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Kathleen Norris

THE PAULIST PRESS

401 West 59th Street New York, N. Y.



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Unreasonable Mothers

By Kathleen Norris.

OU want the youngsters to be

happy, don’t you? You want them

to love you, don’t you? You can’t

separate them from their own

crowd, can you? You don’t want

to make them different from the others,

—

peculiar and conspicuous,—do you?
These are not my questions. These are

the questions good mothers,—Catholic
mothers, too,—toss about carelessly when
the terrible question of the modern girl,

her jazzing, painting, smoking, drinking,

motoring, reading, spending, flirting, and

all the rest of it, arises.

And having given these careless and su-

perficial queries what might disrespectfully

be described as “the air,” these good

mothers put the whole topic away again,

with a sigh. “No, of course not,” they say,

as a sort of blanket answer. And that ends

that.

1

1

1



My question, if I may respectfully and

dubiously offer it,—for the little girls I love
are children at the moment, and their

problems and perhaps my appreciation of

them are some years ahead,—my question
would be: do we, we Catholic mothers,

know what we expect of our growing girls

and boys, and if so, what is it?

In all the other things we do, there is a

rule. School children have a definite code;

so many lessons, so much play; so much

promptness and politeness; certain things

required; certain things forbidden.

The maids have their rules; the shops

theirs; the nursery has its rules about

food, naps, manners. Policemen, sailors,

doctors, teachers, scientists—all have their
definite laws.

But if the most precious creatures in our

world, Mary, eighteen, Tom, twenty, have

their code and their rules, what are they,

and where are they?

Most mothers—not all, but we of the

big cities see a rather alarming proportion

of them—most mothers make up their
rules from day to day. Mary asks sepa-

rately for permission to go to every party;

there is no law about it at all. Sometimes

[ 2 ]



Mother lets her go to a really undesirable

gathering, just because she is so sick of

disappointing the child 1

“You can’t say ‘no’ every time,” said a

heartsick mother in California a few

months ago. She had said “yes” a few

hours before, and as a result her beautiful

seventeen-year-old was lying, for the last

time, unrecognizably mutilated and quite

dead, in her mother’s arms.

Perhaps it didn’t occur to this mother,

but it might to us, whose tragedies haven’t

befallen yet, that you don’t have to say

“no” all the time, if the code says it for

you.

If a baby asks for matches you don’t

deliberately, sigh, frown, mitigate the situ-

ation with a “Not to-night, dear.” Matches

mean fire, and fire destroys life, and there-

fore the baby is left in no doubt as to

whether he may have them or not. There

is what lawyers call a static piece of code

about matches.

But there is no static code about allowing

your little girl to race about the dark coun-

tryside with a half-intoxicated youth who

has only twice before driven a car. There

is no code about rouge, lip-red, hip-flasks,

[ 3 ]



ugly books, ugly stories, dancing,—to-day
she may not do these things; to-morrow

she may, if she cries hard enough, or pouts

long enough.

And her mother, who had courage

enough to bear her, and keep the matches

away from her, and refuse her walnut

creams when she had a fever, and the

moon when she wanted it,—her mother,
who may have to answer at a High Tri-

bunal for her soul some day, says patheti-

cally: “Well, what can you do? You can’t

say ‘no’ all the time!” But why can’t you?

You do say “no” all the time about certain

dangerous things, why not about others?

Well, the truth is, we are lazy, we mod-

ern mothers. To raise our daughters,

—

and incidentally our sons, for what we

teach our daughters is communicated to

our sons and other women’s sons,—to raise
our daughters to be temperate, self-con-

trolled, dignified, pure in thought and de-

sire as well as act, would mean that from

their babyhood upward we must devote to

them all the things we are too lazy to think

about—much less attempt. Time, intelli-
gence, prayer, example, companionship

—

the very words exhaust us!

[41



Easier far to buy her the new coat she

doesn’t need at all, but wants so badly, to

give her plenty of money for beauty par-

lors and taxis and slippers, and to ship her

off for a whole long evening with five

othe-r very youthful persons, who will be

steadily eating, drinking, dancing, whisper-

ing, speeding along lonely roads, for sev-

eral hours, and, having placed her in this

perilous position, murmur lazily in her

powdered ear, with a parting kiss: “Now

do be careful, darling, and don’t get into

any silly scrape! Remember the terrible

trouble poor Anna got herself into, and

Isabel having to testify in court that the

boys had been drinking when the accident

occurred! Good night, dear. Good night,

Bob.”

