OUR BABIES

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 83, 9 April 1910, Page 15

OUR BABIES

- (By Hygeia.) PublUhed under the auspice* of the Gociety tor the Promotion ot the Health c/ Women and Children. "It ii vUer to put up a fence i>t the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom." &DDBESS OF PLUNKET NURSE AND SECRETARY. .Wellington— Plunket Nurte M'Donald, 73, Aro-ftreet. T«L 2425. Hon. iec, Mrs. M'Vicar. 45, Majoribanks-strett, City. Tel. 2642. riunket Nursat stnrices fre*. HEALTH OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN. The following is a continuation of the president's w}dres» at the second annual j conference of the Society for the Promotion of the Health of Women and Children:— IDEAIA OF WIFEHOOD. I feel, Witb Mrs. Earle, that marriagei should' not be a woman's only profession, but it should be her highest hope. Every girl should try and make herself worthy of it both in body and mind, and this attitude will not njako a girl grow into a less sensible old maid if she nas to bo one. On the contrary, it is, of course, quite obvious to any one who will look beyond schooldays that the healthy, nor. mal, all-round development, that will make the best of a girl for marriage, will also make her in the long run most fit to earn her, own living, and most inclined to earn it in way* that will satisfy her higher nature as a woman, which should crave of all things for life in a home, whether her own or another's: or, failing this, for some calling such at nursing, which will satisfy the natural tendency of all good women to offer some sacrifice of heraelf for other*. It is not women alone who feel that too much is being demanded ot human nature— of women'i nature, especially— in order to carry out the fetish of modern education. As Lafcadio Heam says:— "l confess to being one of those who believe that tno human heart, even in the history of a raoe may be worth infinitely more than the human intellect, and that it will sooner or lafer prove itself inhnitoly better able to answei all the cruel enigmas of the Sphinx of Life. And, by way of conclusion, I may venture to quote from an article on education by Ferdinand Brunstiere: "All our educational measures will prove vain if there be no effort to force into the mind, and to deeply impress upon it, the sense ol tno&e fine words of Lamenncus: 'Human »ocie ty is based upon mutual giving, or upon the sacrifice of man for man, or oi each man for all other men; and sacrifice is th« very essence ot all true society. In these days of falling population the State should surely give every encourageinaat to any earnest practical movement coming spontaneously from the hearts of its jrotnen which tends to exalt motherhood and incline girls to home life and home interests, while, at the same time, affording akilled help and practical advice to parents with regard to babyhood. This certainly is the spirit of a book on motherhood just published, with an introduction by Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton. LL.D., M.D., F.R.S. (president of the Jait congress on school hygiene). Ma Brereton start* out with th« explanation that what she has to say is baaed on experience derived from her own practice and observation. The chief purpose of the book is, she says, "to enable the average mother who reads it to look inward on her own home with its delicate network of duties, privileges, joys, and sorrows, and to lighten and bnjhten to some degree the seemingly common round and trivial task." She aims also at "inducing the more thoughtful mother to look outward beyond the home circle towards the vast multitude of imperfectly developed mothers who are suffering under the handicap of extreme riches or extreme poverty, and enable her to realise that her own apparently modest successes aud failures, precisely because they are tho sweet or bitter fruit of her own experience, may give her just the necessary j»cnrer to help by pen, by puree, oi by practice those who, owing to the defects and imperfections of their upbringing, have come short of the full comprehension of the potentialities of motherhood." Further, she hopes to effect "»ome quickening of woman's social and cmo conscience," but expresses "an ever-deep-ening conviction that the right solution of these simple questions of everyday lift and domestic routine is inextricably bound up with the -most successful working out of tho problem of raising tho status -of woman inside and outside the home." "We must begin," she writes, "to educato the child not only beforo it is born, but before ever it is conceived ; in fact, we must begin with the education of the future mother and the future fathet. . . Thero are, of course, women who long to do their duty, who havo still fiom» of tha savage mother's maternal instinct left, yet who would be ashamed to ask nven their medical adviser for help or guidance when trembling on tho vergt of motherhood. These women are too often responsible for a matsacro of tha firstborn. "Science, with all its boasted progress, bas failed to diffuse oertain cardinal and fundamental facts about life, thereby leaving Nature to do. in these highly artificial days, what she could only do satisfactorily when men and women lived natural lives. But it is of no us«. to mourn over the past. Our hope lies in the future, and undoubtedly women themselves are rapidly awakening to their grave responsibilities. They see that in the struggle for civilised existence it is tha quality of the units of a nation which counts, and not mere numbers. If only their plain duty is put before them they will, as the generations of women in the past have done, be not only ready, but eager, to accomplish what is expected of

them. . . What is essential i% that women should not look at wifehond and motherhood as the refuge of those who fail to succeed in professions or trades, but as the highest of nil professions, and the most complex of all businesses."