THE IDEAL WOMAN.

 

[By LADY COOK, nee TENNESSEE CLAFLIN.]

Wherever we look on the works of mediaeval art, we see numberless conceptions of the Madonna and Child. No two of them may be alike, yet they all portray the painter's idea of pure maternity and joyous innocence. Mary may be a Dutch blonde, or an Italian brunette, or even a hard German housewife of the old school; but plain or beautiful, she is always honest, clear-eyed, placid, content. And the child, the infant Hercules, of the Christian faith, he who must cleanse the Augean stables of the world, the wrestler, the serpent stranger, the heir of infinite potentialities lies toying with the breast of his mother. How utterly human it all is! The bride of God is a Syrian peasant girl; the son of God, a helpless naked infant. How supremely happy, too, she appears, as she gazes calmly down into the eyes of her boy ! What joy is there like that of a mother ? Joseph is not always present, and when he is, it is only as a decent accessory, he looks awkward, his office appears to have ceased. Usually, if not always, there is a look in his face expressive of deep thought, as one who would say, "This the man-Christ who is born to redeem the race, and set a perfect example for all men and women to follow." Yet there seems to be a doubt in his mind as to the conception, the beginning, the great mystery. The artist never knows exactly how or where to pose him. The child, however, is an obvious necessity, but holds a secondary place. Mary is the centre, all eyes turn to her. On a thousand canvasses she stands out the saintly type of the glorified human mother. As the ages proceed our ideals must either advance or retrograde. There is no middle position. The Roman Church removed the gods for her saints, and substituted the Virgin for Bona Dea. But, as Paganism gave way to Christianity, so the mystical theology of nineteen centuries is rapidly vanishing under the firm light of modern scientific research. What is false will be abandoned. The time has come when the Virgin must be respected and revered for the great good which she accomplished by bringing the grand man Christ into the world, and henceforth all mothers must look to her as offering the noblest possible example for them to follow and imitate, in order that they, too, may bring into the world pure and lovable children, worthy of being called the images of God.

 There are in our country three million wives at least, and, unless poverty has compelled, thousands of their children have never known their mother's breasts. Three million women, all vowed to the duties of maternity, and the greater number of them deficient in nourishment and its elementary requirements. And why ? Because they have undergone no kind of preparatory training, because they are ignorant of themselves and of their duties; because, too frequently, they were wedded from sordid motives and to unsuitable men ; because when love should have entered as a God, he came as a beast. Heace, the untold wretchedness of their loveless lives, the daily miseries that destroy their homes; to say nothing of shameless adulteries, widespread prostitution, loathsome diseases, and early deaths. Our Law Courts reveal but a very small fraction of the existing social corruption. Could we see the whole at once, we should recoil with horror at the sight. Throughout all nature, reproduction is the highest function of every living thing, and to it all other functions are more or less subsidiary. Maternity is thus the supreme effort of the supreme organism, neither to be undertaken lightly or without forethought. Yet the mothers of our marriageable girls have rarely given their daughters any information as to sexual relations. Prudishness or false modesty restrains. Consequently, their knowledge acquired by experience, often comes too late to prevent unhappy results. The same girls may not study physiology. They must not learn how they were produced, and how they are formed. They are thus a ready prey of all who can take advantage of their ignorance.

 The period arrives when the girl, young, fair, innocent, but intensely ignorant of all she ought to know, is thrown by conventional marriage into the arms of a man whose habits and thoughts have nothing in common with hers. Even a roue—and roues now-a-days are both young and numerous—is not refused if he happen to have a satisfactory income. In the latter case, even if she does not become physically tainted, she must become morally so—frequently both—and her offspring must inherit and reproduce at maturity the virtue derived from its father. Lovely and innocent as she may be, she is not the typical mother, nor is her boy the Christ. Syria never produced our ideal. In that ignorant and despotic region she could not have existed. Only poets and painters have had occasional glimpses at her. The typical mother can neither be a slave nor a genetrix of slaves. She is the free, the perfect woman, who has been embraced by the divine man.

 All that substracts from the freedom of woman hinders her development, and therefore lessens her value as a wife and a mother. For this reason we do not cease to advocate the necessity of equal rights and equal laws for the sexes before society can possibly improve in purity and in happiness, and before woman can rise to her true dignity. Although the duties of men and women differ, the status of both in the eye of the law and of society should be the same, and nothing should be required of the one which is not also demanded of the other. For instance, let man continue to regard chastity as indispensable in women, but let women also require the same from men. And let her, if modest, regard as a profound insult a proposal from anyone whose delicacy and power of appreciation her purity have been destroyed by contact with lust and infamy. Too long has woman been enslaved, the toy and victim of man. But the dawn of her emancipation has come. A few have already seen the light, the bonds which enswathed woman's faculties are being loosened ; may they soon drop off. Then we shall see her lovelier than anything sculptured by Grecian chisel, calm-browed as Athen, majestic as Hebe, light-limbed and strong of mind, joyous, serene, loyal, true of heart and purpose, irradiated with a wise intelligence, despising shame and frivolities, tender with a woman's sweetest tenderness, loving simple truth—a noble mother raised to a higher pedestal. This is the true ideal woman, capable, too, of realization. This is the true mate of the true man, and worthy of daring the world's hero.

Yorke's Peninsula Advertiser (SA : 1878 - 1922), Friday 20 July 1894

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article216328043