The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons by Ellice Hopkins

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THE
POWER OF WOMANHOOD
OR
MOTHERS AND SONS

A BOOK FOR PARENTS, AND THOSE IN
LOCO PARENTIS

BY ELLICE HOPKINS

AUTHOR OF "LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES HINTON,"
"WARS AMONG WORKINGMEN," ETC.

Sow an act, and you reap a habit:
Sow a habit, and you reap a character:
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

NEW YORK
E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY
31 West Twenty-Third Street
1901 Copyright, 1899

Copyright, 1899
By
E.P. DUTTON & CO.

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

This little book has been written under great physical disabilities,
chiefly while wandering about in search of health, and consequently far
from the libraries which would have enabled me to give proper references
to all my quotations. Often for a whole year I have been unable to touch
it; but again and again I have returned to my task, feeling it worth any
risk to mind or body if only in the end its words might prove of some
service to the educated mothers of England and America.

Under these circumstances, I know I may plead for indulgence as to any
defects its pages may present.

But now that, after six years, I have realized the pretty Eastern
proverb, "By patience and perseverance, and a bottle of sweet-oil, the
snail at length reaches Jerusalem,"--now that by God's unfailing help I
have finished my difficult task, I can but commit the book into the
hands of the women who have implanted in me, next to my faith in God,
faith in the "Power of Womanhood," and whose faithful adherence and
co-operation remain the deepest and most grateful memory of my life.
Most of the ordinary means of circulation are closed to a book of this
nature. The doors of circulating libraries are for the most part shut;
notices in papers for the general public are necessarily few; nor can I
any longer hope, as I once did, to visit America, and give it a wide
circulation by my own efforts. I can but stretch out my hands to my many
dear unknown friends in America,--hands which have grown too weak to
hold the sword or lift the banner in a cause for which I have laid down
my all,--and ask any mother who may find help or strength in this book
to help me in return by placing it in the hands of other mothers of boys
she may know, especially,--I would plead,--young mothers. Do not say
they are too young to know. If they are not too young to be the mothers
of boys, they are not too young to know how to fulfil the responsibility
inherent in such motherhood. They at least can begin at the beginning,
and not have occasion to say, as so many mothers have said to me, with
tears in their eyes, "Oh, if I could only have heard you years ago, what
a difference it would have made to me! But now it is too late."

Enable me thus, by your aid, to do some helpful work for that great
country which I have ever loved as my own; and which with England is
appointed in the Providence of God to lead in the great moral causes of
the world.

If, indeed, each mother whom, either by word or deed, I may have helped
would do me this service of love now that I am laid aside, not yielding
to the first adverse criticism, which is so often only a cry of pain or
prejudice, but patiently working on at enlightening and strengthening
the hands of other mothers in her own rank of life, what vital work
would be done:--work so precious in its very nature, so far-reaching in
its consequences, that all the travail and anguish I have endured, all
the brokenness of body and soul I have incurred, would not so much as
come into mind for joy that a truer manhood is being born into the
world, even the manhood of Him who--

"Came on earth that He might show mankind
What 'tis to be a MAN: to give, not take;
To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;
To help, not crush; if needs, to die, not live."

2 BELLE VUE GARDENS,
WALPOLE ROAD, BRIGHTON,
_Nov. 1, 1899_.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I.--INTRODUCTORY 1

II.--"WHY SHOULD I INTERFERE?" 13

III.--FIRST PRINCIPLES 26

IV.--THE SECRET AND METHOD 38

V.--EARLY BOYHOOD 56

VI.--BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE 69

VII.--EARLY MANHOOD 131

VIII.--THE INFLUENCE OF SISTERS 157

IX.--THE MODERN WOMAN AND HER FUTURE 170

X.--NATIONAL AND IMPERIAL ASPECTS 191

XI.--THE DYNAMIC ASPECT OF EVIL 206

CONCLUSION 221

APPENDIX 231

"No advice, no exposure, will be of use until the right relation
exists between the father and mother and their son. To deserve his
confidence, to keep it as the chief treasure committed to them by
God;--to be, the father his strength, the mother his
sanctification, and both his chosen refuge, through all weakness,
evil, danger, and amazement of his young life."

