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While maintaining the house and promoting the well-being of her husband were key elements of the model Christian woman's life, her greatest achievement was her role as mother. Stemming from a "natural" gift, she was expected to know how to appeal to children, to nurture and to teach them in ways that escaped men:
There is a mother sense and only mothers have it. There is a woman sense and how long is it going to require for men to find out that women know a thing or two better than men can ever teach them?BS , February 21, 1895, p. 1.
Within a patriarchal system, motherhood was woman's avenue to power. Man's life had an end-quality in religion, politics, and economics; in producing a child, however, he became the means and woman the end. The elevation of that element of her life, therefore, became the first and most natural way for a woman to demonstrate a growing sense of power and individuality. Residues of low esteem and injunctions regarding submission caused women to fail to identify their maternal role as aggressive—they claimed that all their ambition was for their child—but the child's success or failure was interpreted as the success or failure of the mother. The male child, particularly, often served as the channel of her aspirations; through him she achieved the fame and worth otherwise denied her.
She lives. . .in the lives of her two noble preacher boyswas a typical description of a mother's derivation of power from her children.
BS , February 10, 1916, p. 9.
Mothers were urged to be authoritative and direct in guiding their children's lives; children were taught they should always take mother's advice.
Man is so constituted that he must be tied to something,"claimed a Y.M.C.A. speaker, and he nominated
mother's apron stringas earth's strongest tie to the surest authority.
BS , August 26, 1897, p. 10.
She could be trusted for conveying the truth in matters moral and religious; she also supplied the support one needed to maintain allegiance to faith and duty.BS , February 6, 1913, p. 15.
Mother's tie with God bordered on the supernatural:
Mother is next to our Savior. She is love, and love is holy.BS , November 21, 1912, p. 31.
. . .bend once against beneath the tender hands of your mother, who will carry you and your other loved ones, and all your griefs and sorrows, with her to the throne of grace.BS , August 26, 1897, p. 10.
The gracious Savior knows that there have been times when I would have fallen in life's stern battle line, if it had not been for the precious mother-love that tucked me in when came the cold winter blasts in the long ago. My sweet mother never believed me bad, and her faith and confidence drew out the best and noblest that was in me. . . . Dear, sweet, precious mother, . . .thy pure, unselfish love, lavished so graciously upon thy unworthy boy, has served to bear him up when all other human strength seemed gone.BS , January 14, 1904, p. 4.
A dying mother's entreaty,
Son, meet me in heaven,was sure to make a lasting earthly impression on her grieving child. The frequency of death, in fact, bore upon the attachment of both child and mother to each other. Part of a mother's investment in her children stemmed from fear that they would be snatched away or was compensation for the ones she had lost. "Sister Hill" of Henderson was a pathetic example of the fortitude called for in that age of higher infant mortality.
A most worthy Christian lady left a widow while yet young,Mrs. Hill lost four children in a month's time from typhoid.
The dear sister has not murmured yet,someone reported,
but she says she wants Susie left to her.
TBH , February 2, 1887, n.p.
Repeated reports of the death of young children and the unending pain associated with that experience explain, in part, the tenacious strength of the mother-child relationship.
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