“Her Father doesn’t approve of this sort

of thing one bit,” says Mother, going back

to the sitting room, and picking up her

bridge hand, “and I think he’s quite right.

But what can you do? The girls say that

the boys won’t pay any attention to them

if they aren’t right in the thick of things,

and after all, they’re only young once.

Three hearts? I think we’ll double that.”

Meanwhile, press and pulpit thunder

[S]



against the sacrifice, the despoiling, of

youth and innocence and goodness. Mean-

while, the vague, spoiled, pleasure-ex-

hausted little souls and bodies drift into

what they call marriage, attempt to recon-

cile the new state with the old freedom for

kisses and dances and suppers and caba-

rets, weep their disillusioned tears, and

find themselves at twenty-six or twenty-

eight utterly out of harmony with life,

ignorant of its spiritual values, bewildered

by its disappointments, obliged to accept

the appalling fact of an unhappy marriage,

or the even less thinkable solution of a

barren and permanent loneliness purchased

through the divorce courts.

Without raising the delicate question as

to whether Catholic mothers are perhaps

a little more sane than others, we may at

least assume that hundreds and thousands

of girls within the fold to-day are leading

lives of extravagance and dissipation noth-

ing short of insanity.

Isn’t it our fault? Isn’t it because we

older women are so lazy and so weak?

To be sure, we can occasionally show a

flash of character.

[ 6 ]



“No, positively not,” we can say, “not

with those men, one of them divorced

so scandalously, and the other a notorious

drunkard. You needn’t tease, Mary.

Your’e not going.”

But what an empty, dramatic gesture

this is! How different from the position

of both mother and daughter, had the first

formed that child’s soul steadily and care-

fully, through the years, to the point when

to want to go on a dancing party with men

of that stamp would be quite out of the

range of possibility.

Such men ought not to have the privilege

of friendship with Mary; they ought not

to be free of her home. Far from apolo-

gizing to her child for refusing them abso-

lute responsibility for her, body and soul,

for a whole long evening, Mary’s mother

ought to apologize to Mary for ever having

permitted her to meet them, at all.

But where are the mothers who have

built about their children a rigid and brac-

ing atmosphere of self-denial and spiritual

peace?

We know life is hard. We know good-
ness is not found, tied up in a milliner’s

box, or in a rich marriage, but that it must

t 7 ]



be forged, coined, chiseled, by our own

weak hands. We know that cabarets and
jazz and lip-red and silk stockings are not

better for Mary in her girlhood than they

will be in her thirtieth year, and we know

that the appetite grows upon the stuff that

feeds it.

Are we so blind that we can silence our

souls with the bland hope that the atmos-

phere of tea-dances, road houses, midnight

supper clubs will somehow miraculously

prepare that child’s heart for the sacrifices

of wifehood and motherhood, for the kit-

chen and the nursery, for prayer and faith

and hope and charity?

Hardly. Indeed we think we are not

blind to the situation at all. We love to
exchange horror stories; we remind each

other that the daughter of those lovely

people woke up in a low-grade hotel, the

morning after the dance, and didn’t know

how she got there. We say with a great air
of moral firmness that the whole thing is

getting ridiculous, and that something

ought to be done about it! Thank Heaven,

it will stop when the child marries.

“But you can’t marry, on less than six

thousand a year, nowadays,” says Mary

[ 8 ]



pathetically, caught in all the danger of a

long engagement.

“It’s true!” her mother concedes rue-

fully, with a sigh.

Marriage is a Sacrament. Purity is a

virtue. Are these to go down to defeat in

a hurricane of rouge-pots and curling-

irons, shoe-buckles and theater seats, high-

powered roadsters and cover charges?

One of the tragic features of the whole

mad business is that the youngsters are not

happy. Go to a tea-dance at some big hotel

some afternoon—alas, any afternoon, for
they dance three hundred and sixty-five

times a year, and satisfy yourself that the

exhausted, painted, half-clothed, flushed,

perspiring, eternally competing and etern-

ally unsatisfied children of to-day are not

happy.

