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Show Mothers Function Better If Hot Thought Saints By JANET LOWE Copley News Service "We are filled with wonder as to what the future mothers of the race will be," wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton as she and her friends launched the first wave of the women's movement, back in the 1800s. SHE WAS confident that the emancipation of women would not fail and that one of the results of liberated women would be better mothers, happier families. "Ralph Waldo Emerson says men are what their mothers make them," wrote Susan B. Anthony in 1875. "But I say, to hold mothers responsible for the character of their sons while you deny them any control over the surroundings of their lives, is worse than mockery, it is cruelty. Responsibility grows out of rights and power." AS WOMEN won the right to vote and participate in government and gradually won other rights as well, their attitudes toward homemaking and motherhood began to change. We are slowly moving away from the era when "mother" was synonymous with "saint," to a time when mother is a person, with all the strengths and frailties that attend the human condition. condi-tion. IT HASN'T been easy to untangle from the mythical mother image. In the analysis of children's readers, "Dick and Jane as Victims," the image of mothers shown to small children was "a limited, limit-ed, colorless, mindless creature. crea-ture. She wants nothing for herself. . . She is what we have all been looking for all our lives, the perfect servant. Not only does she wash, cook, clean, nurse and find mittens; mit-tens; these chores constitute her only happiness." While most mothers today don't derive total joy from finding mittens, . many women, even feminists, value the experience of motherhood. BETTY FRIEDAN in a newspaper interview explained, . . It's throwing the baby out with the bath water to try to point a finger at motherhood as the main enemy of women or to make women feel guilty over their real emotions as mothers, or even to deny the value and the validty of the experience. I would not have given up being a mother for anything. , ." Golda Meir admits that it wasn't easy, being a political activist and a mother as well. It was hectic, she says, "always "al-ways rushing from one place to another to work, home, to a meeting, to take Menachem, my son, to a music lesson, to keep a doctor's doc-tor's appointment with my daughter Sarah, to shop, to cook, to work and back home again. . . but my children grew up to be healthy, productive, talented and good people." JOHN ADAMS wrote, "Did you ever hear of a great and good man who had not a good mother?" Modern mothers are equally concerned over raising great and good daughters, and are finding that the person-mother is better equipped to do that than the saint-mother. Novelist Jessamyn West claims that she got both her name and her creative drive from her mother, whose imagination was stifled, but did not die. It emerged in her daughters, by way of romantic roman-tic names, and in Jessamyn, the will to write. Sylvia Porter attributes her success to a mother who was determined deter-mined that her daughter would have a career. ACTRESS Valerie Harper's mother "had such resistance from her family (she wanted to be a doctor) that she swore her kids would do whatever they wanted to and they have, with her support," sup-port," according to Valerie. She goes on to say, 'The more J strip away the mother stuff you know, the junk you have in your head about parents; "I have to do this for her, I have to get her approval" the more I appreciate her humanness and am able to count her as a dear friend." As we begin to see more daughters grow up in homes with emancipated mothers, it is easier to drop the apprehension felt by mothers who wondered what effect their freer lives would have on their children. NORA EPHRON, whose mother was a screenwriter and the only working mother on the block, felt somewhat defensive about the things she wasn't able to do for her children. "For instance,' explains Ephron, "if there were a PTA meeting, she would say, semi-defiantly, 'the o'her mothers do that. You'll just have to tell your friends that your mother works.' I was fiercely proud of her, and I know to this day I wouldn't be caught at a PTA meeting." THE ROLE of mother is still evolving, and still under pressure from change, but on this Mother's Day 1978 we can assure Elizabeth Cady Stanton Stan-ton and Susan B. Anthony that the mothers of the race are doing just fine, thank you. |