The Mother a CreatorBy C. Josephine Barton(Contemporary. Formerly associate editor and publisher “The Life,” author of “An Interlude,” “Evangel Ahvallah,” “The Mother of the Living,” etc.)
By C. Josephine Barton
(Contemporary. Formerly associate editor and publisher “The Life,” author of “An Interlude,” “Evangel Ahvallah,” “The Mother of the Living,” etc.)
Thoughts are the blocks out of which children are made.... Your child’s thoughts will flow in the trenches you open for it. During the impressible first few months it will cultivate that which you cultivate. If you love, it will love; if you hate, it will hate. If you have the measles, it will have it; the child will rejoice at your rejoicing, and will weepwhen you weep. (This is one instance wherein if you “weep you willnotweep alone”! Anger indulged in by you will make the foetus helpless in Anger’s toils! Love humanity, find and faithfully perform your work, and your unborn child will one day be a philanthropist....
Two brothers manifested the same criminality their father had been guilty of when begetting them, and they became even worse men, because their weak, unresisting mother took no control over them during the months most important, and their passions developed. Thus the design and form of temple unwittingly carved out in the brain of their two sons, developed the phrenological bumps, criminal protuberances to match the design marked out for them by their father in his unenlightened Temple of Thought. This condition could not have been altered by any process known except that of the mother’s thought-action during the period of pliability in the atom. But being incompetent, unable to systematize her thoughts and purify her heart, or cultivate the philosophical and rational, the begotten shape developed with all the qualities about it that had so blighted the begetter....
It is with pleasure I turn from the above picture and point out to you the laws leading up to the beautiful character of Elizabeth Cady Stanton—one of the bravest of leaders in the cause of woman’s emancipation. Daniel Cady was a distinguished lawyer, a New York judge, later elected to Congress. Though a man of fine qualities, unimpeachable integrity, he was sensitive and modest to a markeddegree; while her mother, Margaret Livingston, had the military idea of government, was tall and queenly, self-reliant and at her ease under all circumstances. She was the daughter of Colonel Livingston, who, at West Point, when Arnold made the attempt to betray that stronghold into the enemy’s hands, in the absence of his superior officer, took the responsibility of firing into the Vulture, a suspicious looking British vessel that lay at anchor on the opposite side of the river, leaving Andre, the British spy, with his papers to be captured.
The foregoing shows the result of the influence of two united energies in the production of a powerful woman. To modify the effect of her begetter’s modesty, the mother’s military ideas stood in good place; and to supplement his embarrassment, she was full of courage; so that even if her father had implanted the foundation for the cultivation of an over-modest child, the mother made up the happy balance during her supervision, and it resulted in the freedom of individuality in the beautiful woman who has blessed the race with light, in the dispelling of many clouds. The loving and faithful mother of seven children, she found time to fill a noble sphere in public, one in which they could rise up to call her blessed.