The Pittsburgh Press (August 1, 1941)
MOTHERHOOD IN 1941
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Putting motherhood on a purely patriotic basis is a screwy idea that runs counter to the common sense of the ages. Women have children for two reasons only – because they want them, or because they don’t know how to prevent conception.
Right now, it seems to me a woman of any intelligence will not accept the pleasant theory that motherhood is a noble enterprise no matter what goes on in the world. Actually it puts her in a class with the munition makers and fine as those gentlemen may be, there is some difference in the set of goods manufactured.
Yes, I know the pioneer mothers bore their babies in precarious times. Yet those women lived in an era of great expansion. Today, for them, was hard, but their tomorrows were rosy with hope. I imagine they never gave a thought to the populating of a continent, but they dreamed of the wide acres they could bequeath to their sons and daughters and of the grand free nation they were building. Besides, to the pioneers, children were an economic asset. They were almost a necessity in that rural culture – the farmer who couldn’t afford hired men could get his laborers by fatherhood.
Women of our time feel the same emotional need for babies that was felt by Abraham’s wife. The feminine nature will never be free of maternal yearning, and it is everlastingly true that a woman’s real wealth can be measured only by the babies she has mothered, although she may not have given them life.
Yet the good people who talk to us about motherhood in abstract terms or even in patriotic phrases miss the point. And the point is this: It is not hardship, nor self-sacrifice, nor even disaster and death that modern women fear for their children. Our hearts rage and rebel because we are asked to provide and let loose over the globe a new horde of murderers.