- Feb 27, 2003
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I recieved this from my priest today, and it relates a lot to what we have been discussing some in this forum lately.
"On American Motherhood"
by President Theodore Roosevelt
March 13th, 1905
In our modern industrial civilization there are many and
grave dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the
triumphs. It is not a good thing to see cities grow at
disproportionate speed relatively to the country; for the small
land owners, the men who own their little homes, and
therefore to a very large extent the men who till farms, the
men of the soil, have hitherto made the foundation of lasting
national life in every State; and, if the foundation becomes
either too weak or too narrow, the superstructure, no matter
how attractive, is in imminent danger of falling.
But far more important than the question of the
occupation of our citizens is the question of how their family
life is conducted. No matter what that occupation
may be, as long as there is a real home
and as long as those who make up that
home do their duty to one another, to
their neighbors and to the State, it is of
minor consequence whether the man's
trade is plied in the country or in the
city, whether it calls for the work of the
hands or for the work of the head.
No piled-up wealth, no splendor of
material growth, no brilliance of artistic
development, will permanently avail any
people unless its home life is healthy,
unless the average man possesses honesty, courage, common
sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at
need to fight hard; and unless the average woman is a good
wife, a good mother, able and willing to perform the first and
greatest duty of womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to
bring up as they should be brought up, healthy children, sound
in body, mind, and character, and numerous enough so that
the race shall increase and not decrease.
There are certain old truths which will be true as long as
this world endures, and which no amount of progress can
alter. One of these is the truth that the primary duty of the
husband is to be the home-maker, the breadwinner for his wife
and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be
the helpmate, the housewife, and mother. The woman should
have ample educational advantages; but save in exceptional
cases the man must be, and she need not be, and generally
ought not to be, trained for a lifelong career as the family
breadwinner; and, therefore, after a certain point, the training
of the two must normally be different because the duties of the
two are normally different. This does not mean inequality of
function, but it does mean that normally there must be
dissimilarity of function. On the whole, I think the duty of the
woman the more important, the more difficult, and the more
honorable of the two; on the whole I
respect the woman who does her duty
even more than I respect the man who
does his.
No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as
responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a
family of small children; for upon her time and strength
demands are made not only every hour of the day but often
every hour of the night. She may have to get up night after
night to take care of a sick child, and yet must by day continue
to do all her household duties as well; and if the family means
are scant she must usually enjoy even her rare holidays taking
her whole brood of children with her. The
birth pangs make all men the debtors of all
women. Above all our sympathy and regard
are due to the struggling wives among those
whom Abraham Lincoln called the plain
people, and whom he so loved and trusted;
for the lives of these women are often led on
the lonely heights of quiet, self-sacrificing
heroism.
Just as the happiest and most honorable
and most useful task that can be set any
man is to earn enough for the support of his
wife and family, for the bringing up and starting in life of his
children, so the most important, the most honorable and
desirable task which can be set any woman is to be a good and
wise mother in a home marked by self-respect and mutual
forbearance, by willingness to perform duty, and by refusal to
sink into self-indulgence or avoid that which entails effort and
self-sacrifice. Of course there are exceptional men and
exceptional women who can do and ought to do much more
than this, who can lead and ought to lead great careers of
outside usefulness in addition to--not as substitutes for--their
home work; but I am not speaking of exceptions; I am
speaking of the primary duties, I am speaking of the average
citizens, the average men and women who make up the
nation.
Inasmuch as I am speaking to an assemblage of mothers, I
shall have nothing whatever to say in praise of an easy life.
Yours is the work which is never ended. No mother has an
easy time. Most mothers have very hard times; and yet what
true mother would barter her experience of joy and sorrow in
exchange for a life of cold selfishness, which insists upon
perpetual amusement and the avoidance of care, and which
often finds its fit dwelling place in some flat designed to
furnish with the least possible expenditure of effort the
maximum of comfort and of luxury, but in which there is
literally no place for children?
