I have actually heard this barbarous aversion to
innovation carried still further, and a sensible woman stigmatized
as an unnatural mother, who has thus been wisely solicitous to
preserve the health of her children, when in the midst of her care
she has lost one by some of the casualties of infancy which no
prudence can ward off. Her acquaintance have observed, that this
was the consequence of new-fangled notions--the new-fangled notions
of ease and cleanliness. And those who, pretending to experience,
though they have long adhered to prejudices that have, according to
the opinion of the most sagacious physicians, thinned the human
race, almost rejoiced at the disaster that gave a kind of sanction
to prescription.
Indeed, if it were only on this account, the national education of
women is of the utmost consequence; for what a number of human
sacrifices are made to that moloch, prejudice! And in how many
ways are children destroyed by the lasciviousness of man? The want
of natural affection in many women, who are drawn from their duty
by the admiration of men, and the ignorance of others, render the
infancy of man a much more perilous state than that of brutes; yet
men are unwilling to place women in situations proper to enable
them to acquire sufficient understanding to know how even to nurse
their babes.
So forcibly does this truth strike me, that I would rest the whole
tendency of my reasoning upon it; for whatever tends to
incapacitate the maternal character, takes woman out of her sphere.
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