Rushkin.

THE POWER OF WOMANHOOD

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

In a banquet given in honor of Heinrik Ibsen by a Norwegian society
known as the Woman's League, in response to a speech thanking him in the
name of the society for all he had done for the cause of women, the
poet, while disclaiming the honor of having consciously worked for the
woman's cause--indeed, not even being quite clear as to what the woman's
cause really was, since in his eyes it was indistinguishable from the
cause of humanity--concluded his speech with the words:

"It has always seemed to me that the great problem is to elevate
the nation and place it on a higher level. Two factors, the man and
the woman, must co-operate for this end, and it lies especially
with the mothers of the people, by slow and strenuous work, to
arouse in it a conscious sense of culture and discipline. To the
woman, then, we must look for the solution of the problem of
humanity. It must come from them as mothers: that is the mission
that lies before them."

Whether we are admirers of the great Norwegian poet or not, whether we
are afflicted with Ibsenism, or regard his peculiar genius in a more
critical and dispassionate light, no one would deny to him that deep
intuitive insight which belongs to a poet, and which borders so closely
on the prophet's gift.

It is now some years since I have been laid aside, owing to the terrible
strain and burthen of my ten years' conflict with the evils that are
threatening the sanctity of the family, the purity of the home, and all
that constitutes the higher life of the nation. But in those ten years
the one truth that was burnt into my very soul was the truth enunciated
by Ibsen, that it is to the woman that we must look for the solution of
the deepest moral problems of humanity, and that the key of those
problems lies in the hands of the mothers of our race. They, and they
alone, can unlock the door to a purer and a stronger life. This, in
Ibsen's words, "is the mission that lies before them." And it is this
strong conviction which makes me feel that, even with broken powers and
shattered health, I cannot rest from my labors without, at any cost to
myself, placing the knowledge and experience gained in those years of
toil and sorrow at the disposal of the educated women of the
English-speaking world who, either as mothers or in other capacities,
have the care and training of the young.

No one recognizes more thankfully than I do the progress that the
woman's movement has made during what have been to me years of inaction
and suffering. The ever-increasing activity in all agencies for the
elevation of women; the multiplication of preventive institutions and
rescue societies; above all, that new sense of a common womanhood, that
_esprit de corps_ in which hitherto we have been so grievously lacking,
and which is now beginning to bind all our efforts together into one
great whole--these I thankfully recognize. We no longer each of us set
up in separate and somewhat antagonistic individuality our own little
private burrow of good works, with one way in and one way out, and
nothing else needed for the wants of the universe. We realize now that
no one agency can even partially cover the ground, and conferences are
now held of all who are working for the good of women and children, to
enable the separate agencies to work more effectually into one another's
hands and unite more fervently in heart and soul in a common cause.
Beneath all this, apart from any external organization whatever, there
is a silent work going on in the hearts of thoughtful and educated
mothers, which never comes before the public at all, but is silently
spreading and deepening under the surface of our life.

But when all this is thankfully recognized and acknowledged, I still
cannot help questioning whether the mass of educated women have at all
grasped the depth and complexity of the problem with which we have to
grapple if we are to fufil our trust as the guardians of the home and
family, and those hidden wells of the national life from which spring up
all that is best and highest in the national character. Nay, I sometimes
fear lest even our increased activity in practical work may not have the
effect of calling off our attention from those deep underlying causes
which must be dealt with if we are not to engage in the hopeless task of
trying to fill a cistern the tap of which has been left running. This
absorption in the effect and inattention to the cause is to a certain
degree bred in us by the very nature of the duties that devolve upon us
as women. John Stuart Mill has compared the life of a woman to an
"interrupted sentence." The mere fact that our lives are so interrupted
by incessant home calls, and that we are necessarily so concerned in the
details of life, is apt to make us wanting in grasp of underlying
principles. Perhaps it is the fact of my having been associated all the
early years of my life with eminent scientific men that has formed in me
a habit of mind always to regard effects in relation to causes, so that
merely to cure evil results without striking at the evil cause seems to
me, to use a Johnsonian simile, "like stopping up a hole or two of a
sieve with the hope of making it hold water."