The woman who is a good wife, a good mother, is
entitled to our respect as is no one else; but she is entitled to it
only because, and so long as, she is worthy of it. Effort and
self-sacrifice are the law of worthy life for the man as for the
woman; though neither the effort nor the self-sacrifice may be
the same for the one as for the other. I do not in the least
believe in the patient Griselda type of woman, in the woman
who submits to gross and long continued ill treatment, any
more than I believe in a man who tamely submits to wrongful
aggression. No wrong-doing is so abhorrent as wrong-doing
by a man toward the wife and the children who should arouse
every tender feeling in his nature.
Selfishness toward them, lack of tenderness toward them,
lack of consideration for them, above all, brutality in any
form toward them, should arouse the heartiest scorn and
indignation in every upright soul.
I believe in the woman keeping her self-respect just as I
believe in the man doing so. I believe in her rights just as
much as I believe in the man's, and indeed a little more; and I
regard marriage as a partnership, in which each partner is in
honor bound to think of the rights of the other as well as of
his or her own. But I think that the duties are even more
important than the rights; and in the long run I think that the
reward is ampler and greater for duty well done, than for the
insistence upon individual rights, necessary though this, too,
must often be. Your duty is hard, your responsibility great;
but greatest of all is your reward. I do not pity you in the
least. On the contrary, I feel respect and admiration for you.
Into the woman's keeping is committed the destiny of the
generations to come after us. In bringing up your children you
mothers must remember that while it is essential to be loving
and tender it is no less essential to be wise and firm.
Foolishness and affection must not be treated as
interchangeable terms; and besides training your sons and
daughters in the softer and milder virtues, you must seek to
give them those stern and hardy qualities which in after life
they will surely need. Some children will go wrong in spite of
the best training; and some will go right even when their
surroundings are most unfortunate; nevertheless an immense
amount depends upon the family training. If you mothers
through weakness bring up your sons to be selfish and to
think only of themselves, you will be responsible for much
sadness among the women who are to be their wives in the
future. If you let your daughters grow up idle, perhaps under
the mistaken impression that as you yourselves have had to
work hard they shall know only enjoyment, you are preparing
them to be useless to others and burdens to themselves. Teach
boys and girls alike that they are not to look forward to lives
spent in avoiding difficulties, but to lives spent in overcoming
difficulties. Teach them that work, for themselves and also for
others, is not a curse but a blessing; seek to make them happy,
to make them enjoy life, but seek also to make them face life
with the steadfast resolution to wrest success from labor and
adversity, and to do their whole duty before God and to man.
Surely she who can thus train her sons and her daughters is
thrice fortunate among women.
There are many good people who are denied the supreme
blessing of children, and for these we have the respect and
sympathy always due to those who, from no fault of their
own, are denied any of the other great blessings of life. But
the man or woman who deliberately forego these blessings,
whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self
-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference
between the all-important and the unimportant,--why, such a
creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the
soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses
to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and
who though able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the
bread which others provide.
The existence of women of this type forms one of the
most unpleasant and unwholesome features of modern life. If
any one is so dim of vision as to fail to see what a thoroughly
unlovely creature such a woman is, I wish they would read
Judge Robert Grant's novel "Unleavened Bread," ponder
seriously the character of Selma, and think of the fate that
would surely overcome any nation which developed its
average and typical woman along such lines. Unfortunately it
would be untrue to say that this type exists only in American
novels. That it also exists in American life is made
unpleasantly evident by the statistics as to the dwindling
families in some localities. It is made evident in equally
sinister fashion by the census statistics as to divorce, which
are fairly appalling; for easy divorce is now as it ever has
been, a bane to any nation, a curse to society, a menace to the
home, an incitement to married unhappiness and to
immorality, an evil thing for men and a still more hideous evil
for women.
These unpleasant tendencies in our American life are
made evident by articles such as those which I actually read
not long ago in a certain paper, where a clergyman was
quoted, seemingly with approval, as expressing the general
American attitude when he said that the ambition of any save
a very rich man should be to rear two children only, so as to
give his children an opportunity "to taste a few of the good
things of life."
