Mother's Day

The Decline and Fall of Motherhood:

The New York Times has an interesting article on motherhood that I find, having read it, to fit in better with my understanding of 19th and 20th century history than the standard reading that we often hear.

ONE of the most enduring myths about feminism is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today.... That myth — repeated in Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly’s new book, “The Flipside of Feminism” — reflects a misreading of American history.

There was indeed a time when full-time mothers were held in great esteem. But it was not the 1950s or early 1960s. It was 150 years ago. In the 19th century, women had even fewer rights than in the 1950s, but society at least put them on a pedestal, and popular culture was filled with paeans to their self-sacrifice and virtue.

When you compare the diaries and letters of 19th-century women with those of women in the 1950s and early 1960s, you can see the greater confidence of the earlier mothers about their value to society. Many felt they occupied a “nobler sphere” than men’s “bank-note” world.

The wife of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia, told her mother that she did not share her concerns about improving the rights of women, because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.” Americans of the era believed in “the empire of the mother,” and grown sons were not embarrassed about rhapsodizing over their “darling mama,” carrying her picture with them to work or war.

This is quite right, at least in the English-speaking world. The reign of Queen Victoria sparked a revival of interest in the ideals of chivalry, as we have discussed here before at length. Eric reminds us, rightly, that 19th century reconstructions of chivalry were different from the original in many respects; but they aimed at reconstituting the core of the thing, part of which was an ethic of mutual service between knight and lady, man and woman, husband and wife.

What went wrong? Frankly, the next part of the article is so heavily pointed in the direction of my own thoughts that I have to be suspicious of my ability to judge it. (Confirmation bias, and all that.)

In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of “Mother Love” as unmanly and redefine what used to be called “uplifting encouragement” as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality[.]

How bad did it get?

In 1942, in his best-selling “Generation of Vipers,” Philip Wylie coined the term “momism” to describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and demanded that politicians heed their moralizing.

Momism became seen as a threat to the moral fiber of America on a par with communism. In 1945, the psychiatrist Edward Strecher argued that the 2.5 million men rejected or discharged from the Army as unfit during World War II were the product of overly protective mothers.

In the same year, an information education officer in the Army Air Forces conjectured that the insidious dependency of the American man on “ ‘Mom’ and her pies” had “killed as many men as a thousand German machine guns.”

The ethic of chivalry -- or, if you like, both the medieval chivalry and the 19th-century chivalry -- was one that encouraged men to be guided by ladies. The era of Queen Victoria had heroic gentlemen whose highest aspiration was to be of service to the Queen; to be influenced by the lady herself was the highest praise. To be of service to any lady was great praise. As the biographer of Chretien de Troyes describes the work of his patron:

[She was] the Countess Marie de
Champagne. She was the daughter of Louis VII, and of that famous Eleanor
of Aquitaine, as she is called in English histories, who, coming from
the South of France in 1137, first to Paris and later to England, may
have had some share in the introduction of those ideals of courtesy and
woman service which were soon to become the cult of European society.

Those hours -- renewed in the 19th century, and not abandoned yet by some -- were the height in all human history of the relationship between the sexes. However we came to the place where men were despised for being influenced by the women in their lives, it is a poorer place. This is Mother's Day, so I will simply close with a story that happened to me recently.

I stopped at a service station and, when I arrived at the door, I noticed that on the inside of that door was a woman confined to a walker trying to get out. I opened the door for her, and held it while standing aside as any gentleman would. As she passed me, she said: "Thank you, young man. Tell your mother that she did a blessed job."

I did just that, this morning. This, though, is the finest of things: it is what being a man is all about. To defend and to protect, to uphold those who find themselves struggling with a fate that has made them weak, these are the things for which strength was made. We are fortunate to enjoy it, for an hour. Strength will pass from us, and we to the grave, all too soon. To use our strength in a fitting way, while we are granted that extraordinary boon, is a great honor and a great joy.