The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought | Page 8

this:--
"The bearer of the so-called offspring is not the mother of it, but only the nurse of the newly conceived foetus. It is the male who is the author of its being; while she, as a stranger, for a stranger, preserves the young plant for those for whom the god has not blighted it in the bud. And I will show you a proof of this assertion; one may become a father without a mother. There stands by a witness of this in the daughter of Olympian Zeus, who was not even nursed [much less engendered or begotten] in the darkness of the womb" (115. 211). "This is akin to the wild discussion in the misogynistic Middle Ages about the possibility of lucina sine concubitu. The most recent and most scholarly discussion of all questions involved in "mother-right" will be found people in the world; for it stands on record that the five companies (five hundred men) recruited from the Iroquois of New York and Canada during our civil war stood first on the list among all the recruits of our army for height, vigour, and corporeal symmetry" (412. 82). And it was this people too who produced Hiawatha, a philosophic legislator and reformer, worthy to rank with Solon and Lycurgus, and the founder of a great league whose object was to put an end to war, and unite all the nations in one bond of brotherhood and peace.
Among the Choctaw-Muskogee tribes, women-chiefs were also known; the Yuchis, Chetimachas, had "Queens"; occasionally we find female rulers elsewhere in America, as among the Winnebagos, the Nah-ane, etc. Scattered examples of gynocracy are to be found in other parts of the world, and in their later development some of the Aryan races have been rather partial to women as monarchs, and striking instances of a like predilection are to be met with among the Semitic tribes,--Boadicea, Dido, Semiramis, Deborah are well-known cases in point, to say nothing of the Christian era and its more enlightened treatment of woman.
The fate of women among those peoples and in those ages where extreme exaltation of the male has been the rule, is sketched by Letourneau in his chapter on The Condition of Women (100. 173-185); the contrast between the Australians, to whom "woman is a domestic animal, useful for the purposes of genesic pleasure, for reproduction, and, in case of famine, for food," the Chinese, who can say "a newly-married woman ought to be merely as a shadow and as an echo in the house," the primitive Hindus, who forbade the wife to call her husband by name, but made her term him "master, lord," or even "god," and even some of our modern races in the eye of whose law women are still minors, and the Iroquois, is remarkable. Such great differences in the position and rights of women, existing through centuries, over wide areas of the globe, have made the study of comparative pedagogy a most important branch of human sociology. The mother as teacher has not been, and is not now, the same the world over.
As men holding supreme power have been termed "father," women have in like manner been called "mother." The title of the queen-mother in Ashanti is _nana,_ "Grandmother" (438. 259), and to some of the Indian tribes of Canada Queen Victoria is the "Great White Mother," the "Great Mother across the Sea." In Ashanti the "rich, prosperous, and powerful" are termed _oman enna,_ "mothers of the tribe," and are expected to make suitably large offerings to the dead, else there will be no child born in the neglectful family for a certain period (438. 228).
With the Romans, mater and its derivative _matrona,_ came to be applied as titles of honour; and beside the rites of the parentalia we find those of the matronalia (492. 454).
In the ancient Hebrew chronicles we find mention of Deborah, that "mother in Israel."
With us, off whose tongues "the fathers," "forefathers," "ancestors" (hardly including ancestresses) and the like rolled so glibly, the "Pilgrim Fathers" were glorified long before the "Pilgrim Mothers," and hardly yet has the mother of the "father of his country" received the just remembrance and recognition belonging to her who bore so noble and so illustrious a son. By and by, however, it is to be hoped, we shall be free from the reproach cast upon us by Colonel Higginson, and wake up to the full consciousness that the great men of our land have had mothers, and proceed to re-write our biographical dictionaries and encyclop?dias of life-history.
In Latin _mater,_ as does mother with us, possessed a wide extent of meaning, "mother, parent, producer, nurse, preparer, cause, origin, source," etc. _Mater omnium artium necessitas,_ "Necessity is the mother of invention," and similar phrases were in common use, as they are also