This man, whose profession and calling should have
made him a moral teacher, actually set before others the ideal,
not of training children to do their duty, not of sending them
forth with stout hearts and ready minds to win triumphs for
themselves and their country, not of allowing them the
opportunity, and giving them the privilege of making their
own place in the world, but, forsooth, of keeping the number
of children so limited that they might "taste a few good
things!" The way to give a child a fair chance in life is not to
bring it up in luxury, but to see that it has the kind of training
that will give it strength of character. Even apart from the
vital question of national life, and regarding only the
individual interest of the children themselves, happiness in the
true sense is a hundredfold more apt to come to any given
member of a healthy family of healthy-minded children, well
brought up, well educated, but taught that they must shift up,
well educated, but taught that they must shift for themselves,
must win their own way, and by their own exertions make
their own positions of usefulness, than it is apt to come to
those whose parents themselves have acted on and have
trained their children to act on, the selfish and sordid theory
that the whole end of life is to "taste a few good things."
The intelligence of the remark is on par with its morality;
for the most rudimentary mental process would have shown
the speaker that if the average family in which there are
children contained but two children, the nation as a whole
would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three
generations it would very deservedly be on the point of
extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base and
selfish doctrine would be giving place to others with braver
and more robust ideals. Nor would such a result be in any
way regrettable; for a race that practiced such doctrine--that
is, a race that practiced race suicide--would thereby
conclusively show that it was unfit to exist, and that it had
better give place to people who had not forgotten the primary
laws of their being.
To sum up, then, the whole matter is simple enough. If
either a race or an individual prefers the pleasure of more
effortless ease, of self-indulgence, to the infinitely deeper, the
infinitely higher pleasures that come to those who know the
toil and the weariness, but also the joy, of hard duty well
done, why, that race or that individual must inevitably in the
end pay the penalty of leading a life both vapid and ignoble.
No man and no woman really worthy of the name can care for
the life spent solely or chiefly in the avoidance of risk and
trouble and labor. Save in exceptional cases, the prizes worth
having in life must be paid for, and the life worth living must
be a life of work for a worthy end, and ordinarily of work
more for others than for one's self.
The woman's task is not easy--no task worth doing is easy
--but in doing it, and when she has done it, there shall come to
her the highest and holiest joy known to mankind; and having
done it, she shall have the reward prophesied in Scripture; for
her husband and her children, yes, and all people who realize
that her work lies at the foundation of all national happiness
and greatness, shall rise up and call her blessed.
"On American Motherhood"
by President Theodore Roosevelt
March 13th, 1905
In our modern industrial civilization there are many and
grave dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the
triumphs. It is not a good thing to see cities grow at
disproportionate speed relatively to the country; for the small
land owners, the men who own their little homes, and
therefore to a very large extent the men who till farms, the
men of the soil, have hitherto made the foundation of lasting
national life in every State; and, if the foundation becomes
either too weak or too narrow, the superstructure, no matter
how attractive, is in imminent danger of falling.
But far more important than the question of the
occupation of our citizens is the question of how their family
life is conducted. No matter what that occupation
may be, as long as there is a real home
and as long as those who make up that
home do their duty to one another, to
their neighbors and to the State, it is of
minor consequence whether the man's
trade is plied in the country or in the
city, whether it calls for the work of the
hands or for the work of the head.
No piled-up wealth, no splendor of
material growth, no brilliance of artistic
development, will permanently avail any
people unless its home life is healthy,
unless the average man possesses honesty, courage, common
sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at
need to fight hard; and unless the average woman is a good
wife, a good mother, able and willing to perform the first and
greatest duty of womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to
bring up as they should be brought up, healthy children, sound
in body, mind, and character, and numerous enough so that
the race shall increase and not decrease.
There are certain old truths which will be true as long as
this world endures, and which no amount of progress can
alter. One of these is the truth that the primary duty of the
husband is to be the home-maker, the breadwinner for his wife
and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be
the helpmate, the housewife, and mother. The woman should
have ample educational advantages; but save in exceptional
cases the man must be, and she need not be, and generally
ought not to be, trained for a lifelong career as the family
breadwinner; and, therefore, after a certain point, the training
of the two must normally be different because the duties of the
two are normally different. This does not mean inequality of
function, but it does mean that normally there must be
dissimilarity of function. On the whole, I think the duty of the
woman the more important, the more difficult, and the more
honorable of the two; on the whole I
respect the woman who does her duty
even more than I respect the man who
does his.
