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By Root 1926 0

seeking of emotional recompense for the buffets which life has dealt her own ego. In her relationship with her children, every deed and almost every breath are designed unconsciously but exclusively to absorb her children emotionally and to bind them to her securely. In order to achieve this purpose, she must stamp a pattern of immature behavior on her children…. The mothers of men and women capable of facing life maturely are not apt to be the traditional mom type. More likely mom is sweet, doting, self-sacrificing…. takes no end of trouble and spares herself no pains in selecting clothes for her grown-up children. She supervises the curl of their hair, the selection of their friends and companions, their sports, and their social attitudes and opinions. By and large she does all their thinking for them…. [This domination] is sometimes hard and arbitrary, more often soft, persuasive and somewhat devious…. Most frequent is the method of indirection in which in some way the child is made to feel that mom’s hurt and trying ever so hard to conceal that hurt. The soft method is infinitely more successful in blocking manifestations of youthful thought and action….

The “self-sacrificing” mom when hard-pressed may admit hesitatingly that perhaps she does look “played out” and is actually a bit tired, but she chirps brightly “What of it?”…The implication is that she does not care how she looks or feels, for in her heart there is the unselfish joy of service. From dawn until late at night she finds her happiness in doing for her children. The house belongs to them. It must be “just so” the meals on the minute, hot and tempting. Food is available at all hours…. No buttons missing from garments in this orderly house. Everything is in its proper place. Mom knows where it is. Uncomplainingly, gladly, she puts things where they belong after the children have strewn them about, here, there, and everywhere.…Anything the children need or want, mom will cheerfully get for them. It is the perfect home…. Failing to find a comparable peaceful haven in the outside world, it is quite likely that one or more of the brood will remain in or return to the happy home, forever enwombed.4

The “mom” may also be “the pretty addlepate” with her cult of beauty, clothing, cosmetics, perfumes, hairdos, diet and exercise, or “the pseudo-intellectual who is forever taking courses and attending lectures, not seriously studying one subject and informing herself thoroughly about it, but one month mental hygiene, the next economics, Greek architecture, nursery schools.” These were the “moms” of the sons who could not be men at the front or at home, in bed or out, because they really wanted to be babies. All these moms had one thing in common:

…the emotional satisfaction, almost repletion, she derives from keeping her children paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away with the bold and decisive strokes of maturity from the emotional maternal womb…. Being immature herself, she breeds immaturity in her children and, by and large, they are doomed to lives of personal and social insufficiency and unhappiness…5

I quote Dr. Strecker at length because he was, oddly enough, one of the psychiatric authorities most frequently cited in the spate of postwar articles and speeches condemning American women for their lost femininity—and bidding them rush back home again and devote their lives to their children. Actually, the moral of Strecker’s cases was just the opposite; those immature sons had mothers who devoted too much of their lives to their children, mothers who had to keep their children babies or they themselves would have no lives at all, mothers who never themselves reached or were encouraged to reach maturity: “the state or quality of being mature; ripeness, full development…independence of thought and action”—the quality of being fully human. Which is not quite the same as femininity.

Facts are swallowed by a mystique in much the same way, I guess, as the strange phenomenon by which hamburger eaten