Much as we give them, they want more.

Given a white rabbit coat, Mary, who has

never been taught any theory of self-

denial, wants a chinchilla. Given chin-

chilla, she muses of becoming a great

movie star, wishes she could meet Baldino

Baldi, dreams of impossible conquests, and

frets because she has—what a girl recently

[ 9 ]



complained of to me—a “morality com-
plex,—so I never can do anything!”
Dozens of girls eagerly quoted to me re-

cently the article in the modernest of

magazines called, “The Worthless Woman
Triumphs.” It was a shallow and a

shoddy article, Mary Stuart and George

Eliot, among others, being casually ad-

duced to illustrate the edifying point in-

dicated in the title, but its reception gave

me a startling glimpse of the mind of the

girl of to-day.

That is her ideal, is it? That’s where

all the beautifying and perfuming and

idling tends. To a belief that the worth-

less woman triumphs.

No end to what we give them, to what

we let them read and say and eat and drink

and wear and do. And one of the tragic

features of the whole mad business is that

the youngsters are not happy.

Girls of to-day, forgive us, your moth-

ers, who know what we might have done

to make you good as well as happy. It is

we who fail, not you.

We know that when you were little chil-
dren we might have gathered the children

of the few women we love and trust, the

[ 10 ]



few who think as we do about life, and

have said to you:

“These are your friends. You must all

grow up together, united through your

faith, through your schooling, through

your parents. You may have all the joys

that are good—games under the attic
eaves, tramps, picnics, summer trips, the-

atricals, charades; you may have a home

gymnasium, a costume trunk, billiards,

croquet, tennis, dancing, cameras, bicycles,

skates, books.

“Best of all, you may have your mother

and father, at the family table, and your

friends’ mothers and fathers, at theirs.

They will listen to you, laugh with you,

make you listen and laugh in turn. Your

lives shall be theirs, and theirs yours, for

all the quiet months of work and play, and

in the holiday gatherings, and the mid-

summer excursions, you will find that the

young persons outside your circle are only

too pathetically anxious, only too grateful,

to be occasionally included.

“But public dances, night clubs, racing

cars, road houses, drink, dangerous com-

pany, dangerous books, dangerous plays

and movies—these you shall not have.

till



You may as well realize it now, in your

very small childhood. These are against

your code, these are forbidden.”

Fortunately for my argument, I know

that this course succeeds. I know four

Catholic women who have kept their chil-

dren safe. Five nights a week each family

is at home, but on two nights all eighteen

of these devoted persons, little and big, are

together. And there is no outside attrac-

tion that will lure those children from the

family party; to them the most exciting

thing in the world is to have Friday night

arrive, and to have the cousins begin to

troop in for two whole days of joy.

So that I assert positively that it can be

done. Not easily, perhaps, but much more

easily than our cowardice leads us to

dream. It can be done, and what a crown

upon Catholic womanhood if it were

through us that the new fashion began!

For let us suppose the worst. Let us sup-

pose that a Mary or a Tommy breaks loose

from the clan, tires of the jokes and the

intimacy,—but they never will!—and dis-
appears, to find more exciting company,

to try new roads.

Why, even then, the bulwark of the fam-

[ 12 ]



ily code is behind them like a wall. Even

then, they know that they are deliberately

exiling themselves. Even then, when the

white lights flicker, and the stifling filthy

air of the dance hall dizzies them, and the

constant idle babble of ugliness and sin

goes on, are they not going to be the richer

for the sudden rush of homesickness, the

sudden longing for Mother again, pure

and tender and strong, for the aunts and

uncles and cousins, the crazy charades that

made everyone laugh until he cried, the

innocent comments of the smallest mem-

bers of the group, the wild squabble over

sleeping arrangements and the division of

bathing suits? Isn’t our own position

stronger now, and to be infinitely stronger

some day at the Bar of Justice, if we can

say, “We tried. We prayed, we worked,
we counseled. We offered him the gold,
but he took the brass.”