No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as
responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a
family of small children; for upon her time and strength
demands are made not only every hour of the day but often
every hour of the night. She may have to get up night after
night to take care of a sick child, and yet must by day continue
to do all her household duties as well; and if the family means
are scant she must usually enjoy even her rare holidays taking
her whole brood of children with her. The
birth pangs make all men the debtors of all
women. Above all our sympathy and regard
are due to the struggling wives among those
whom Abraham Lincoln called the plain
people, and whom he so loved and trusted;
for the lives of these women are often led on
the lonely heights of quiet, self-sacrificing
heroism.
Just as the happiest and most honorable
and most useful task that can be set any
man is to earn enough for the support of his
wife and family, for the bringing up and starting in life of his
children, so the most important, the most honorable and
desirable task which can be set any woman is to be a good and
wise mother in a home marked by self-respect and mutual
forbearance, by willingness to perform duty, and by refusal to
sink into self-indulgence or avoid that which entails effort and
self-sacrifice. Of course there are exceptional men and
exceptional women who can do and ought to do much more
than this, who can lead and ought to lead great careers of
outside usefulness in addition to--not as substitutes for--their
home work; but I am not speaking of exceptions; I am
speaking of the primary duties, I am speaking of the average
citizens, the average men and women who make up the
nation.
Inasmuch as I am speaking to an assemblage of mothers, I
shall have nothing whatever to say in praise of an easy life.
Yours is the work which is never ended. No mother has an
easy time. Most mothers have very hard times; and yet what
true mother would barter her experience of joy and sorrow in
exchange for a life of cold selfishness, which insists upon
perpetual amusement and the avoidance of care, and which
often finds its fit dwelling place in some flat designed to
furnish with the least possible expenditure of effort the
maximum of comfort and of luxury, but in which there is
literally no place for children?
The woman who is a good wife, a good mother, is
entitled to our respect as is no one else; but she is entitled to it
only because, and so long as, she is worthy of it. Effort and
self-sacrifice are the law of worthy life for the man as for the
woman; though neither the effort nor the self-sacrifice may be
the same for the one as for the other. I do not in the least
believe in the patient Griselda type of woman, in the woman
who submits to gross and long continued ill treatment, any
more than I believe in a man who tamely submits to wrongful
aggression. No wrong-doing is so abhorrent as wrong-doing
by a man toward the wife and the children who should arouse
every tender feeling in his nature.
Selfishness toward them, lack of tenderness toward them,
lack of consideration for them, above all, brutality in any
form toward them, should arouse the heartiest scorn and
indignation in every upright soul.
I believe in the woman keeping her self-respect just as I
believe in the man doing so. I believe in her rights just as
much as I believe in the man's, and indeed a little more; and I
regard marriage as a partnership, in which each partner is in
honor bound to think of the rights of the other as well as of
his or her own. But I think that the duties are even more
important than the rights; and in the long run I think that the
reward is ampler and greater for duty well done, than for the
insistence upon individual rights, necessary though this, too,
must often be. Your duty is hard, your responsibility great;
but greatest of all is your reward. I do not pity you in the
least. On the contrary, I feel respect and admiration for you.
Into the woman's keeping is committed the destiny of the
generations to come after us. In bringing up your children you
mothers must remember that while it is essential to be loving
and tender it is no less essential to be wise and firm.
Foolishness and affection must not be treated as
interchangeable terms; and besides training your sons and
daughters in the softer and milder virtues, you must seek to
give them those stern and hardy qualities which in after life
they will surely need. Some children will go wrong in spite of
the best training; and some will go right even when their
surroundings are most unfortunate; nevertheless an immense
amount depends upon the family training. If you mothers
through weakness bring up your sons to be selfish and to
think only of themselves, you will be responsible for much
sadness among the women who are to be their wives in the
future. If you let your daughters grow up idle, perhaps under
the mistaken impression that as you yourselves have had to
work hard they shall know only enjoyment, you are preparing
them to be useless to others and burdens to themselves. Teach
boys and girls alike that they are not to look forward to lives
spent in avoiding difficulties, but to lives spent in overcoming
difficulties. Teach them that work, for themselves and also for
others, is not a curse but a blessing; seek to make them happy,
to make them enjoy life, but seek also to make them face life
with the steadfast resolution to wrest success from labor and
adversity, and to do their whole duty before God and to man.
