THE MOTHER GIFT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18374, 14 April 1923, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE MOTHER GIFT.

Men have cried out in alarm, "With all this suffrage, with all this entering of professions, with all this throwing wide of the world's doors, women will rush out of the homes!" And I want to answer, "Perhaps that is the best thing about it. We knowwe women—that in all time i there have been those in homes who did not belong there; women who would have honoured a Judges bench, thrilled an audience, cleaned up cities and towns and straightened out governments, written books, painted pictures, or modelled in clay, but who never while the sun ' shone down could make a homei. And homes have been hells, and women s . hearts torture chambers, and children s I lives embittered, and needed work in the , world left undone, all because of a mis- | taken idea that all women should be , shoved, drummed, crowded, pushed, coerced into homes. Perfectly satisfied with their reading of the law, never get- j ting down to fundamentals, men have i considered that the only failure was the failure of the woman to adapt herself to the situation. Now, >> the truth is— every woman knows it and no man— many > women | are gifted for motherhood, for home-mak-ing, for wives in the highest sense, and many have no more gift for this most social and most sacred of all vocations 1 than they have wings to carry them to j the moon! You may learn the technique i of motherhood, you may be an expert in baby clothes and fresh air and feeding, but if no fundamental, instinctive mothergift is there, you cannot rise ,to the full , possibilities of the calling. What men j don't knowand women dois that the j mother-hear tod woman can't be steered . out of the home, and the non-mother- | hearted woman cannot be steered into ■ it. You may steer her body there, her labours, her daily routine, but you can- : not get her soul, her spirit, there. No , house was ever made into a home by a | chained personality, by one fighting inwardly to spread her wings and lly to other spaces.