It is, therefore, on these deeper aspects that more especially bear upon
the lives and training of our own sons that I want to write, placing
before you some facts which you must know if you are to be their
guardians, and venturing to make some suggestions which, as the result
of much collective wisdom and prayer, I think may prove helpful to you
in that which lies nearest your heart. Only, if some of the facts are
such as may prove both painful and disagreeable to you, do not therefore
reject them in your ignorance as false. Do not follow the advice of a
politician to a friend whom he was urging to speak on some public
question. "But how can I?" his friend replied; "I know nothing of the
subject, and should therefore have nothing to say." "Oh, you can always
get up and deny the facts," was the sardonic reply.

Let me first of all give you my credentials, all the more necessary as
my long illness has doubtless made me unknown by name to many of the
younger generation, who may therefore question my right to impart facts
or make any suggestions at all. Suffer me, therefore, to recount to you
how I have gained my knowledge and what are the sources of my
information.

In the first place, I was trained for the work by a medical man--my
friend Mr. James Hinton--first in his own branch of the London
profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of
women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source
of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and
Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he
saw and the tales he heard. The words of the Prophet ground themselves
into his very soul, with regard to the miserable wanderers of our
streets: "This is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them
snared in holes and hid in prison-houses; they are for a prey, and none
delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore."

The very first time he came down to me at Brighton, to see if I could
give him any help, speaking of all he had seen and heard, his voice
suddenly broke, and he bowed his face upon my hands and wept like a
child. That one man could suffer as he did over the degradation of this
womanhood of ours has always been to me the most hopeful thing I know--a
divine earnest of ultimate overcoming. The only thing that seemed in a
measure to assuage his anguish was my promise to devote myself to the
one work of fighting it and endeavoring to awake the conscience of the
nation to some sense of guilt with regard to it. In order to fit me for
this work he considered that I ought to know all that he as a medical
man knew. He emphatically did not spare me, and often the knowledge that
he imparted to me was drowned in a storm of tears. We were to have
worked together, but his mind, already unhinged by suffering, ultimately
gave way, and, with all that this world could give him--health, fame,
wealth, family affection, devoted friends--he died prematurely of a
broken heart.

For ten years, therefore, after my friend's death I gave up everything
for the purpose of carrying on the work he left me, and beat wearily up
and down the three kingdoms, holding meetings, organizing practical
work, agitating for the greater legal protection of the young,
afterwards embodied in two Acts--one for removing children from dens of
infamy and one known as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which have done
much to educate the public sentiment of the country; but always making
it my chief object to rouse educated women to face the facts about their
own womanhood, and, above all, to rouse mothers to realize the perils of
their own boys and to be determined to know enough to enable them to act
as their guardians.

During those ten years of warfare, passing as I did from family to
family, and always concerned with questions that touch upon the
innermost shrine of our life, I necessarily became the recipient of many
hidden sorrows. In fact, my fellow-creatures used me as a bottomless
well into which they could empty their household skeletons; and I used
often to reflect with sardonic satisfaction that I should never run dry
like other old wells, but that death would come and fill me up with a
good wholesome shovelful of earth, and I and my skeletons would lie
quiet together. But in this way I gained a knowledge of what is going on
under the surface of our life, whether we choose to ignore it or not,
which possibly can only come to those who are set apart to be
confessors of their kind; and the conclusion was forced upon me that
this evil, in one form or another, is more or less everywhere--in our
nurseries, in our public, and still more our private, schools,
decorously seated on magisterial benches, fouling our places of
business, and even sanctimoniously seated in our places of worship.