Surely she who can thus train her sons and her daughters is
thrice fortunate among women.
There are many good people who are denied the supreme
blessing of children, and for these we have the respect and
sympathy always due to those who, from no fault of their
own, are denied any of the other great blessings of life. But
the man or woman who deliberately forego these blessings,
whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self
-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference
between the all-important and the unimportant,--why, such a
creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the
soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses
to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and
who though able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the
bread which others provide.
The existence of women of this type forms one of the
most unpleasant and unwholesome features of modern life. If
any one is so dim of vision as to fail to see what a thoroughly
unlovely creature such a woman is, I wish they would read
Judge Robert Grant's novel "Unleavened Bread," ponder
seriously the character of Selma, and think of the fate that
would surely overcome any nation which developed its
average and typical woman along such lines. Unfortunately it
would be untrue to say that this type exists only in American
novels. That it also exists in American life is made
unpleasantly evident by the statistics as to the dwindling
families in some localities. It is made evident in equally
sinister fashion by the census statistics as to divorce, which
are fairly appalling; for easy divorce is now as it ever has
been, a bane to any nation, a curse to society, a menace to the
home, an incitement to married unhappiness and to
immorality, an evil thing for men and a still more hideous evil
for women.
These unpleasant tendencies in our American life are
made evident by articles such as those which I actually read
not long ago in a certain paper, where a clergyman was
quoted, seemingly with approval, as expressing the general
American attitude when he said that the ambition of any save
a very rich man should be to rear two children only, so as to
give his children an opportunity "to taste a few of the good
things of life."
This man, whose profession and calling should have
made him a moral teacher, actually set before others the ideal,
not of training children to do their duty, not of sending them
forth with stout hearts and ready minds to win triumphs for
themselves and their country, not of allowing them the
opportunity, and giving them the privilege of making their
own place in the world, but, forsooth, of keeping the number
of children so limited that they might "taste a few good
things!" The way to give a child a fair chance in life is not to
bring it up in luxury, but to see that it has the kind of training
that will give it strength of character. Even apart from the
vital question of national life, and regarding only the
individual interest of the children themselves, happiness in the
true sense is a hundredfold more apt to come to any given
member of a healthy family of healthy-minded children, well
brought up, well educated, but taught that they must shift up,
well educated, but taught that they must shift for themselves,
must win their own way, and by their own exertions make
their own positions of usefulness, than it is apt to come to
those whose parents themselves have acted on and have
trained their children to act on, the selfish and sordid theory
that the whole end of life is to "taste a few good things."
The intelligence of the remark is on par with its morality;
for the most rudimentary mental process would have shown
the speaker that if the average family in which there are
children contained but two children, the nation as a whole
would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three
generations it would very deservedly be on the point of
extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base and
selfish doctrine would be giving place to others with braver
and more robust ideals. Nor would such a result be in any
way regrettable; for a race that practiced such doctrine--that
is, a race that practiced race suicide--would thereby
conclusively show that it was unfit to exist, and that it had
better give place to people who had not forgotten the primary
laws of their being.
To sum up, then, the whole matter is simple enough. If
either a race or an individual prefers the pleasure of more
effortless ease, of self-indulgence, to the infinitely deeper, the
infinitely higher pleasures that come to those who know the
toil and the weariness, but also the joy, of hard duty well
done, why, that race or that individual must inevitably in the
end pay the penalty of leading a life both vapid and ignoble.
No man and no woman really worthy of the name can care for
the life spent solely or chiefly in the avoidance of risk and
trouble and labor. Save in exceptional cases, the prizes worth
having in life must be paid for, and the life worth living must
be a life of work for a worthy end, and ordinarily of work
more for others than for one's self.
The woman's task is not easy--no task worth doing is easy
--but in doing it, and when she has done it, there shall come to
her the highest and holiest joy known to mankind; and having
done it, she shall have the reward prophesied in Scripture; for
her husband and her children, yes, and all people who realize
that her work lies at the foundation of all national happiness
and greatness, shall rise up and call her blessed.
Go with rusmeister's suggestion. 