What family among us hasn’t got a girl

whose Daddy thinks she sings more pret-

tily than Jeritza? Maybe Jeritza wasn’t in

good voice the night Dad heard her, but

have you heard our Margaret sing “The

Minstrel Boy?” What mother hasn’t got a

son that isn’t funnier than Charlie Chap-

[ 13 ]



lin, when you once get him started? Have

you heard Dan do the Jewish woman get-

ting out of the subway with four kids?

Why do we let them go away from us,

when what they want, and what we want,

are the old, beautiful home things : friend-

ship, laughter, talk, hospitality, family

love, and a chance to develop their own

personalities, find their own self-expres-

sion, before the most appreciative audi-

ence in the world?

One day some years ago I was nervously

watching four small children at the shore.

After I had called out agitated warnings

about deep water, rafts, diving, ropes, the

beach fire, and other dangers, a little boy

came to my side and seriously rebuked me.

“Mother, don’t worry. Kids don’t want

to die.”

Kids don’t want to die. And we don’t

want to see them die, either; we don’t want

to see purity, sanity, temperance, self-con-

trol, judgment, piety, youth and freshness

and goodness, die out of them. Let us

save them if we can. Let us help them

to see what no young person believes nat-

urally, but what they can be brought to

believe, that goodness and happiness are

114 ]



reconcilable terms—indeed, that they must
be reconciled, if we are to have wise, clean-

minded, balanced women and men to carry

parenthood to the generations to come.

If there are going to be tears, better

have them now, while she is safe, than

hereafter, in divorce court or morgue or

hospital. If she is going to despise you to-

day for forbidding her her freedom, for-

bidding the attractive but dangerous com-

pany admittance to your house, what of

it? For your principles and your God this

is not too much to do.

Easier this than your child’s hatred a

few years from now, when, principles and

religion sacrificed, she is going to despise

you anyway. What if our girls do rage

and cry? They cried when they were

babies, and we did not feel it so serious a

matter.

And they won’t cry long. In a few years,

in one generation, the decent, the good, the

sane thing might be brought into favor;

and the girls whose parents still let them

run wild, make their own laws, sell their

beauty and bloom and characters and

souls for a few hot, extravagant hours of

self-deceiving, crush out their taste for

[IS]



home ties, books, conversation, home and

faith,—these will be the unfortunate, the
pitied girls.

For girls can’t mingle with badness, and

miraculously extract goodness from it.

Every time we give them a bad thing, coun-

tenance a dangerous friendship, a poison-

ous book, an immoral play, a reckless ex-

pedition, we take a good one away. They

can’t have both; they can’t have the ugly

precocious knowledge that the conversa-

tion of certain acquaintances imparts, and

at the same time the purity of heart that

keeps God in sight.

They are our children, not our equals.

They are our charges, not merely amusing

and independent human beings who hap-

pen to live in our houses. We make them
what they are, and what they are going to be.

They ask for bread: love, faith, service,

goodness, the secret of happy lives. And

we give them stones: dancing, dressing,

money, painting, flirting, speeding. It will

be an uncomfortable day for some of us

when we have to answer for it, when too

late we hear the sorrowful young voices

saying

:

“Mother, kids don’t want to die.”

[ 16 ]



The frankest book on the noble and ignoble

possibilities of sex that has ever come from

the pen of an authoritative Catholic writer.

A forceful, brief yet comprehensive discus-

sion of the dangers of sex-promiscuity,
in-

formative chapters on Birth-Control, Di-

vorce, Annulment and Separation. A sane,

practical, illuminating book by

Rev. Martin J. Scott, SJ.

WHAT does it all mean? Birth-control, divorce, modern
paganism with its worship of self and denial of the soul . . .

its exterior of Christian culture, and heart of heathenism

teaching that the body is supreme . . . uncontrolled passion

with its resultant disquiet, dissatisfaction, wretchedness

and despair . . . broken homes, broken hearts and callous

children?

WHAT is the reason for this debasement of moral stand-
ard and conduct? Father Scott in his new book goes

straight to the true facts; gives an unflinching condemna-

tion of modern sexual vices and proves that true Catholic

marriage promotes the happiness and welfare of the indi-

vidual, the family and society.

Cloth bound $1.00 Paper 50c

Published by

The Paulist Press 401 West 59th Street New York, N. Y.



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