because you like it.
A true mother, one who sees in the bearing and bringing up of children her self-sacrificing vocation and the fulfilment of God’s will, will not speak so.
She will not speak so, because she knows that her business lies not in making of her children what suits her or suits the prevailing tendency of the times. She knows that children-the coming generation-are the greatest and most sacred thing it is given to man actually to see, and that to serve this holy thing with her whole being is her life.
She herself knows, being constantly between life and death and safeguarding a barely dawning life, that life and death are not her business, her business is to serve life, and therefore she will not seek distant paths for that service but will only not neglect those near at hand.
Such a mother will bear children and will nurse them herself, will first of all feed another before herself, will prepare food for the children, will sew and wash for them, will teach them and will sleep and talk with them, because she sees therein her life-work.
She knows that the security of every life lies in labour and the capacity to labour, and therefore she will not seek external security in her husband’s money or in her children’s diplomas, but will develop in them the same capacity for a self-sacrificing fulfilment of God’s will which she has felt in herself, a capacity to endure toil with expenditure and danger of life. Such a mother will not ask others what she is to do, she will know it all and will fear nothing, and will always be at peace, for she will know that she has done what she had to do.
If there may be doubts for men and for a childless woman as to the way to, fulfil the will of God, for a mother that path is firmly and clearly defined, and if she fulfils it humbly with a simple heart she stands on the highest point of perfection a human being can attain, and becomes for all a model of that complete performance of God’s will which all desire.
Only a mother can before her death tranquilly say to Him who sent her into this world, and Whom she has served by bearing and bringing up children whom she has loved more than herself-only she having served Him in the way appointed to her can say with tranquillity, ‘Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.’ And that is the highest perfection to which, as to the highest good, men aspire.
Such women who fulfil their mission reign over men, and serve as a guiding star to mankind; such women form public opinion and prepare the coming generation; and therefore in their hands lies the highest power, the power to save men from the existing and threatening evils of our time.
Yes, women, mothers, in your hands more than in those of anyone else lies the salvation of the world.
February 14, 1886
The end