After the first two years of work among women I found that it was
absolutely hopeless attacking the evil from one side only, and I had to
nerve myself as best I could to address large mass meetings of men,
always taking care clearly to define my position--that I had not come
upon that platform to help them, but to ask them to help me in a battle
that I had found too hard for me, and that I stood before them as a
woman pleading for women. The first of these meetings I addressed at the
instance of the late revered Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot, who took
the chair, and inaugurated the White Cross Movement, which has since
spread over the civilized world. And throughout this most difficult side
of my work I had his priceless co-operation and approval; besides the
wise counsel, guidance, and unfailing sympathy of one whom but to name
is to awake the deepest springs of reverence, Dr. Wilkinson, then the
incumbent of St. Peter's, Eaton Square, afterwards Bishop of Truro, and
now Bishop of St. Andrews. But so great was the effort that it cost me,
that I do not think I could have done this part of my work but for my
two favorite mottoes--the one, that "I can't" is a lie in the lips that
repeat, "I believe in the Holy Ghost"; the other, received from the lips
of Bishop Selwyn, that "If as soldiers of the Cross we stick at
anything, we are disgraced forever."

But lastly, and perhaps best of all, as giving weight to any suggestions
that I may make, across the dismal mud swamp that I often trod with such
an aching heart and faltering steps came to meet me God's best and
highest, with outstretched hands of help and encouragement. It was the
highly-cultivated and thoughtful women who, amidst the storm of obloquy
that beat upon me from every quarter, first ranged themselves by my
side, perceiving that the best way to avoid a danger is not to refuse to
see it. Some were women already in the field in connection with Mrs.
Butler's movement, to which our nation owes so much, some were roused by
my words.

In all our large towns where I formed Associations for the Care of
Friendless Girls I was in the habit of reporting my work to the clergy
of my own church, whose sympathy and cooperation I shall ever gratefully
acknowledge. Ultimately, the leading laity, as well as some
Nonconformist ministers, joined with us; often these conferences were
diocesan meetings--to which, however, Nonconformists were invited--with
the Bishop of the diocese in the chair; and after my address free
discussion took place, so that I had the advantage of hearing the
opinions and judgments of many of our leading men in regard to this
difficult problem, and getting at men's views of the question.

The matter that I lay before you, therefore, has been thoroughly and
repeatedly threshed out at such conferences, as well as in long,
earnest, private talks with the wisest and most experienced mothers and
teachers of our day; and it is in their name, far more than in my own,
that I ask you to ponder what I say.

Do not, however, be under any fear that I intend in these pages to make
myself the medium of all sorts of horrors. I intend to do no such thing.
It is but very little evil that you will need to know, and that not in
detail, in order to guard your own boys. We women, thank God, have to do
with the fountain of sweet waters, clear as crystal, that flow from the
throne of God; not with the sewer that flows from the foul imaginations
and actions of men. Our part is the inculcation of positive purity, not
the part of negative warning against vice. Nor need you fear that the
evil you must know, in order to fulfil your most sacred trust, will
sully you. This I say emphatically, that the evil which we have grappled
with to save one of our own dear ones does not sully. It is the evil
that we read about in novels and newspapers, for our own amusement; it
is the evil that we weakly give way to in our lives; above all, it is
the destroying evil that we have refused so much as to know of in our
absorbing care for our own alabaster skin--it is _that_ evil which
defiles the woman. But the evil that we have grappled with in a life and
death struggle to save a soul for whom Christ died does not sully: it
clothes from head to foot with the white robe, it crowns with the golden
crown. Though I have had to know what, thank God! no other woman may
ever again be called upon to know, I can yet speak of the great conflict
that involved this knowledge as being the one great purifying,
sanctifying influence of my life. But even if, as men would often
persuade us, the knowledge of the world's evil would sully us, I know I
utter the heart of every woman when I say that we choose the hand that
is sullied in saving our own dear ones from the deep mire that might
otherwise have swallowed them up, rather than the hand that has kept
itself white and pure because it has never been stretched out to save.
That hand may be white, but in God's sight it is white with the
whiteness of leprosy. Believe, rather, the words of James Hinton,
written to a woman friend: "You women have been living in a dreamland of
your own; but dare to live in this poor disordered world of God's, and
it will work out in you a better goodness than your own,"--even that
purified womanhood, strong to know, and strong to save, before whose
gracious loveliness the strongest man grows weak as a child, and, as a
little child, grows pure.

