The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought | Page 8

Greek philosophers on the relation of the father and the mother to the
child. Plato is represented as calling "mind the conception, idea, model,
and _father_; and matter the mother, nurse, or seat and region capable
of births." Chrysippus is said to have stated: "The foetus is nourished in
the womb like a plant; but, being born, is refrigerated and hardened by
the air, and its spirit being changed it becomes an animal," a view
which, as McLennan points out, "constitutes the mother the mere nurse
of her child, just as a field is of the seed sown in it."
The view of Apollo, which, in the council of the gods, influenced

Athene to decide for Orestes, is 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,"