God grant that, in view of the tremendous responsibilities that devolve
upon us women in these latter days, we may cry from our hearts:

"Let not fine culture, poesy, art, sweet tones,
Build up about my soothed sense a world
That is not Thine, and wall me up in dreams.
So my sad heart may cease to beat with Thine,
The great World-Heart, whose blood, forever shed,
Is human life, whose ache is man's dull pain."

CHAPTER II

"WHY SHOULD I INTERFERE?"

I am, of course, aware that at the very outset I shall be met by the
question--far less frequently urged, however, by thoughtful mothers than
it used to be--"Why need I interfere at all in a subject like this? Why
may I not leave it all to the boy's father? Why should it be my duty to
face a question which is very distasteful to me, and which I feel I had
much better let alone?"

I would answer at once, Because the evil is so rife, the dangers so
great and manifold, the temptations so strong and subtle, that your
influence must be united to that of the boy's father if you want to
safeguard him. Every influence you can lay hold of is needed here, and
will not prove more than enough. The influence of one parent alone is
not sufficient, more especially as there are potent lines of influence
open to you as a woman from which a man, from the very fact that he is a
man, is necessarily debarred.

You must bring the whole of that influence to bear for the following
considerations.

Let me take the lowest and simplest first. Even if you be indifferent
to your boy's moral welfare, you cannot be indifferent to his physical
well-being, nay, to his very existence. Here I necessarily cannot tell
you all I know; but I would ask you thoughtfully to study for yourself a
striking diagram which Dr. Carpenter, in one of our recognized medical
text-books, has reproduced from the well-known French statistician,
Quetelet, showing the comparative viability, or life value, of men and
women respectively at different ages.

[Illustration: DIAGRAM REPRESENTING THE COMPARATIVE VIABILITY OF THE
MALE AND FEMALE AT DIFFERENT AGES.]

The female line, where it differs from the male, is the dotted line, the
greater or less probability or value of life being shown by the greater
or less distance of the line of life from the level line at the bottom.
Infant life being very fragile, the line steadily rises till it reaches
its highest point, between thirteen and fourteen. In both cases there
is then a rapid fall, the age of puberty being a critical age. But from
fifteen, when the female line begins to right itself, only showing by a
gentle curve downwards the added risks of the child-bearing period in a
woman's life, the male line, which ought, without these risks, to keep
above the female line, makes a sharp dip below it, till it reaches its
lowest point at twenty-five, the age when the excesses of youth have had
time to tell most on the system.[1] Here, at least, is evidence that
none can gainsay. The more you ponder that mysterious sharp dip in the
man's line of life at the very age which Nature intended should be the
prime and flower of life, the more deeply you will feel that some deep
and hidden danger lies concealed there, the more earnestly you will come
to the conclusion that you cannot and will not thrust from you the
responsibility that rests upon you as the boy's mother of helping to
guard him from it. Keep him from the knowledge of evil, and the
temptations that come with that knowledge, you cannot. The few first
days at school will insure that, to say nothing of the miserable streets
of our large towns. As Thackeray long ago said in a well-known passage,
much animadverted on at the time:

"And by the way, ye tender mothers and sober fathers of Christian
families, a prodigious thing that theory of life is, as orally
learnt at a great public school. Why! if you could hear those boys
of fourteen who blush before their mothers, and sneak off in
silence in the presence of their daughters, talking among each
other, it would be the woman's turn to blush then. Before Pen was
twelve years old, and while his mother thought him an angel of
candour, little Pen had heard enough to make him quite awfully wise
upon certain points; and so, madam, has your pretty rosy-cheeked
son who is coming home from school for the ensuing Christmas
holidays. I don't say that the boy is lost, or that the innocence
has left him which he had 'from heaven, which is our home,' but
that the shades of the prison house are closing very fast round
him, and that we are helping as much as possible to corrupt
him."[2]

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